I thought before I came charging in asking the questions I wanted to ask, I'd probably better to do courtesy and say hello and introduce myself. 😁
Hi. I'm Querqueti and I'm just shy of fifty years old and still don't know how the hell that happened and I live in Britain. I've been playing flight sims since Digital Integration's Fighter Pilot, where you had blue sky and green ground and that was basically it. I was never good at it, though. In fact during the time I owned a ZX Spectrum I don't think I ever successfully managed to land the thing. I was better at Elite, quite honestly. I boarded the Flight Simulator series at version 3 and spent happy hours zooming jaggily around Chicago at night; and I've followed the franchise up to FS2020 which I spend far too much of my free time on.
I say I've been 'playing' flight sims and I use the word advisedly. It's what I do with them, for the most part. I'm not technically minded, nor a serious aviation enthusiast. I don't work in the industry, I'm not good enough for a virtual airline, and I couldn't handle the pressure of VATSIM. I just like the pretty scenery and the neat planes. I like planning flights from A to B via C, X, epsilon, ailm and wunjo. I enjoy plotting the route, doing the basic calculations and following rough procedures for approach, en-route and departure - though more often than not they're 'procedures' I've laid out for myself rather than the proper formal published real-world ones. The navigation side of things has always been a draw for me, especially radio nav, and I'm going to miss VORs when they're gone.
In terms of aircraft, I gravitate most of all to 'caravan' types - little single-engine prop planes with a bit of living space inside that you could take a few friends and go on adventures in: the Cessna Literal Caravan most prominently. I can fly airliners, and usually successfully (if not gracefully), but they're too big, too fast and too high for what I'm interested in for the most part. Though most often I find myself in the TBM-930, which is faster and more capable than I probably need - I basically want to do low-level sightseeing flights and land in wilderness areas to take in the view - but it's one of relatively few that's about the right size where the doors open and you can sit on the steps watching the sunset. Sadly the Caravan, which I'd otherwise prefer, doesn't let you open its doors and this has become weirdly important to me, though it's a longstanding 'feature' of mine that I do tend to fixate on bafflingly unimportant things. And although I've tried the Simworks Studios Kodiak, which is a brilliant plane, no doubt, I can't handle the punishingly accurate flight model: the way the slightest wind flips me off the runway the moment I'm generating any amount of lift. I can take off and land in it, but it's very rarely a pretty sight.
Anyway that's me and my interface with Flight Sim and I'm pleased to meet you even though I haven't met you because I haven't posted this yet but think of it more of a statement of intent. A mission statement, you might say. A vision.
