Dad Scores Big for Christmas

Wow! Everyone had a good Christmas morning, including yours truly. I got a Saitek Pro Flight Yoke and Rudder Peddle system - check it out:

No more clumsy cheap joystick for me. Hooking everything up was pretty easy. The yoke plugs into an open USB port and then everything else plugs into the yoke. Windows recognized them immediately although there's also software that comes with them so you can program different profiles for different games.

Flying with them was trickier than I thought though. Everything's more sensitive that my old joystick, so on my first landing attempt I was over-correcting to the point I thought I'd probably crash. I finally managed to get over the runway though and level the wings enough to land.

On my second attempt, I restrained myself and made smaller adjustments, which worked a lot better. That landing was much smoother:
I've still got to experiment with the settings before I get really comfortable with this, but I know I'm going to love them. The rudder peddles make taxiing a lot easier (as long as you don't over-steer), and are especially helpful on take-off when you're trying to steer the plane down the runway without banking the wings before liftoff. The yoke is a lot more precise than the joystick and has more buttons on it. The throttle quadrant is also nice for throttle control but the prop and fuel mixture controls didn't seem to work. I think I've got to reverse them or something but I'll experiment with that and see.

More updates to follow...