How real can it get ?

In her excellent article pretending to fly Aviatrix describes her use of the flight simulator, which somewhat differs from the ways sim-only pilots do.
Having read that made me realize just how much time (and money for payware addons) I have spent on making the experience more realistic, not only for visual presentation, but for having realistic navaids and airfields that are more than just a lonely gras strip plastered into the landscape.

Probably the absolutely biggest thing for making the experience more realistic is a small addon called FSPassengers. It's an addon that adds the most important factor of aviation - passengers and cargo. If you fly around in FS2004 or any other sim, you're basically really just strolling about, but in reality you either transport some cargo from A to B (aka quadratic pax) or you haul people (aka self-loading cargo).
By flying with FSPax, you're now forced to not only fly, but to fly safely. Those virtual passengers of yours are very demanding and they love bitching. Wanna barrel-roll your 737? Well try it and get lambasted for it. Of course contrary to real life, you won't be losing your license, because you haven't done a checkride in the first place, but FSPax has a clever rating system and those huge deposits of penalty points will quickly enougth show wether you're a capable sim pilot or a maniac.

Another thing that people do to put more realism to their simming experience is online flying. There are people who do the ATC work via big networks like VATSIM and people can now fly with more realistic ATC and there are a lot of virtual Airlines, some of them are even recognized and supported by their real world counterparts.
I'm flying for a virtual airline myself and it is quite fun. I recently asked our management to add 2 Dash-7's to our fleet and they granted it. Damn, that's a fun plane. You can fly into airports with a 1.000 ft runway with 50 people in the back and it is not only legal but perfectly within the planes capabilities. A 50-seater with an approach speed of 85kn, that just boggles the mind.

The latest thing coming up are addons like TileProxy a program, that loads satellite images in real time and paints them on your landscape. If your machinery is up to it and the region you're flying is decently covered, you get a great scenery and you can now do some real VFR flying.

My post about why I'm in far east russia is still coming, I'm actually still writing it, so expect it sometimes soon.

Cheers and always keep your takeoff-landing ratio at 1:1