How I got iinto Flight Sim, by xxxxxxxxx

[louross]

First story, by me, myself, LR. Next story by _______________.

In late 1993, a friend gave me his computer. 1993. Can you imagine the computers then? No mouse. No windows. All DOS. Rough. Couldn't even get into it. Called another friend to ask him how to get it going. I told him it was turned on. He said, Okay, where are you now?"
"Well, in the living room."
"Uhhhh, mmmmm, no, where are you in the computer?"
"Oh. The screen is black and there is a white flashing dash in the upper right corner."
"Okay, now..."

About six months later I'm walking thru a shopping mall, see a computer store, and think, "wonder what they got." Never found out - the first thing I saw was a box that said "Flight Unlimited." I read the specs and, obviously, my computer wouldn't run it, so I found a technician I liked and asked him what I needed.
What do I tell my wife. "Oh, hi honey, gonna buy a computer for 600 dollars to play games on." Oh, yeah, sure.
" Hon, listen, the business is growing, and I need help with all the administration. We need a newer computer....."

Later, at the shop (with her) I was telling him all the specific things the new computer had to have and ended with "... this computer will have to run the most advanced computer game available, so do whatever you have to do." Very dry and matter of fact. She looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and said, "Lou," I raised my hand a little, looked in her direction, gave the masculine I'm in control look (remember John Wayne), and slowly shook my head. One hour later we walked out of the shop with a new powerhouse, the Pentium III CPU WITH a video card! WOW!.
Two days later I'm installng Flight Unlimited II.

Great program, but very limited. All GA and central California.
A month later I found Pro Pilot, and a better controller. Controller- much better control. Pro Pilot- a piece of garbage.
FS 2000. Future possibilities here. PSS 744. Nice. The future's coming.
FS2002. Active Sky- great wx program. Flight Deck Companion- wouldn't fly without it. Ultimate Traffic- airports starting to look real. PDMG 744- amazing program- unbelievable FMS programing. PIC 767- lots of fun. Dream Fleet 737- a disppointment- too many bugs.
FS2004. CaptSim 727- a piece of pure garbage. DreamFleet 727- Most amazing flight dynamics I've ever seen in MSFS, unbelievable.

Built my homebuilt cockpit shell. 21" overhead and 21" main monitor (nvidia AGP card), 17" floor monitor for center pedastal (pci card). Lighting switches for inside and outside. White with rheostat, red, blue lights. Very nice. Actually, sexy.

Problems were 2-fold: the flights in the PMDG 744- KEWR-VHHH, 15hrs; KJFK-EGLL 8-9 hrs. Have to eat. Bought white linens for meals, special silverware and plates, a medium blue tray. All meals- and coffee- inside the sim. Other problem- my wife REFUSED to wear any type of uniform! Okay, no Hooters Airlines. Let's go Singapore Airlines then. Nope. Regular clothes of the moment. Then the complaints- "always in the sim". Yep. but I'm not at the bar. Not out with the boys. I'm at home.

A friend of hers gave her a book, called Men are from Mars- Women are from Venus. That book solved most all the problems.

Now, I only have one monitor (the others burned up). Main problem now tho, is she STILL refuses to wear the uniform!

Anyway, how did you get into flight sim?

Next...

[dirtydog1006]

Well, like many guys, I got into FS because I hate the Boy Scouts. Oh, I am sure they are mostly a fine group. But the troop in my town had daintly leadership. They called off a camping trip because of what they called 'rain' and what you and I would call 'barely there fog.' I turned in my neckerchief keeper. Then my buddy up the street says, "You know, there's this thing called CAP." I was hooked. Some flying, more learning about flying, lots of marching, and a fair amount of roughing it in the boonies, where a semi-retired USAF paramedic showed us how to make almost anyting from a surplus 28-foot cargo chute, as any SAR ground team should know. (What's RAIN?) What with one thing and another, I never got my wings, but I read Avation Week for decades. Fairly recently this same buddy starts raving about FSX. He gets real enthusiastic about things, but then burns out quickly. But he wouldn't shut up about FS, and Santa had just got me a computer with decent video. So when I saw 'last-year"s version' (fs9) for <$20, well what the heck. Throw in a cheap joystick and it's still less than a night out with Silvia. Best $48.95 I've spent in a long time.

[flaminghotsauce]

In a long ago galaxy far far away, I had tried to "fly" an F-15 game on one of those computers that came out in the late '80's. I really knew very little about flying or airplanes or aerodynamics or anything at all, so it was a challenging game. But I had always been interested in airplanes since I was a little kid. I would build the model airplanes to "strafe" my brothers' model cars. ;D I found an old book when I was a child about the pilots of WWI and read and re-read that book.

