Whats your FS background?

That screenshot of FS2 on the commodore brings back painful memories. It was dire speed wise, so best flown with a 100 Ft cloudbase (So IFR and no scenery as such) and used as an instrument procedural trainer. Digital joysticks didn't help, so my attitude was that if I broke cloud in the right place to be able to put it on the runway, that was a successful flight.

Then things like 386's and joy of joys, 486 came along, and FS4, which also then got some very powerful addon packages that meant things like Dublin scenery was possible, and got done, and that started all manner of interesting things.

I already had a PPL, and at that stage, was trying to get a CPL/IR so Flight Sim was a useful tool. Then Aer Lingus found out about the Dublin Scenery I'd done, and the next thing was a procedural trainer, using FS4 and my scenery, and a specialised dual control joystick type system with a much modified keyboard that allowed flights by two people without using keyboard input to control the basic operations, again built by me. It was used to train some of the new cadets at the time, and then was the centrepiece of the Young Scientist fair the following year.

That got me looking in a different direction, and I became involved with a package that had split off from FS4, but was very similar, with some common code, and as a result of that, met up with a developer who had produced a graphics package for ATP, along with some better flight modelling.

That over time became a specialised airline sim which also had a lot of commonality with FS, AS2.

That then led into a multi machine networked version that was suitable for professional and research use, and I spent a lot of time over a number of years installing a much modified version of this in the UK, based on the A320, with a complete mode control panel, overhead panel, centre console and flight management system, all fully functional, with an instructor station, and this was used with A320 pilots to carry out human factors research on flight deck design, with a view to improving the interface between the aircraft and the crew. That one system used a network of 19 Pc's and had full instrumentation, external view monitors and a lot of other very specialised systems on it, including things like TCAS. and much of the degraded modes of flight depending on the nature of systems failures

For development work, I had a hybrid simulator that was a mixture of 737, MD83 and Airbus, dual control, and that was seen in a number of events in both Ireland, Austria, Germany and the UK.

9-11 did huge damage to that market, Microsoft significantly backed off the Flight Sim market, and a number of the other developers moved away from professional work, partly because the changes in rules applied to high end flight simulators made it almost impossible for the low end developers to validate their systems.

I'd also managed to get the CPL/IR as well, but then Saddam Hussein killed much of the job market, so I stayed with computers, albeit doing a lot less with flight simulation than I used to.

In terms of real flying, I've done a lot of multi engine IFR flying in Twin Comanche, Aztec, Apache and Seneca, and a whole variety of Cessna, Piper and similar singles, including some multi day long distance cross country flights in the States.

I also managed to get a lot of time in full flight simulators, and included in that list are Citation, Bombardier and Lear Business jets, then on the commercial side, BAC1-11, Boeing 737-2, 737-3-5, 747 Classic, 747-400, 757, 767, 777, Lockheed Tristar, Douglas DC10, Airbus A320 and Concorde. All in all, there's probably about 200 hours in these sims, and then probably somewhere between 1 and 2 thousand hours in the generic sims that I've been involved with, which were the hybrid development maching I had here, and the A320 in the UK.

Recent years, I've not done much flying, either real aircraft or simulators, some medical issues got in the way of the real stuff, and a massive flood at our house damaged a lot of my hardware and the flight deck, and I just didn't have the heart at the time to rebuild it all, and with the future post 9-11 being very uncertain, I wasn't sure I could justify the significant expense involved. Most of the sim flying I do now tends to be VFR in a light single or maybe a light twin, over relatively short distances

I've also started spending more time with radio control model flying, and that is sparking some interests in merging some of the flight sim ideas into the model flying arena, but before I go too far with that, I need to be able to fly the models effectively, and helicopters are a significant challenge, especially the larger ones!

So, that's my background in simulation, it might not be the longest flight sim career, but I reckon it's not far off it, given the early start on the very basic systems that it started on.