19 hours ago, charliearon said:

Heck, where else can you drink and fly an aircraft?

Air America

Spent childhood summers near KFJK in the 1960s and got imprinted on airplanes - airliners especially.

Thought seriously about learning to fly but was never able to get the time and the money to come together (I had one or the other but never both). I'm not sure how far I would have gotten with it - flying GA in the New York area was never going to be a relaxing experience.  My take was you had to be instrument-trained at minimum to be safe, and flying a GA aircraft to a professional standard was going to be one more stressful thing added to other stressful things in my life. 

Thanks to the sim, I get some (not all) of the enjoyment at a fraction of the cost and agita.  And I get to focus on the things I like most - systems, navigation, geography, the view out the window, being part (sort of) of the things I watched as a kid.

In all, it's a pretty good tradeoff.

 

I've tried to explain it to my wife too....it's difficult.

The only real explanation is a connection to a simpler time in my life.  I was 7 when FS3 came out and it blew my mind. Can even remember running home from school to play it.  Fast forward to High School when FS95 was the latest and it keep me company when I wasn't exactly the most popular kid in school.  In my 20s, I got carried away with other hobbies and revealing my flightsim interests would have been embarrassing with my roommates and such.

Now its a married family life for me...but I get to play with a real A320/319 4 days a week up and down the east coast day in and day out.  After all that real life stuff, I still love to see whats going on here for some reason...don't know why i'm interested in simulating what I do for real, but I do.  If somebody here knows, please let me know....

5 hours ago, rhumbaflappy said:

Air America

I hope you're joking.

1 hour ago, 188AHC said:

I hope you're joking.

Considering the nature of the operations carried out, stress the crews were placed under (both flying and ground personnel), as well as the era and location, it does not seem too far fetched to think that a few Air America pilots ended up developing a bottle problem as a coping mechanism. That is just pure conjecture of course, I am eager to get stuck into some books about Air America in fact. Along with the Tigers (both the AVG and the Tiger Line until the FedEx acquisition) they became part of the fabric of US aviation history. Fascinating history.  

It was part the love of aviation and part wonder at what a computer could do. My first exposure to Flight Sim was, I believe, version 3 on a demo Atari ST computer at a department store called Lechemere back in 1980-something. I saw one of the employees playing around with it and was mesmerized. He let me take control after showing me the basics on the keyboard (any of y'all remember the old days of tap-tap-tapping the arrow keys? :D), and I was hooked. 

Back then, my family was on the lower end of the economic scale, so buying a computer was out of the question. Years later, my brother in law worked at a computer store and was able to acquire a home PC from his job, and he let me install a copy of FS4 on it, which I played as often as he and my sister would let me over. Soon after, I was able to save my own earned money and purchased my first PC for the express purpose of Flight Sim 4.0. I ran the gamut on all the addons available-- Aircraft & Scenery Designer, Aircraft & Adventure Factory, and even some third party scenery design tools like SEE4 for added special effects (colored lights!). 

Since then, I followed all versions up to FSX. Flight didn't interest me, as it appeared to be a drastic departure from what I loved about the platform, and so my simming eventually died out. Several years later, X-Plane 10 caught my eye, and I dove in, falling in love over again. Then came X-Plane 11 and I still carried on. Eventually, I'd once again develop a sort of ennui, so even XP11 took a backseat as I carried on with other interests and hobbies. Enter the announcement for FS2020, and I'm all perked up again. One of the niches I got into over my time with the various sim platforms was bush flying, and FS2020 looks to be absolutely perfect for that type of flying. I can't wait to get my mitts on it!

Edited December 3, 20196 yr by JonRD463

Flight Sim is methadone to the heroin addict.