No matter how expensive a home sim you make, it won't ever get be even a quarter of what an actual entry amateur plane costs to buy and maintain. It's not even the plane itself either, it's all the recurring costs like storage, maintenance, spare parts, fuel, certification fees, taxes, etc. The only cheap flight option for a recreational pilot is bushcraft light planes. And they will still cost more than the sim setup, while you'll only be able to fly it on certain places, during certain weather, at certain times of the year. The rest of the time you'll still have to pay all the storage and maintenance fees. Planes are incredibly expensive.
Yes and no. I bought a property with a double wide and a 5000 square foot hangar on it located on a private strip. The rent from the double wide and the other hangar spots I rent pays the mortgage and all the expenses related to the property. I own a j3 cub that I have about 30k into that I fly daily in Florida and maintain it myself for practically nothing. Affordable aviation is possible but you have to be very smart about how you go about doing it, and a good bit of luck is involved to get the right deals by being in the right place at the right time.
Yes, but I bet that if you break down the accounting it would still be several times the cost of the setup on the photo. Home sims typically don't carry an additional mortgage payment or a lifestyle commitment.
There's heights and there heights. The common fear is of heights that are large enough for a fall to cause serious injury, and not too large to be out of range for biological fall protection
I used to be afraid of heights, but trained myself out of it as an adult. I had trouble abseiling, walking on elevated walkways, standing near windows in tall buildings
Three things I never had a height problem with:
Front seat of a plane (or any other seat, for that matter)
I looked into getting a pilots license and a plane once thinking maybe it would be more fun than flying commercial.
The license to fly just a dinky Cessna would be expensive af and I would only be able to afford a Cessna from 1982 or some shit anyway AND they only have a range of like 300 miles or some shit.
To actually go anywhere beyond my state I'd need a private jet license which is even more expensive takes a while and WAY outside of affordability.
Ah well guess I'm stuck driving or flying commercial
I fucking love the dedication people put into their sin rigs. Their joy makes me so happy, even more so when it's related to their real work. This guy is a trucker and recreated his entire cabin for his American Trucker sim. He's my fucking hero: https://youtube.com/shorts/EmpAJR5lNuQ?si=Z324Z-M_pGG_9Bp-
Wet lease? Yeah, clubs and leasing are an accessible option but depends on what you want to do. Flying a tiny 182 Cessna, sure will be as much as a nice Sim setup. For one flight, at $200 an hour, roughly 25 hours of flight or thereabouts and you're already over the price of the simulator.
Fly commercial jets, like the one this picture is simulating? No way. A small Citation jet starts at $50k a month. That's probably already 5 times the cost of equipment in that photo. And you can fly the big birds and do crazy stuff with them in the sim.
Back when I was making extra good money I got some flying lessons and started dreaming about it and eventually figured out the costs (bad enough the upfront ones, way worse the running costs) for a shitty-shit plane that wasn't even exciting to fly.
Also the physical setup in the picture looks like it's emulating large commercial passenger planes (don't really know enough to guess which, though) and those planes cost millions of dollars.
This is exactly what I was looking at. What the hell is with that?
Guy probably could have purchased an entire office worth of chairs with the money he spent on all that gear.... He didn't even bother to get one decent chair?
Most people mention the costs of owning aircraft vs a sim, but there's another possible reason: health. People come in different shapes and forms and not everyone who loves aviation is able to get II or even III medical class. So flight simulation is their only option to be a "pilot".
I mean, on VATSIM (popular aviation simulation network) there's a group of visually impaired people who have made a special interface so they can fly an aircraft even though they can't see!
Simulation (of any kind) gives many people what they can't get in any other way. And as with any other hobby, as long as it's not damaging to other aspects of your life, let people enjoy what they want
This doesn't sound like a lot, until you consider it was the #2 most dangerous occupation in the US that year.
Behind #1 Loggers (111 per 100k) and ahead of #22 Police Officers (14 per 100k).
So it's one thing to have a flight sim rig and at worst fall off your chair.
A whole another thing to potentially make a mistake in an actual plane and pay the price with your life.
The double-standard on display here is just disgusting. Sure, it's perfectly fine to modify your home entertainment system into a fake airplane but I try a little remodeling to make work feel more like home and it's all "security will escort you off the premises" and "we're taking away your pilot's license". Boils my blood.
