Yeah, FS2004, AKA: FS9, AKA: A Century of Flight, is an open architecture sim with online capability through ip or Microsoft's "Gaming Zone", there are many third party addons, which of course vary from terrible to terrific, and there are a few payware addons as well. The FM isn't going to teach you how to fly an actual aircraft, but it WILL, coupled with appropriate guidance, allow you to gain an understanding of the procedures involved in the management of the aircraft, communications, airspace, and instrumentation. These are a significant part of learning to fly, so I think the utility of the sim is certainly there.I have all of the above sims, and can use any of them, FS2K has one advantage, and that is the flight instructors station that lets one person fly, while another monitors the aircraft data, such as heading, altitude, airspeed, climb rate etc, which I could use to verify that your doing as you say you are ;-) FS2004 has better ATC, weather, and flight review features, X-plane has a better FM, you can fly on mars or doa re-entry in the Shuttle, with realistic (so they say) physics, but the radio navigation aids arent as accurate as they are in the MS sims. In short, any will work, and all have certain advantages.For primary training (in Microsoft sims) we will use these aircraft, available for download here, note, the first file is the plane for fs2002 users, the second file is the plane for fs2004: FS 2002http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?DLID=&Name=&FileName=realair172sp.zip&Author=&CatID=RootFS2004
http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?DLID=&Name=&FileName=ras172_fs9.zip&Author=&CatID=RootTheir main page is here, they have a payware SF 260 and SuperDecathlon that are reportedly some of the best aerobatic aircraft made to date for the MS sims. Also you can read about the 172 that you just downloaded ;-)http://www.realairsimulations.com/Here is a page of 30 nice addons available for download mostly for fs2002, but they will usually work ok in fs2004:http://www.avsim.com/pages/0603/fs2002_tribute/14best_ac/tribute_part14.htmlThe places to go to search for and download aircraft are
www.flightsim.com and
www.avsim.comIt is well worth it to create the little login ID as flightsim.com, its a must do if you want to make the MS sims the best they can be.X-Plane users will find most addons for this sim here:http://www.x-plane.org/X-plane users can get global scenery here (and you need it, otherwise xplane just places runways over water whihc sucks the big one.)http://www.chromatix.uklinux.net/scenery/download.htmlS!TX-EcoDragonBlack 1TX Squadron XO
