"Are you coming to bed yet?"

"I won't be long. I just need to find out if this new file I've downloaded works properly. Look, it's really good... see how the screen pops up when you hit the F9 key? It means you can have it running in the background, and you can put GPS fixes in, so you can get a much better angle on the turn to the final approach. Before, I couldn't work out how IFR was supposed to work. And see these new night textures? Some bloke just designs these, and puts them up for free! Isn't it great?"

"So no, you're not coming to bed. Fine."

(If you pay close enough attention when these words are spoken to you, you'll detect the note of weary resignation in her voice. If you bothered looking, you'd also see it in her eyes. She pities you. Maybe she's starting to resent you. She might already hate you. If she did, would you even notice?)

If the conversations in your household have reached this stage, I'd guess it's about six months since you first installed FS2000 on your PC. How did you get here? More importantly, where are you going?

How did you get here?

In answering the first question, it's worth looking back at your whole gaming experience. You'd probably been playing video games of one sort or another since you were very young. From Hungry Horace onwards, you've been there, done that. You gasped when Dune first allowed you to build up a city and fight battles with little animated tanks, in REAL TIME!!! You gaped in awe when Doom allowed you to machine-gun pixellated baddies, whose guts you could hear splatting off the walls. You nearly wet your pants when your mate bought one of those new-fangled 3D cards, and the day you had your first online game of anything was the day you realised sleep was an unnecessary indulgence. But somewhere along the way, something changed. You realised you were different. The pretty colours and manic, boggled-eyed insanity of Quake were leaving you cold. Real-time strategy, frankly, bored the arse off you. What you really wanted to do was fly. The seeds were sown when you bought your first combat flight simulator. Was it TFX? EF2000? You lay in bed, poring over the manual. You happily dozed off to sleep with thoughts of HUDs, Boresights and Mavericks running through your mind. And for a while, this was enough. But at some point, your love for the combat sim began to wither. You couldn't quite bear to be parted for ever, but the river that runs through us all was inexorably leading you to the terrible truth: what you really wanted, needed to do was to fly civilian airliners. The aerial equivalent of the No.191 bus. On your computer. With no guns or bombs. In real time, using real world procedures. (Is it any wonder she pities you?) So, having idly perused the box the last few times you were at the games shop, you finally went ahead and bought FS2000. Hey! You only need a Pentium 166 to run this! It'll be like greased lightning on my system! You poor fool. Remember the sense of confusion you felt as you set every slider at max, fired it up and sat back to watch the dazzling graphics? How you had time to make tea between each frame, as it lugged along like an arthritic carthorse on its way to the knacker's yard? That's when you were forced to look for help, and how you discovered AVSIM and the rest of the sites.

You were shocked to discover the forums weren't full of people with handles like 'QuaxolotltheKilla' and 'SlayThrashKarnage'. No one swore at you when you asked for help.

Then you discovered add-ons. Within a week, you'd bought and downloaded FSTraffic, FSClouds, AETI 747-200, PSS 777. You had Nav 1.2, Nav 3.0 and FSNav (although you weren't sure what the difference was.) You'd tried to install a hundred different freeware aircraft, without realising they were all for a different sim. You had new airports that took your frame rate into negative figures. Your installation now weighed in at 5 gigabytes, with rogue files all over the place, and FS2000 wallowed around like a corpulent drunk having a fight with himself. And you didn't have the first idea about how to fly. The best you could manage was taking off and crash-landing at the default Meigs flight. The 747-200? Ha! How you struggled when you realised the Quick Start Manual assumed knowledge of standard operating procedures. How you cried when the INS took you off towards China when you wanted Illinois. How you wished you'd paid attention when Ralph Tofflemire warned you it wasn't for beginners. And so it goes.

