A History in Flight Simulation
I thought it might be fun to take a trip down memory lane - to revisit the various computers and simulators that have eaten huge chunks of my time over the last however-many years.
I’m not entirely sure you can class “Combat” on the Atari 2600 as a flight simulator - directing aircraft sprites around the screen to pelt each other with pixel-sized bullets. We spent countless hours doing so though, so perhaps it has earned it’s place. I have particular memories of the first-world-war bi-planes doing endless loop-the-loops while spraying each other with an endless stream of ammunition.
Christmas 1984 delivered the first computer to our family - an 8 bit Sony HB-75 “HitBit” MSX. One of the cassette tapes wrapped up with it was grandly titled “Flight Sim 737”, with a spectacular airbrushed painting of said aircraft traversing stormy skies on the cover. While a good deal of imagination was required to imagine an aircraft, let alone a 737 while squinting at a few rendered lines on the television in the living room, we spent HOURS tinkering with it. From memory, shortly after leaving the wireframe runway, the view changed to the radar plot of air traffic control. We spent hours controlling a single pixel as it slowly made it’s way around the screen.
A few years later the MSX was usurped by an Atari ST. The Atari was originally bought with the intention of using it for music - but while waiting to be served in the showroom of “Evesham Micros”, we noticed an Atari ST on display with a jaw dropping flight simulator called “SubLogic Flight Simulator 2” running on it. I can remember watching a 3D rendered Cessna take off from Oakland International like it was yesterday.
Over the next several years all manner of simulators arrived on the Atari ST - among them Falcon, F-16 Combat Pilot, Apache, and the quite wonderful “Pro Flight” - a stunning (for the time) Panavia Tornado simulator. I kept returning to Flight Simulator 2 though - and slowly acquired a number of “scenery disks” - expanding it’s world to include the United Kingdom, among other places. Flight Simulator came with a hefty book, and a number of printed charts - oh how I wish I still had them.
I taught myself radio navigation in Flight Simulator 2 - experimenting with VOR, ADF and DME radios until they made some sort of sense.
In the early 1990s the Atari ST was replaced by the first of several IBM PC compatibles - which ushered in Flight Simulator 4, now sold by Microsoft. The leap forward was immense - and opened the doors to a world of add-ons. You could create your own scenery, aircraft and adventures with “Aircraft and Scenery Designer”, which also upgraded the simulator to run in higher resolutions.
During the the mid 1990s, progress with flight simulation software and hardware was frightening - with the advent of specialised 3D graphics hardware - who remembers the 3Dfx graphics cards, that did texture-mapping in hardware for the first time?
Flight Simulator progressed quickly - from Flight Simulator 5 - which also introduced texture mapping - to Flight Simulator 95 (in Windows), 98, 2000 (or Millenium Edition), 2004, and of course “Flight Simulator X”.
Of course Flight Simulator wasn’t the only game in town - and my hard-drive saw “Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat”, Stealth Fighter, Falcon 3, Fleet Defender, Falcon 4, TFX, Eurofighter 2000, Apache Longbow, and more along the way.
For a number of years when our children were small I didn’t have a good enough PC to run any of the modern simulators - money always seemed to vanish into after-school-clubs, groceries, school clothes, trips, and so on.
While visiting my parents one summer my Dad (long since retired) had become interested in flight simulation, and had joined a club down in the south west of England that regularly met up both in the real-world, and online. He upgraded his computer to run the latest version of Prepar3D (at the time the simulator of choice), and gave me his old one.
This was in the spring of 2020.
I immediately bought a copy of X-Plane, and tentatively sat-in on one of the “group flights” held by the club my Dad was a member of. They hosted bi-weekly events using TeamSpeak and JoinFS, allowing everybody taking part to see each other and communicate. Two people were assigned as “controllers”, and would hand-off to each other throughout the flight (ground, tower, departures, etc).
While listening in on everybody being called by air traffic control, ground suddenly called me - asking if I was flying. Suddenly I was taking part - listening to other’s calls to figure out what I should say, and following the route with them.
And that’s how I came to know Ian, Roy, Keith, Patrick, Rory, Dave, Geoff, Eric, John, Francis, Fabio, Damion, Adam, Joe… the list goes on (I’ve no doubt forgotten one or two). A wonderful group of characters from all over the place that for the most part only knew each other through their weekly flights.
Not long after beginning flying with the group, I also started recording videos to share my progress in learning the first “study level” aircraft I had acquired - the “ZiboMod 737” and “ToLiss A321” in X-Plane 11. I also recorded a video about a free mapping program I had discovered called “LittleNavMap” for the benefit of the group.
Somehow, the videos become popular.
I suppose it’s worth noting that I had spent the last several years running around all over Europe teaching people how to use complicated systems (I’m a software developer and tech consultant in the daytime), so showing, explaining, and teaching had become second-nature.
Fast forward three years, and those few shared videos have grown to five hundred videos, five million views, twenty-odd thousand subscribers, an online community at Discord, regular group flights, a virtual airline, a blog, and a piece of software I wrote to help people see each other on the map while flying.
I never really set out to do any of this - it all just sort of happened. I’m really still just sharing an interest - and happily divulging that I’m not a “real pilot” while learning how things work and how planes should be flown.
Maybe I should finally make that t-shirt - “Not a real pilot”.