Anyhoo, later in life I found my music career going nowhere, my family going somewhere, and when I saw my income go to 1/2 or so, I decided it was time to change careers. My intention was to go into piloting for a living, being another job, like playing music, that is so much fun that it's not work... oh the naivete! I researched how to get my ratings, and discovered a few colleges around that offered aviation ratings on student loans, yeah!

Along the college research, I decided to get into a computer simulator so I could begin my study months before classes began and get a little bit ahead. Enter Flight Simulator 2000! And lets splurge and go FS2000 Pro! It was awesome to get the printed manual with that sim. THAT was my initial flight manual before I got my first Jeppesen.

When classes started I was well ahead of the curve on VOR navigation especially. While chasing my Instrument rating, one of the other students that was dropping out gave me his FS2002 and it was BRILLIANT! Just jaw dropping compared to 2000. After that I just kept buying the latest one I could support on my hardware.

Now I've quit the chase for a real flight gig and got a J.O.B. to pay off those student loans! And surprise, surprise, surprise! My new job is what I was looking for: so much fun and enjoyment it's like not a job. it's like going to the gym for a routing workout, or something less strenuous. Just a routing drive in the country every day, joking with people. They pay me well to do this!

At night I can still enjoy the flying, the family, being at home, and in my own bed every night. Had I achieved the "dream" my life would be far worse.

[Allen Peterson]

Someone made an airplane for me when I was about 4 years old, I've been interested in them ever since.
I grew up on a farm without electricity or indoor plumbing, the only entertainment was a battery operated radio. I listened to Jack Armstrong, Sky King, Capt. Midnight and others. The radio shows usually had some offer going on - for a dime and two boxtops, or package labels, you could get stuff. Since we were a large family boxtops were not a problem, the problem was the dime and the stamp which I had to talk Mom into supplying. In those days a 3 cent stamp cost a nickel and a penny post card was 2 cents, so it was usually a hard sell.
When I was 9 or 10 I sent off for a Piper Cub... - I don't think it was called simulator. What I got was Piper Cub and a console printed on heavy paper. I had to cut it out, fold it up and paste it together and attach threads to to the parts. It had very detailed instructions. When I got it assembled after a couple days of hard work what I had was a yellow (of course) Piper Cub with a wing span of about 2 inches suspended by the threads inside the console, which was about 4 inches wide. The plane was viewed from the 6 o'clock position through the opening (like where the monitor would be in later years) and a stick and rudder pedals in front (like where the keyboard would be). I was amazed that it came out as good as it did.
Pushing the stick back and forth pitched the plane up and down (no elevation change). Pushing the stick left and right rolled the plane left or right, and the rudder pedals yawed the plane left or right. Some imagination was required by the pilot, as was the sound (optional).
The mission was to fly a circuit. The instructions said (more or less as I remember) to start the engine and push in the throttle. After a bit, push the stick forward a bit to raise the tail (you could see the plane respond), and when you got flying speed pull back on the stick a bit to climb. When at altitude, level off and then stick to the left and push left rudder to roll the plane and turn cross wind, then ... you can guess the rest.
On final you closed the throttle and put the nose down to lose altitude. When close to the ground pull back on the stick to flare and make the landing (all landings were perfect).
I probably flew about 10 left hand circuits before I got bored. It never occurred to me to fly a right hand circuit. To this day flying right hand circuits are awkward.
Fast forward to the early '70s. With a lot of help from a friend I built a CP/M computer. It had 48K of memory, a 2.5 MHz processor, an 8 inch floppy drive and a 12 inch monitor with a 64 by 16 line display. I had a flight program which ran in MBasic (and was blazingly slow). When I ran the program it displayed 4 or 5 lines, something like:
Your altitude is .....ft
Your speed is ......mph
Your heading is.... *
Your throttle is .... %
and waited for you to enter something.
If you just hit Enter, after several seconds it printed out the same 4 or 5 lines again, this time maybe with changes in speed and altitude.
So you typed in something like T=-5 (reduce throttle by 5%) and hit Enter. Again, after several seconds, it would print the results. Things usually got out of hand quickly and you stalled or broke something...
In the early '90s I got a 386 computer with Windows 3.1. I got some flight simulators that ran in high memory (above 64K). Something Hawks, then Battle of Briton, then Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, then Aces of the Pacific and Aces over Europe. I liked Aces of the Pacific but Aces over Europe was tough, those 109Ks would wax my tail in my P-38 every time.
In 1997 I got a computer with Win95 and I couldn't figure out how to load Aces in high memory, so I got FS95. That was fun, I mostly flew the Cessna 172. Then Win98 and FS98 and FS2000, I skipped FS2002.
When FS9 came our my youngest son got it for me for my birthday. I was retired by then and had lots of time. That's when I really got into simming. I found out I could download airplanes. I fired up Gmax and tried the tutorial, but after all of the work all I would have was a P-38 that looked like the stick model I made in my younger days. So it was back to flying and tweaking downloads.
Then I discovered Tom and Bill's original board and I was really hooked. I learned a lot about flying and fixing FDs from Tom.
Now I have FS9, FSX and Xplane 9.6, but I mostly fly FS9.

