If you are new to flight simulators, you may be wondering what the question means? Yoke or Flight Stick – it actually is referring to the main control that is used in the cockpit of aircraft that are flying today or did fly in the past and you would like to fly as part of your flight simulator. Obviously the point of using a flight simulator is to have the most realistic experience that you can, and an important part of that is to make sure the control you are using matches the control that is actually in the aircraft.

You may not realise it, but these days some aircraft use the traditional flight yoke and some use a flight stick. In our home cockpit, we can match the flight yoke with a replica flight simulator yoke and match the flight stick with a joystick.

Although most passenger jets still use a yoke, there are a number of well known jets that have moved to a flight stick. The most famous example is the Airbus, that started the use of a flight stick or ’side stick’ as Airbus refer to them. Airbus have retained the side stick that uses the fly by wire technology with the more recent introduction of the giant A380.  The biggest competitor to Airbus, Boeing is sticking with the more traditional flight yoke, even in its latest models. Other types of aircraft that use a flight stick instead of a flight yoke include military jets including the F-16, aerobatic aircraft and some trainers.

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If you are new to the flight simulator world, you may wonder if you should use a flight simulator yoke or a joystick. After all your joystick is great for all of your other games, so isn’t it also fine for your flight simulator? Actually the decision is not based on the software you have, it doesn’t really matter if you have Microsoft Flight Simulator, FlightGear or any other flight simulator package.

The most important point to consider if you should get a yoke or not is the aircraft that you are planning on flying. When I first started getting interested in flying and flight simulators, I was under the impression that all aircraft used a yoke or flight stick as it is also called. The earliest aircraft did actually use a control that is more of a joystick or flight stick than a yoke. The yoke came later and was used in most aircraft but not all. For example military aircraft, acrobatic aircraft and some training aircraft kept a flight stick. Even these days, aircraft use a combination of yokes and flight sticks. Perhaps one of the most well known uses of the joystick in the cockpit is in the airbus A320 and A340 passenger jets. Boeing is keeping with the yoke though and has no plans to change.

So, to choose between a yoke and a joystick is to know which aircraft you would like to fly. If you don’t know do your research and find out what control is in the cockpit of the aircraft that you would like to fly. If you can’t decide or don’t know if you would like to fly an Airbus or a Boeing aircraft, get one of each!