Being Useless Again

This is my virtual airplane (Click on the picture for a larger view). My 21” monitor, the Core Duo Quad computer, the digital 3D joystick, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 9, “A Century of Flight,” is loaded. What you see on the monitor is the control panel of the cockpit of a Boeing 757. I am flying somewhere at night, alone in the dark sky with my virtual colleagues. Actually, this is a corner of my dining room, the place I prefer to work and have my primary computer set up. But in the virtual world, it is the nerve center of a powerful commercial airliner zipping along at 25,000 feet while the earth sleeps below.

If I had a dollar for every hour I have spent flying the simulator, I could probably buy a new house. I have been doing this since the mid 80’s, but I haven’t grown tired of it. I used to play a lot of the “fight-sim” air combat games – dogfights everywhere from Guadalcanal to outer space, but I realized that all of that shooting down and being shot down, bailing out into the ocean and the like was really just a nerve-wracking hassle, and it was not what I really enjoyed about the computer flying games. What I enjoyed was the flying itself. Lifting off from LAX and landing in Denver in a driving snow storm is plenty enough of a life-and-death challenge for me. I don’t need anyone shooting at me to raise my pulse rate.  Click here for the rest of the article