Flight Simulation | Dan's Landing

I play Microsoft Flight Simulator quite a bit. It is mainly the reason I became interested in aviation and finally decided to start my training. In my early days (i.e. FS2002 and earlier) I played with a mouse and keyboard.

The first major transition for me was buying a joystick and using it in place of the arrow keys. Last summer I finally "cracked" and purchased a yoke and rudder pedals to add more realism to my simulated flying. Plus I already had experience in an airplane and the joystick just didn’t feel right anymore. There’s something special about flying with one hand on the yoke and the other on the throttle quadrant.

I still use the joystick when I fly military aircraft, but it has been replaced by my CH Yoke and rudder pedals for civil ones. In this post I discuss my flight simulation setup and provide some suggestions for setting up your own. Let me know what you think, what you would do differently and what your flight sim setup looks like in the comments!

I found an article on MSDN describing how the flight simulator ATC (and pilot I’m guessing) voices are created. Believe it or not, they’re not computer generated but rather a splicing of *.wav files in the right places. ATC voices have been in flight sim since 2002 and they’ve really added to the realism. It’s quite interesting that all was done through some fancy editing.

Collage of MS Flight Sim boxes

I happened upon this article while looking into an SDK for flight sim. Unfortunately I have yet to find a free one, preferably from Microsoft itself. If you happen to know of a free flight simulator SDK, please let me know!

It seems the economic crunch is having an effect on the Flight Simulator business too. David from Land and Hold Short and Jon from FlightBlogger are reporting that Microsoft has disbanded the team in charge of developing its Flight Simulator Series.

Collage of Microsoft Flight Simulator boxes

Although this news is unconfirmed, Gamasutra speaks of corroborating reports through “Twitter messages from collaborators of the Flight Simulator workers.”

This comes as a huge blow to the Flight Sim community since the game is played and loved by people the world over. There are entire businesses dedicated to developing new aircraft models and other software for the game. Not to mention the volunteer community who has created Terrabytes of addons for the series.

I very much hope this is not the end of Flight Sim. It is too quick a death and too many people will mourn it.

Dan's Landing

My Flight Sim setup

Flight Simulator ATC voices

Next on Mayday: MS Flight Sim disappears?

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