[flaminghotsauce]

I have FSX and I love it for low and slow, but FS9 runs so much better. If I want to do some pattern work or real IFR work, I get back into FS9. I still have 2002 and 2000 Pro loaded up along with XPlane 9.6 but I don't run them much but for the curiosity.

[Allen Peterson]

CORRECTIONS to my account:
The Ghost of Christmas' Past appeared to me in a dream last night and reminded me that I built my CP/M computer in the early '80s not the '70s. Also, the little console for the Piper Cub was more like 5 inches wide. Well, it WAS a long time ago.

[Tom Goodrick]

When I was about 5 I went with my dad to his math classroom at the high school on a Sunday afternoon. This was common. I could draw on the black board. This day was different. When he opened the door, I saw that the room was full of model airplanes hanging from the ceiling! He was teaching aeronautics for the CAP (1949).

I was in the CAP four years and did a bit of flying in a Piper Cub we used as a search aircraft, spinning it at every opportunity.

I went to college and got a degree - Bachelor of Aeronautical Engineering that hangs on the wall of my den now.

I have always been fascinated by how airplanes fly. How do they do all those things - big noisy, smelly metal cans lifting dozens of people into the air for long trips? My college training left a lot of gaps in my knowledge. I spent 30 years on the job trying to fill those gaps related to everything from low and slow gliding parachutes, transport planes that dropped supplies by parachute, and then faster planes, rocket launch vehicles (doing drag and moment analyses), space return vehicles and even lunar-return aerobrakes that fly mostly above Mach 10. Highlights include sitting in a cockpit mockup of the C-117 at Douglas in Long Beach in 1973 while I was also taking flying lessons in a Cessna 150. An engineer asked me to move all the controls and switches as I was a little shorter (5' 9") than most transport pilots.

I wrote numerous computer programs that replicated the dynamics of flight for various devices. A major effort was demonstrating on the computer the dynamics of gliding parachute flight in turns, spins and in the landing flare. i was simultaneously flying gliding parachutes by remote control. These were thrown out of planes or dropped from helicopters (the nicer way to do it because the payload did not tumble). In my parafoil sim I wrote 3D graphics showing the motion of stick-figure box with ram wing moving in 6 degrees of freedom over a landing zone with a fence for vertical perspective. A paper in 1981 at an AIAA conference showed a close match between the computed values and the in-flight-measured values for dynamic turns and a spin. (A line accidentally wrapped around the canopy on my instrumented test load and it spun most of the way down until a control change I made caused the line to unwrap and saved the instruments.)

I could obviously tell many stories about things that fall out of airplanes. Another day, ask me about the can of water that fell near me. But with regard to what we now call "Flight Simulators" I got a home computer in 1980 and didn't like the simplified games they called flight simulators, including one from Bruce Artwick Associates that eventually became The Microsoft Flight Simulator FS9 (okay maybe FSX too). I wrote my own for the TRS-80 Color Computer in their Color Basic. It was a technically correct 3 degree of freedom simulator showing a profile view of an airplane taking off and landing. then I added a part where you climed above the ceiling and only saw panel instruments (digital) and could make steady turns to fly long distances using VOR navigation. The VOR's were in the right "places" for many trips. That fascinated me for a long time because I could add many different types of aircraft and go many places. I called the program "FLYNAV" and tried to sell it through a software group in New Hampshire. But when I showed up to demo my programs (which had a mix of BASIC and 6804 Assembly Language routines) that place had only obsolete cludged-together Color Computers that would not run my codes. So I did not become rich and famous as a software game developer.

Then came FS2 on an Atari 1024 Computer with high-res B%W graphics. I really enjoyed learning to fly the Learjet 25. But I was bothered by the fact it could not show and angle of attack. When it came down final, it really came down final almost hitting the runway with its nose every time. It always flew along the velocity vector with no angle of attack! About that time my boys had an Atari computer that was one step above the video game. That one had "F-15 Eagle" on which I spent a lot of time.

