ok so background: ive been flying cinematic stuff on a mavic air 2s for like two years, pretty comfortable, smooth footage, know the basics. decided a few months ago i wanted to get into fpv freestyle because the videos looked insane and i figured hey i already know how to fly so how hard can it be. bought a used 5 inch quad, spent probably 60 hours on simulators (velocidrone mostly), felt pretty okay in the sim, took it out last weekend.

it was humbling. like genuinely humbling in a way i wasnt prepared for. the latency difference between sim and real life threw me off more than i thought it would, and the quad just felt so twitchy and alive compared to anything ive flown before. i managed to not crash for the first few packs which i was happy about, mostly just doing wide lazy circles to get a feel for it, but the moment i tried anything resembling an actual maneuver ? even just a basic split s ? i lost orientation completely and nearly augered it into the dirt.

not looking for sympathy just want to know if this is the normal curve or if i missed something in my sim training. like is there a specific way people recommend practicing transitions from sim to real world

yeah that gap between sim and real is brutal and honestly nobody really prepares you for it adequately. the physics are close but not identical and more importantly in real life you have actual consequences so your brain just operates differently. the anxiety alone changes your inputs.

what worked for me was spending the first several real-life packs only doing things i could do in the sim with my eyes closed, not things i could do competently. so if youre comfortable with banked turns in sim but only okay at split s, do banked turns in real life first. then split s in sim until its bordering on automatic, then try it outside. its tedious but it compresses the learning curve a lot.

also velodrone is decent but a lot of people swear by liftoff or even just the betaflight blackbox data ? fly in sim, look at your blackbox from real flights, compare your stick inputs. sometimes you realize youre doing something weird with your thumbs under pressure that you dont notice when youre just flying.

the orientation loss thing on split s specifically is so real, i think its because in the sim you kind of cheat with the camera perspective and dont really clock how disorienting the inverted moment is until youre actually there. i just kept doing them over and over at altitude until my hands knew the exit throttle timing without thinking about it. like a lot of altitude though, give yourself room to be wrong