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In about 1992, I was invited to be a member of the FAA committee that would ultimately set forth standards for desktop simulator to full up 6DOF simulator use in ways the FAA could consider using as qualification equivalence for existing requirements, e.g., IFR approaches for Instrument Currency requirements, among many others.

Here are a few more examples of "auspicious" Flightsim users who made a mark or two with their extraordinary/unusual skills.

About 20 years ago I took a friend from work flying. When he walked out to meet me at the airport, he said that he had downloaded the same airplane that I owned. He said that he had been practicing with it and had memorized all of airspeed numbers for take-off, approach and landing.

We did a walk around and I told him that I wasn’t going to give him any hints and just wanted him to take off and fly to another airport and land there. I told him that the real thing was easier than using the flight simulator because there was so much more sensory input. But I was not sure how his simulator experience would actually carry over.

Of course, he took off without any problems, but I wasn’t sure how the landing would go when we got to the other airport. To my surprise he was even using trim to get to the correct airspeeds when we entered the pattern and was using the flaps appropriately. And he was correcting our altitude with the throttle.

He made a perfect landing. Our plane is a Piper Cherokee which is very forgiving and one of the easiest planes to fly. But he had no previous flying experience and I was very impressed. We spent the entire day flying all around the area and I had him land at more challenging airports.

I thought for sure that he would start training and get his license, but he never got around to it.