Mar. 30th 2020 3:32 pm

As a drone pilot, it can be a little tough to practice our flying when we can’t leave the house to fly. Flight simulators have become increasingly popular, but what is the best, most realistic one?

After playing Drone Racing League (DRL Sim) for the past year and a half, I fell in love with flying, racing, and just practicing in general. With over 170 hours logged on the sticks, I found myself looking for a new fix. With other options for simulators like the Drone Championship League, Liftoff, Velocidrone, and even the DJI Flight Simulator, how do you know which to choose?!

We looked for something where there were things taking place, cars driving, people walking, and all that. If only the sim could be more like a video game!

So a few minutes in, we find that Grand Theft Auto V has an FPV flight simulator if you just make a few modifications and set up the controller. When I started watching a few videos on how realistic it was and how big the maps were, I knew I could get stuck on my computer for days practicing my flying.

After watching the video above and getting really excited, I realized that this game is only downloadable on PC. I spent a few more hours thinking about how I could turn this FPV flight simulator from a dream to reality and found the answer. I would run Windows on my Mac. After some help from 9to5Mac, I was partitioning my drive and downloading Windows 10.

A few hours later, I booted back up to download Steam and GTA V. I downloaded the mods I needed and installed those into the game files. I then launched the game, completed the prologue, and jumped into the FPV flight simulator to give it a try!

Check out the video below if you are using Mac but want to run Windows as well. This is a fairly easy process, but be sure to give yourself around 150GB to the Windows drive so you have room to download the game (which is 92GB or so). All in all, this should take 2-5 hours and actually works surprisingly well.

For freestyle, this may be the best-case scenario for an FPV pilot. However, for racing, this isn’t the best option, although I see it happening down the road. For a simulator that is more like DJI, you can check out the DJI flight simulator that looks very similar to GTA V — minus the violence and gaming aspect.

Simulators are an amazing way for any pilot to practice their flying whenever they need it because all you need is a computer and controller. If you are looking to get immersed in something new, I would definitely recommend giving this a try!

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