[rlu]

Step 1: Have an interest for it. It sounds like you might!

Once you know you want to, I think YouTube is a really fantastic resource. Also an active community on reddit (r/flightsim, r/MicrosoftFLightSim etc).

I recommend Microsoft Flight Simulator for most people just because it visually looks the best. People will say other sims have better flight dynamics but I'd argue that doesn't matter for 99.9% of people.

You need a pretty good PC to run MSFS though. There's also an Xbox version but it is less extensible. For example, you can't do VATSIM on Xbox.

[sssilver]

Awesome.

I got a high performance gaming PC and access to YouTube.

Any channels you recommend that follow a particularly effective curriculum?

[rlu]

I think at first you can just spawn on runways with the plane on and treat it more as a game than a simulator.

Then you can start spawning at parking spots which will have your plane turned off. You can just youtube "<plane name/type> cold and dark start" and you'll get plenty of videos that show the procedure of getting the plane started (it is more complex than starting a car).

Above is true whether you start out flying a Cessna 172 or a Boeing. Neither way is technically wrong in the sim, lol.

Note MSFS itself has a "learn to fly" section which teaches you some fundamentals. You could consider that a lightweight curriculum.

Once you want to get more serious you could look up the FlightInsight youtube channel. Real pilots use it to learn. Also, there is a service similar to VATSIM called PilotEdge which is like a more realistic version of VATSIM. One of the things it offers is a training curriculum that goes into way more depth than MSFS's native one: https://www.pilotedge.net/pages/training-program-overview. But note this is if you really wanna take it seriously. It teaches you things like airspace considerations and more. It's frequently used by real student pilots.