I have to assume that at this point, some simmers give up. They must do so. To the total novice, FS2000 is a very intimidating program. Its complexity is its strength, but one can't escape the feeling that it was designed with the expert very much in mind. For those who cut their teeth on FS98 or earlier, it may have been a smooth transition. For the rest of us, FS2000 can be a nightmare. But if you've come to the conclusion that it's just not worth the effort, then please, STOP! It IS worth it. If you've reached meltdown, and haven't a clue what you're doing, heed these words. You are not alone. Every single one of the virtual pilots you encounter on the forums was once in your shoes. Even the ones who think STARS are some sort of flight path, instead of celestial bodies which are only visible at night. What you have to do is this; go right back to square one. The one that says "This is an aircraft. Look at its pretty wings." You have to forget your 777, your 747 and your dreams of flying IFR in Concorde. The aircraft for you is the Cessna 182. The default one, not the lovely-looking Dreamfleet version. It sounds so obvious, doesn't it? We read about FS2000's complexity, and its similarity to real-world simulators (and real-world aviation) and then wonder that we can't jump right into the deep end. Go back to the Cessna, sit down and start going through the lessons in the Pilot's Handbook. Do the homework. Learn standard rate turns, radial scanning, VOR-to-VOR navigation. Sound dull? I promise you that the satisfaction you gain from doing this will be in inverse proportion to the frustration you felt while trying to fly the 747. Take the Private Pilot checkride, and when you pass, print the certificate, sign it, then hide it in a drawer where no-one will ever see it.

But you still want to fly a big jet, don't you? Well, your next step is the GPS navigation system. Everything you need to know is in Help, and there's a great tutorial in the AVSIM Education Resource Center (the ERC--it's linked from the main page.) But it's basically very straightforward. It's assumed you can work out how to open the Flight Planner from the FS2000 menu. Do this. Opt to create a GPS-Direct flight. Give it your departure and destination airports. Note that when you create a flight plan, all you seem to get is a red line between your departure and destination airports. You do the rest. In the edit window of Flight Planner, use your mouse cursor to click and drag the line around any navaid you like. Then, while still in the edit window, click on your destination airport. Make a note of the runway you'll be using, and its ILS frequency. Save the route.

Once you're back in the cockpit, click the NAV/GPS button to GPS. Set up the following items on your autopilot: altitude (this means you have to dial in your desired altitude,) click ALT SEL, speed (dial in your desired speed in knots,) click IAS (indicated airspeed,) click NAV, arm the autothrottle and the flight director. Then open your radio stack. In Nav 1, dial in the ILS frequency of the runway you're hoping to land on. Take off, and once you've got your wheels up, engage the autopilot. If you've done this right, your plane will fly you to your destination all by itself. When you're nearly there, switch your NAV/GPS switch to NAV and click the APR (approach) button. If you're really, really lucky, the plane will capture the glideslope, and you'll watch, enraptured, as your plane makes the sweetest descent you've ever seen. Then it will crash, because you're still flying at your rotation speed, you haven't lowered any flaps and the gear is still up. But hey, you're getting somewhere.

Flight simming is a great hobby. It's engaging and challenging. But then so is algebra. I've only just discovered that it's also relaxing and fun. I'm six months into it, and only a few weeks out of the misery and frustration of not knowing enough to make the most successful basic flight from one place to another. Having spent time on the forums, reading up on the many tutorials which are available on the net, and practising in the Cessna, I'm now starting to get somewhere. I recently managed the introductory flight in the AETI 742. The sense of achievement was considerable. But it has taken quite a time to get even here. So, if you're where I was a little while ago, don't give up. Just take it easy. It does come to you, and it's all the more rewarding for having not been easy.

Where are you going?

And so to the second of the original questions: where are you going? Flight simming will present you with a number of challenges, not least of which is the real need to balance what you like doing with other things; i.e., Real Life. Unless you're careful your partner will eventually leave you and spend his/her time with someone who appreciates them and takes them out to do nice things, while you slowly waste away at your computer desk. All the SIDs and STARs in the world are not worth the love of someone close. And if you're already wearing aviator shades and a peaked cap while you fly, and are seriously considering asking your partner to wear a uniform and make safety announcements to your cat while you perform your checklist, you're already very close to the edge. Draw back. There's still time.