A plane. A cheap, 2-4 seat prop plane. A full sim rig can fly ANY PLANE and spaceships too!
I am not in any way a sim gamer of any of these sorts. My inputs are keyboard, mouse, or controller. And I suck at everything I play, and I try to limit my gaming time (and expenditures on gaming).
Some of those things for PC flight sims are straight up real cockpit pieces. Dude is simply buying his plane one bit at a time until he can assemble the whole thing.
I've installed Internet for a dude who had a setup this gnarly. And to top it all off, he lived on a piece of land attached to an aircraft museum. He really loves planes.
Some people are so dedicated to their hobbies and I love seeing it.
An extended family member of mine hosted a reunion at his house years ago, and he apparently lived in a neighborhood where many people have small airplane hangars attached to their houses instead of a normal garage. It was nuts. You're just walking through a normal-looking house in a normal-looking suburban neighborhood, go through what would otherwise be a garage door, and suddenly you're in a big hangar.
Do you know how much it costs to annual a Cessna 172? You could build 3 of these rigs a year for what the aviation equivalent of a 1988 Toyota Camry costs to maintain and fuel.
First time I got into one, this was my exact reaction: wtf this thing is like a 1980s corolla turned onto an aircraft. I was sure I'd get killed in that rickety pos.
Racing sims can get crazy. Full wrap around monitors, motion rigs, load cell pedals. You can buy all the same equipment that F1 racing teams use, provided you're willing to drop six figures.
That said, there's some top sim racers that have a Logitech wheel clamped to a desk.
I'd put money that he has at least a small plane. I work in the motorcycle industry and there's a large overlap between pilots and motorcycle riders for some reason. Quite a few private pilots have pretty well set up flight sim rigs at home. Not to this extreme, but most have the basics for running MS Flight Simulator
I work in the motorcycle industry and there’s a large overlap between pilots and motorcycle riders for some reason.
I got a single neighbor who has two different cars, a bunch of e-scooters, and builds different e-bikes constantly in his garage. Some people are just enthusiastic about modes of transportation I think...
Doing a PPL and I'm already considering getting at least a scooter. Easy and fast transport to the bumfuck nowhere area of the airport we fly from, I need to go regularly but never take any pax.
I’m doing the same with my work from home set-up. I even have a mannequin dressed up as a “boss” who hovers at my shoulder while I try to get stuff done .
I'm going to take a guess that this sim setup is mainly for IFR or instrument flying. I know some people that do virtual airline stuff and they follow real life as closely as they can, so after taking off its auto-pilot on and using instruments for navigation instead of visual landmarks.
The cheapest Cessna (say a half-a-century old Cessna-150 with only a thousand or hours left on the engine before mandatory refurbishment) will set you back maybe $20k.
Then there's the maintenance costs (one every 50 flight hours, a bigger one every 100 flight hour and so on as well as the yearly one), plus insurance and fuel.
Oh, and flying one of those planes is not really excitting (except for landings, those are cool) mainly because it cruises at 90 knots airspeed (about 160 Km/h) which at the minimum flying height per flight regulations (except during takeoff and landing) which is 1000 feet (around 300m) does not feel at all fast.
Absolutelly, spend $30k (if you get it as a kit and assemble it yourself) and you can get something a little more excitting ... or spend $2k in that setup (I'm guessing, assuming you assemble it yourself) and let the Suspension Of Disbelief save you the rest of the money and you can even fligh planes that cost many millions of dollars (which, judging by the controls, is what that setup is simulating).
Mind you a Commercial Pilot License is "only" 1000 flight hours so you might get it for less than $100k depending on which country you do your training in and hence the cost per hour in the air (or, if you do like my Amateur Pilot Trainers in the UK and give lessons for the flight hours, which can be done with only an Amateur Pilot License) though you'll get a lot of "special moments" with trainees at the controls (did I mention landings are exciting ;)).
I would take full VR cockpit immersion over office desk setup with fancy buttons any day. Reaching over and flipping a switch in VR that while not physical, it often has a little feedback and for me, that makes it all feel real.
Flight simulators are a pretty niche hobby. Spent a lot of time playing the Microsoft Flight Simulator - comes handy if you wanna study aviation or become a pilot.