When I was a kid, I always enjoyed flight simulators, going back years. I’d spend hours trying to perfect how to fly the various planes, but there’s only so much you can do with an 8086 with CGA (later a 386 with EGA) graphics. Once I hit college I didn’t have time to keep up with my interest in aviation. But last week I got myself a copy of X-Plane 9.
I have to say, home flight simulators have come a long way since I last messed around with Flight Simulator 4.0. At cruise altitude, it almost looks like you’re looking down from a real plane. I spent most of the weekend flying around to various places. I can still line up with a runway and land without crashing, though I wouldn’t characterize my landings as always beautiful. I did a flight from Newark Liberty International, following the VORs across Pennsylvania to land at Pittsburgh. Then flew a Cirrus Vision from Roanoke, Virginia to Westfield Massachusetts. Total flying time, a little more than two hours. Then for no apparent reason, I loaded up a Piper Saratoga II, and flew it from Essex County Airport in New Jersey, to Martha’s Vineyard, at night, in low visibility. Had to pass over the runway once, but managed to land the second time without putting the plane into the drink.
The great thing about flight simulators is, you can fly while drinking bourbon. The FAA frowns on that in a real plane. Truth be told, I think flying while drinking is probably less dangerous then driving, since you have a lot of time to figure things out, and once you get past takeoff and landing, the computer does most of the real flying anyway. Your job, at that point, is just to navigate.
Another new thing in these newfangled modern flight sims is they have helicopters. I found out I can’t fly a helicopter to save my life. I can kind of take off, and get moving forward, but I can’t hover, and I crash. The balance between cyclic control, collective control, yaw, and compensating for wind seems to elude me.
All this could possibly get me interested in real aviation, as I once wanted to get a pilot’s license, but I don’t know if I really need another expensive hobby. And when it comes to expense, flying puts guns to shame.
Today we have yet another sad panda alert. Bryan Miller and the Philadelphia Inquirer are whining that Obama is reintroducing a modified version of the Tiahrt Amendment, which allows for more sharing of trace data with police agencies, but not politicians and the media. This is, naturally, outrageous: