My name is Andrew. My online name is GolfPilot. I am a real world Instrument Rated Private Pilot. I am a part of a Flying Club in the San Francisco Bay Area with a 182RG, 182, 172, and an Archer. I sometimes post videos of my flying adventures on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/user/Anrboy

I first learned to fly when I was 8 and I begged my mother to buy me Flight Simulator 2000. I really had no clue what to do and had no way of learning how to set up a computer let alone fly.

I quickly figured out I needed a joystick and was flying a 172 without crashing (on the sim)!

I got pretty good at it and by the time I was 12 I was able to fly around and land the Learjet, impressing my friends, and even my uncle (A pilot).

I was a later user of FSX because I didn't have a computer that could handle it. When I went to college I brought a workstation computer of my dad's with me, It had a 3.00GHZ Pentinium D processor in it. At first it didn't run FSX but with upgraded memory, and a 9600GSO I had it running nicely!

Within a couple months of college I started flying real airplanes. The flight training was not school related. Purely on my free time. It took me about a year to get my license.

During this year I started using Vatsim! I used the callsign of the plane I was training in and would regularly practice touch and goes and my talking skills.

While training for my instrument rating I used FSX a lot. I have pretty much become the king of setting up computers for instrument training. All my pilot friends have me come over and set up their computer for them and I have an absolute blast doing it!

Today I use a more modern home built computer.

my specs are as follows:

FX-8350 black edition

GTX 760 4GB

16GB DDR3 @ 1666mhz

128GB SSD for Windows 8.1 and Simulator

I use Prepar3d v2.2

I use Prepar3d at least once a day and hope to be able to broadcast my flights here on Avsim!