When it comes to flight simulator software, there are really only three options you should consider: X-Plane, Microsoft Flight Simulator or Prepar3D (pronounced “prepared”).

Read more Step 4: Choosing the right Flight Simulator software In this guide, we will discuss examples, ideas, hardware and software that will keep the total investment well under $10k. Of course, the total investment will increase depending on how advanced and realistic you want to make your home cockpit.Īs we mentioned before, it’s important to think about what you want to do with your home flight simulator, your goals, and determine your budget correspondingly. Home flight simulators can range from a simple desktop-mounted joystick in front of a laptop, to entire cockpits that resemble the real aircraft. Step 2: What is your budget?īefore diving into the practical side of building your own home flight simulator, let’s first think about the numbers.

In this guide, we will focus on the latter, as most of our readers are either licensed or student pilots, who want to use their home flight simulator not only for fun, but also to train and improve their skills. On the other hand, you have people like us, (student) pilots, who want to take maximum advantage of their time before and between flights to train procedures, navigation, or other skills, and which saves them tons of money in fuel and renting costs. These enthusiasts might be young kids, flying on their home computer with just a joystick and headphones, or they might be older people with larger budgets who recreated an entire B737 cockpit in there garage, beating many flight school simulator setups. You have the aviation enthusiast who just wants to experience the joys of flying virtually for fun. People build home cockpits for all sorts of reasons. First of all, it’s important to make up your mind about your goals, before we start thinking about budgets, gear, software and setups, as this will all depend on what exactly you want to achieve with your home aircraft simulator.

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