Copied from a comment I made on Reddit a while back (first time opening Reddit in a month!)

I’ve been simming 15 years and got my PPL last year so have gone through this recently. Simming absolutely helped me in my PPL, I had a good understanding for how the aircraft handled and felt things came quickly in most regards. As far as stick and rudder skills, I obviously had to learn the muscle memory, which came fairly quickly but took practice. Sight picture was actually a bigger thing to learn, along with localized weather, things like thermals on a hot day or mini rotors when landing in a heavily wooded area, etc. Those are things which don’t exist in the sim so had to be learned from scratch. The actual aircraft handling made sense in my head so it just required the stick and rudder learning. Crosswind landings actually came really easily having already learned and practiced the coordination in sim for years.

A few things I noticed in my training

let your CFI teach you. Don’t assume you know anything, let them teach you everything as if it’s new. Some stuff you’ll say to yourself “yeah I already knew that”, but with a lot more stuff than I expected I actually learned I was doing it wrong or learned a better way to do it. I found this helped me overcome bad habits more easily because they were identified from the get go and then never practiced the bad habits in the real plane.

dont bother using the sim to practice any stick and rudder stuff, but do still use it. I found it helpful to practice my SRM skills, visual navigation, and just familiarizing myself with the area and landmarks. It can be helpful to do stuff in the sim to practice the things you learn for the written, like VOR stuff, magnetic compass turning/accel tendencies, etc.

look out the window! learn your sight picture and keep your head out of the cockpit

reset your bar. Don’t assume you can do anything irl that you do in the sim. You need to prove everything to yourself IRL before you can be confident doing it.

use VATSIM, even for VFR. Just having lots of voice comms and being comfortable talking and flying, and just with how radio comms flow is very useful and made learning the radios super easy. I learned to fly under the seattle bravo shelf and was always talking to someone and it was really not too bad given how much I’ve used VATSIM.

Not at all. I am still being a sw engoneer

It definitely did not help with getting to know how the aircraft handled - sims are just too… different from reality. Even my flight school’s dedicated whole-cockpit sim wasn’t great at emulating real flight physics.

What it did help with is cockpit flows and flight planning (within reason). The school wanted us students to learn certain procedures by heart (unsure how yours does things) and only verify their completion via checklist. Flying multiple traffic patterns and learning when to do what was certainly helpful. So, definitely useful, but not for everything. The only way to really learn to fly is… to fly :)