Flight simulator

REALSIMGEAR offers the best in-home flight simulation for pilots of all stages to hone their skills. That's why we've partnered up to help pair you with the best possible simulator for your needs.

These complete setups are more than just a statement piece in your home or business, they provide the most realistic simulation experience for you and your friends to practice flying. 

These simulators are not toys; as such, we recommend you utilize help from Sporty's and REALSIMGEAR to make the right purchase, plan your installation, set up, and start flying. 

A few weeks ago Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was released and reenergized the longest running software product line under Microsoft’s umbrella. It’s a great program, and the sim community is vibrant with videos of digital pilots pushing the envelope. But what does MSFS 2024 offer to real world pilots? We decided to test it out and here are five things we like, and one we don’t.

In an exciting revelation at Flight Sim Expo 2024, Sporty’s and Infinite Flight announced a partnership, aiming to bridge the gap between flight simulation and real-world aviation training. This collaboration strives to revolutionize how aspiring pilots learn and practice flying skills, offering a seamless integration of mobile flight simulation and comprehensive flight training courses.

Did you ever fly out of Meigs field in downtown Chicago before it closed? It’s one of those airports you will never forget if you were lucky enough to visit before the painful closure in 2003. Beyond its reputation as a scenic and convenient access point to downtown Chicago, it was just as memorable to many pilots for a different reason. Ask just about any pilot today who learned to fly in the late 90s or early 2000s and memories will flood back to the view from the departure end of Runway 36 at KCGX, preparing for takeoff in Microsoft Flight Simulator. For many, including me, this was the first introduction to the excitement and freedom of general aviation.

Home flight simulators offer a wealth of training situations to sharpen a pilot's skills, and instrument flying is one of the most valuable scenarios we can practice in a standard home simulator. Join Sporty's own Chris McGonegle as he covers flight sim hardware, the most popular flight sim programs, weather editing, and fruitful scenarios to practice. The second half of this webinar features Josh Harnagel from Redbird Flight Simulators, who covers FAA approved training devices, areas of focus for IFR proficiency, IFR proficiency training with a CFI, and best practices for training in a simulator.

Complement your Instrument flight training or challenge yourself as a digital pilot with the Instrument Rating Flight Sim Training Guide from Sporty's Pilot Shop. This guide includes an introduction covering how best to use this guide with an at home simulator as well as keyboard shortcuts to help make you a Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 power user. It includes 22 lessons featuring clickable links directing the user to Sporty's Instrument Rating Course to view how a maneuver or approach is executed before digitally flying.

Ever wanted to pilot an eVTOL aircraft that has the capability to transition to a pusher propeller? Well now you can with X-Plane 12 and the digital ALIA eVTOL from BETA Technologies. With the latest version of X-Plane 12 the ALIA is included in the fleet of digital aircraft bringin the total to 23. Rated for a 250 nautical mile range and the ability to take off and land on a helipad, you'll quickly find yourself touring areas of your hometown that wouldn't necessarily be approachable from an airplane.

The Honeycomb Bravo is one of the most popular flight sim pieces on the market. The challenge is making sure that our hardware configuration is understood by X-Plane 12, which can be a tedious task each time we make a lever change. For that reason, Sporty’s provides preconfigured airplane profiles for X-Plane 12 that will make the transition between different aircraft seamless.

The team at Laminar Research has long been working on improving the X-Plane platform and just recently the newest version debuted, X-Plane 12. Everything from wake turbulence produced by wide body aircraft to supersonic flight has been critiqued and fiddled with until it was ready for the community. But what good is a flight simulator if you don’t have great aircraft to fly? Enjoy a quick review of the aircraft changes from X-Plane 11 to X-Plane 12.

The Honeycomb Bravo throttle is an amazingly capable hardware piece that, once configured correctly, leads the pack in flight sim throttle options. The downside of all these options is that it can be intimidating to program all the commands and levers to operate as we would like. For that reason, the flight simulation department at Sporty’s put together a configuration map for running the Honeycomb Bravo with X-Plane 11. We cover how to configure the throttle for single engine GA, single engine GA complex, multi-engine GA, two-engine jet, and four-engine jet aircraft.