N8439T 6/30/92 - 12/05/19
This was an article I never wanted to write. Last week I was forced to sell my airplane after 27 years of ownership and something like 1400 hours in the pilot's seat. Unfortunately, running a flightsim fan site is no way to get rich and the past couple of years have been especially tough.
As a new pilot in 1991 I quickly got tired of renting and started looking for a plane of my own. The FBO at KOWD actually included an aircraft broker who went looking for me. Aft
Here's why flightsimming is better than real flying:
While I admire those developers who create planes that require a real preflight inspection and keep track of the aircraft maintenance, there are days when I'd gladly give up that realism when at the airport, and just jump in the plane and go as you can do with a flightsim plane.
Winter seems to have come early this year, and that's a good foot of wet heavy snow that has to be removed. I'd rather be flying than shoveling!
T
This has been a good week for me being at aviation events. I previously reported on my B-25 ride and then the weekend comes and it's time for the annual "Battle For The Airfield" at the Collings Foundation HQ not far from where I live. Since 1979 the Collings Foundation has assembled a collection of classic cars, historic aircraft and more recently military vehicles. The large bombers tour all around the country, some of the other flybable planes are based in warmer regions than New England, but
I think most of us here enjoy aviation in all its aspects, not just limited to simulated flight on a computer. I have a friend who has developed an interest in hobby drones and he found a friend who already owned one, so he invited me along to get a demonstration.
This appears to be one of the most popular models available, the DJI Phantom III
This is not a toy and it's not cheap, at over $1000 for the model we saw.
Anyone familiar with R/C aircraft would be right at home with the c
Smaller airports can be fun to visit as you never know what will fly in. My local airport has a weekly drive-in / fly-in event once a week during the summer so it gets lots of cool cars as well as some fly-ins. You might see an ultralight or an old Cub fly in, or one week it was a Lake Amphibian. When I drove in for this week's event, though, something quite unusual had arrived:
It looked like a Gemini space capsule from the 1960's...It is a Gemini space capsule from the 1960's! And it's
In the U.S. a pilot's license is good forever but to actually be able to use it there are various additional requirements, one of which is a flight review every two years where you go out with an instructor and demonstrate that you still know what you're doing with an airplane. My review was due this month and given that I had not flown all that much over the past year I asked to do a more thorough review than the regulations require.
Today we were scheduled for the second flight in the revie
Most of us get to know a variety of people through flightsimming. We've had many people come and go during all the years we've been running FlightSim.Com. Back around 1999 to 2001 a fellow named Bruno Barreiros was part of the team here, helping us with the news that we published.
Just recently, Bruno reconnected with us and he's certainly moved up in the aviation world! Instead of just simming on the computer, Bruno now drives real A320's and A340's around the sky for a Portuguese carrier na
I wonder why people are so reluctant to use file names?
I run into this quite frequently in my role as file librarian. Someone will ask for some change or other and tell me to do it to "their file" or some such vague description. Or they will tell me the FID number, which is not very useful; check our search pages and you'll see there is no way to search on FID. Or they'll give me the URL of a search result they did; again not useful since that search result only works for the person who did
I truly like to think of the flightsim hobby as a community, people who work with each other to make things better, at least within the hobby itself and who are willing to help each other when necessary. Help usually means tips on tweaking FSX, inside info on an aircraft.cfg setting, ideas on new scenery or aircraft liveries, etc. but sometimes it extends into the real world. This is one of those cases.
Tony Radmilovich has been around the flightsim hobby for as long as I can remember. We hav
I've been to many air shows and other aviation events over the years. Frankly, I got a bit tired of the "big" shows as they have in recent years become too commercialized...VIP seating, loud music, announcers who just won't shut up (I want to hear airplane noise!), etc. Shows in the past that were more about the planes were more fun.
http://www.eaa196.com/images/myricks12/images/img_2353.jpg
So, I generally only go to smaller events, the kind of back to basics fly-ins that are held by EAA
This past weekend I actually had the chance to get away for a few days. Most people go to a resort or some such for a vacation. I went to Dayton, Ohio.
