Ralph Zimmerman
At 57 (born on D-Day!), my passion for the skies goes back 44 years
to my first flight in a commercial airliner - a gift from my parents
- a trip to Big Apple from Syracuse, NY and it has never stopped
since that day. As a teenager, whenever I flew, I always somehow
found my way to the cockpit for a chat with the crew. I studied
weather, flight dynamics and navigation on my own and passed the FAA
Private, Commercial and almost passed the Instrument written while
still in my teens.I took flying lessons at Tamiami airport in South Florida during the early 70's in a Cessna 152. I soloed after only 3.5 hours and went on to get my solo cross-country before I ran out of money and that's back when we were only paying $16/dual and $14/hr solo! I logged about 32 hours and just never got back to finish. Now I have the money but a heart attack won't let me pass a physical so I do all my flying and fulfilling my dreams as best I can through the marvel of the wonderful computer flight sims we have today!
My first sim was Sublogic's Flight Simulator II for the Atari and I've moved on up since over the last 14 years to IBM compatibles and now "fly" an AMD Athalon 750 MHz with 384 Mb RAM and a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP graphics card. My favorites are FS2000, Fly!, X-Plane, Flight Unlimited II and III. I own many of the combat sims but buy them mostly for the graphics - I'm a civil aviator at heart! I find that flying FS2000, a favorite plane, along with a MS Sidwinder Force Feedback Pro stick and RealATC 2(TM) or a ProFlight adventure with a RealATC(TM) custom module for it along with Chris Brett's EFIS is a hard combination to beat for making it "As Real As It Gets". Add Lago's FS Traffic and FS Assist to populate the airways and airports and WOW! Of the newer combat sims, I like Falcon 4.0 and F-22 Lightning 3, Janes F/A 18 and DID's Super Hornet and of course MS Combat Simulator. Now that both Fly! and Flight Unlimited III are out I can say that I do enjoy both of them for what they are and they both add in different ways to my enjoyment of civilian aviation sims and although they both sport ATC, neither has RealATC(TM)!
My favorite flights are done in FS2000 with Lago's FS Traffic and FS Assist running in the background while flying a ProFlight 2000 generated flight with RealATC2 running in the background.
Contributions to the flight sim community have been the first turboprop SGA sound for MS FS4.0, a significant enhancement to BAO's Las Vegas Scenery for FS5, and helped designed the Las Vegas scenery for the recent FLY-IN 11 held on one of the very popular on line services. This enhancement package LASENHV3.ZIP works just great with FS98 and also quite well when adapting the FS98 Las Vegas scenery to work with FS2000.
In March of 1996 I became known as the "father of RealATC" for MS Flight Sim when I created the very first "REALATC" .wav files for use with the newly release BAO Flight Shop to overwrite those horrible 30 enroute files that played! This led to a great expansion of the concept and RealATC was born in the CompuServe flightsim forum as a $5 shareware concept his led to the development of a commercial product RealATC(TM) on which I was responsible for the adventure coding and the low altitude sound files on that product. RealATC(TM) was developed on a 486 DX4 100 with 16 Mb of RAM and originally written for FS5.1. Most of the low altitude digital recordings were made by me at LAS and MCO. Credit and thanks also go to Doug Thompson whose High Altitude ARTCC files make RealATC(TM) more complete than it would ever have been for I lacked the resources to capture the great stuff he did. Doug's files were in the public domain at the time on the IUP server and the adventures on RealATC were written to point to them. The commercial publisher included them to save the end user the trouble to download those great files but failed to give Doug proper credit for it. Doug is an air traffic controller at the Memphis ARTCC. There has always been public acknowledgement for Doug's great work on my web site ever since RealATC was first commercially published.
Additionally, I have done the adventure coding and sound editing for several other commercial products. They include Airfield, Flight Academy, Fly Lauda, Lauda 425, Lauda 106, N54 IFR and GO Flight 9973. Updated information can usually be found at my web site. Titles may change as some of these have not yet been released but should be available in the late fall or early winter of 2000.
Public thanks here also to Denver Mendenhall, my best friend in this whole world who contributed much to the entire project every step of the way. Thanks also to my family, friends, colleagues and peers for their loyalty and support. I'm currently residing in Orlando, Florida, having been in Las Vegas for 2 years and in Denver for 10 years prior to that. I was born in Charlotte, NC and grew up around the Syracuse, NY area. In August 2001, I returned to Colorado to live in the Colorado Springs area.
Ralph Zimmerman
http://home.earthlink.net/~ralphaz1
ralphaz1@earthlink.net