Then SimLogic (?) brought out a flight sim for the PC called ATC that had several different types of aircraft, including Cessnas for training. Where FS2 only let you fly in certain areas in the US, ATC came out with a set of maps for Coast-to-Coast flight. I still have those maps. Finally we could fly all over the US. At that time Microsoft had just muscled the FS sim away from SubLogic and brought out FS3. That was a little better than FS2 but still had restricted flight areas. (This is mid-late 1980's). Then FS4 came out which gave you the ability to modify some flight parameters of the aircraft. You could soupup a Skylane until it flew like a bonanza. But it still looked like a Skylane! Then Bruce Artwick brought out FLIGHT SHOP in which you could make airplanes for flight in FS4 that looked the way you wanted them to look. In fact the Flight Shop program fit into FS4 so you could modify a plane, fly it, and modify it more. This teed off Microsoft to no end and they legally trampled Artwick into the ground, taking away his rights to any part of Flight Shop or the Flight Simulator.

At that time I was working at NASA and saw a potential for using FS to simulate some strange flying things we were working on. I called up Microsoft and asked if they were bringing out FS5 with a new version of Flight Shop built in so we could build our own aircraft. I got the ice treatment from Microsoft. FS5=95 came out with an ability to load in aircraft made by "experts" using old copies of Flight Shop and allowing flight around the US and around the world to a very limited extent. I did manage to design and flyh some models for NASA of "Flyback Boosters" and Cargo Return vehicles after I validated the FS5 atmosphere with my U-2-like jet. I showed that the pressure, density and temperature profiles in the FS atmosphere matched those of "NASA Standard Atmospheres" so they let me get serious about it. They even let me bring in a real joystick to fly demos for big shots.

Just after I retired from NASA and started working on-line, FS98 came out. That had a lot of good things and allowed more flights to foreign airports. Then FS2000, FS2002 and FS2004. I here rumors that FSX came out but I refuse to get involved with it.

I've had enough. But I am having fun flying new planes on my laptop while reclining and listening to music.

[Ed Burke]

Way, way back in the years of steam powered computers I was too busy to be bothered with such new fangled nonsense. Graeme, my number 2 son, however had had some hands on experience at school and purchased himself a Commodore. Perhaps an Amiga, maybe they are the same. I was gazing in puzzlement at this object one evening when Graeme arrived home, tossed a floppy disk on the table and suggested that I might be interested.

He knew his target as I have been something of a propellor head all my life.

He loaded it for me and I was introduced to Flight Sim 2. At least that is what I have always thought it to be. I found that I could fly anywhere in the world as long as it was between SFO and LAX. The hills were all polythingos and when it was time for the sun to go down everything went instantly dark, on the second. One had no cause to plead stupidity when calculating 'last light'. AND I still have the disk.

I remember driving him about ten miles away to buy something he called a "modem" and he returned to the car with this thing that could be attached to a phone handpiece in order that it could listen to tones !!!! I'll bet the speed was some thing else too!

From there I progressed to FS 5.1 which came on TWO floppy disks (already size was raising its ugly cranium) and as if these were not enough, there were two more floppies to fix the stuffups in the original two! Here I will not make any smart remarks about Microsoft, vacuum cleaners not withstanding.

This required a PC and I bought a 386 something or other and, at the experts advice, I upgraded the standard 10" monitor to something a teeny bit bigger, but not much. Heady stuff.

Since then I have had, and still have, all the MS sims including FSX but FS9 is still doing most of the flying. I lie, I gave 98 to needy friend.
But, thanks Graeme, I WAS interested and still am and the chances are I will fade out at the screen while doing something hairy, somewhere. The world is our oyster friends folks and females, go for it.

Ed

[pterodactyl (George)]

Well I started much like Ed Burke on a Commodore 64 but with the very first flightsim FS1 program, seems like they already knew more would be coming down the line.

It didn’t take long to move up to FS2 although it was a bit of a disapointment because I lost the bi-plane, when I kept crashing I would fly the Bi-plane and shoot up the terminal for making me crash.
I tried the commodore program for flying the F4 the F15 and a helicopter and got hooked on the flying skills far more then the shoot-up skills the program was mainly designed for. In 95 I progressed to my first actual PC an HP with about as much speed and memory as a coffee maker. My first program besides the “Windows” program yes I said Windows, that was even before Windows 3 that came in a box with 13 3.5inch disks was FS95.
I was hooked on flying (it doesn't help that I also work on aircraft radios for a living) and have progressed through every version since then except FSX.

I enjoy being able to “hop” into my Lancaster one night, my Corsair the next, and then maybe do a difficult approach into Denver with the C46. My favorite old piston pounders aren’t available on FSX, at least not the way I want them. Hopefully the will come out on FlightSim soon. I’ve never learned how to make my own aircraft.
It took several years of experimenting just to learn to repaint for my own colours.