Dayton may be a bit down on its luck right now but it does have some points of interest. Amateur radio ops reading this surely know why I was there. Dayton is of course also the home of the Wright Brothers and even though Kitty Hawk was where their first flights took place it was in Dayton that they actually invented the airplane. Dayton is th
As much time as I spend with flightsimming, and also real GA flying, I rarely have the chance to fly in an airliner. The need just doesn't seem to come up much.
This week, though, I'm on a trip to Redmond, WA. Yesterday was a long day of flying, in a United Boeing 757-200 first to Denver and then to Seattle. Overall a pretty pleasant flight and favorable conditions. We got to Denver 45 minutes early so I had more time to walk around and stretch after 4 hours on the plane. In Seattle, we lande
What goes around comes around...
We all know the cliche about flightsimming being "as real as can be". And surely this has become more and more true with each advance in flight simulator versions. But now it's turned around as flightsimming is coming to real aviation.
This week Garmin announced the new Aera 796 GPS unit. It's "hand held" in that it does not mount in a plane's panel though it's kind of big. But what struck me on seeing this is its latest feature, what Garmin calls "3D visio
I spend seven days a week doing something relating to flightsimming...that is what it takes to keep this web site going. But I also have many other interests, the problem being finding time to devote to them. One partial solution is to try and combine activities and thus the "Three Island Tour" came about.
No surprise, I like to fly real planes and do it when I can. With limited time finding interesting destinations not too far away is something I'm always looking for. Another activity I enjo
I see quite a few recent blog entries by other people...not one of which is a proper use of a blog. To simply ask a question, post what you have to say within the main forums.
Just so everyone is clear, here is a good definition of "blog" from Wikipedia:
A blog (a blend of the term web log) is a type of website or part of a website. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries
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Most of my email is pretty routine stuff, but sometimes I get caught off guard. It's really kind of shocking what some people think of our beloved hobby, for example this email just received (paraphrased a bit, and atrocious grammar and spelling corrected):
I have read articles regarding web sites that are trying to turn people away from the hobby. Some of the reading is so shocking that web sites will do anything just for the money. FlightSim.Com and Avsim
One of my favorite flying destinations is the Owls Head museum, located right on the Maine seacoast in Rockland. It's a very scenic flight up there and just the right distance...too far to drive but a perfect day trip by light plane. About twice a month they have some kind of themed vehicle show and this weekend it was cars of the 50's and 60's. Plus they fly many of their old planes, when the winds permit and of course there is the museum itself.
Most of the planes they fly are from the WWI
Some planes earn the accolade "great" and I think the Corsair is one of them. Not only did it have a distinguished WWII career, it was one of the rare WWII planes whose career extended beyond 1945. Corsairs were still being built as late as 1952 and some saw service into the 1960's.
This past weekend was the 70th anniversary of the Corsair's first flight. The plane was designed and built in Connecticut and the first flight was at Bridgeport airport, at which a 70th anniversary air sh
This is the time of year here in New England that I start thinking about outside aviation activities in addition to flightsimming. This past weekend I attended my first aviation event of the year, a little open house at one of the local airports. Even small events have their little pleasures (in addition to the hamburgs and hot dogs!) and this one offered a look at the Terrafugia Transition, the roadable light sport aircraft. I've seen the videos...it really is a car that flies (or a plane that
This month FlightSim.Com completes another major upgrade: single login. For some years now we've had a situation where FlightSim.Com was almost like two separate web sites, with one registration (login name/password) required for the file library and a second registration required for the message forums. We're not the only site that has this problem, but it is confusing for many people.
The problem is that the file library software and forum software are written by different people and were
Most people don't know what goes on behind the scenes at a big web site like this, but one of those things is software development. FlightSim.Com is run on software that we developed ourselves, from the big things like the file library to little utilities that you as a user never actually see working but that do useful things for us. (The one exception to this of course is the message forum software, which is vBulletin, a popular and widely used program).
Well, one of the big things is about
Being involved in aviation does allow us to do some fun things. Though I was just a spectator, I did do something fun aviation related this past weekend that I thought I'd share here.
The event was called the "Race Of The Century" and was hosted by the Collings Foundation http://www.collingsfoundation.org/menu.htm at their HQ only a few minutes from where I live. Must be nice...big house, huge barn containing an amazing antique car collection, a hangar bigger than any at my local airport and
