First Post

Welcome to Virtually Flying. This is my first attempt at a blog so bear with me. I'm good with computers, having built a couple and having written a number of programs over the years, but at 42 years of age, the whole blogging thing came along "after my time" so I've never really understood the point of it. I don't have a My Space or Face Book page either. Don't even ask me what Twitter is all about. I have no idea.

Why Virtually Flying? I've been an airplane and flight enthusiast since I was a kid. My parents and extended family are from South Carolina, but we moved to Dalton (north Georgia, about 20 miles south-east of Chattanooga, 80 miles north of Atlanta), when I was five. Some time thereafter, my Dad got his private pilot license and I recall us flying back to South Carolina for weekends. It only took about three hours to get there in a Cessna Skyhawk compared to eight hours in a car. I need to ask him more about his planes, but it seemed like Dad owned (either individually or with partners) a couple of different Skyhawks and maybe a twin-engine low-wing plane, as I remember taking a trip in one of those one time. He may have just rented that one though.

My other early memory of airplanes was watching A-10 Warthogs fly low over the trees near my grandparents' home in South Carolina. They flew out of Myrtle Beach Air Force Base and I guess were practicing maneuvers over the sparsely populated farmland where I spent several summers and lots of weekends. I also remember my Dad talking about how he was inspired to get his pilots license by seeing military planes flying over the same countryside when he was growing up. Dad was born in 1937, so when the Myrtle Beach airport was taken over by the military in 1940, he would have been three years old and would have seen military pilots practicing throughout the war years.

OK, so why the "Virtually" in the title. Well, unlike my father, I've never obtained a private pilot's license. I did take some flight lessons, along with my younger sister, when she was in high school and I was in college, but that's about it. Instead, I've always had an interest in flight simulator programs on the computer, having been hooked since the early days of Microsoft Flight Simulator when everything was drawn in wire frame and you had to use a great deal of imagination. Recently, I got a new laptop through work, a Dell Latitude E6500 with a dual core 2.4 GHz processor and 2 Gigs of RAM, and decided that while not ideal, this computer could probably run FSX (Microsoft Flight Simulator, version 10) reasonably well. I picked up Flight Simulator Gold, which includes the Acceleration add-on pack and gave it a try.

The simulator runs pretty smooth with the graphics settings at modest levels. Eventually I'd like to get a gaming desktop with a multiple monitor setup, fancy flight controls with rudder peddles and everything, but for now this will have to do. I did manage to find an old joystick in my basement, which I suspect once belonged to my brother, since I don't remember buying it myself.

So there you have it. My intention is to learn to fly correctly, primarily flying out of the Dalton Municipal Airport, which is modeled nicely in FSX, and flying planes like the Cessna Skyhawk and others that you might legitimately train in. I'm going to avoid the unrealistic, like flying jumbo jets, military planes, and trying to fly between buildings or through the legs of the Eiffel tower and all of that. Future post will detail these early flights. Eventually I would like to move up to more powerful aircraft, although I have little interest in flying jumbo jets. At some point, I would like to fly military planes (like the A-10) and at that point might move on to the more realistic aerial combat simulations (as opposed to the arcadish variety)

I'll keep you posted!