I meant is it fun to play with only a gamepad in contrast to a joystick and more specialized flight sim controls. Are people really playing this with keyboard and mouse?
I use a flight sim (X-Plane, though) with mouse and keyboard alone. For me it’s mostly about navigation realism and IFR, most of the time I’m adjusting heading bug and watching needles on the instruments, takeoff/landing and emergencies aside.
While realistic controls could be nice, you’d never feel complete immersion due to lack of changing (and potentially disorienting in some scenarios) gravity forces. To me the tradeoff is not worth it right now, I’d rather fly an actual plane when I can.
Yes, it’s really cool to be able to look up online the actual real-world area and airport charts with radio frequencies and all, plan your flight with something like SkyVector (free, no affiliation), and then reproduce it fully in the sim with actual weather and without relying on in-game map for hints.
To a bystander it may seem like watching paint dry, but it’s quite engaging and not so easy.
The worst (and/or most fun) is when you are in a cloud, lose your instruments/AP and suddenly notice your compass spinning like crazy (one time I forgot to switch the alternator on and the battery powering most of the instruments ran out, plus sims usually also have configurable random failures). It’s quite trivial to just lose track of your position as well at first.
I pick some old aircraft like Cessna Skyhawk usually, it has autopilot and most common instruments, but its AP is not so advanced that I’d have to spend a chunk of my time sitting around keying in data in order to fly it properly.
