As they say in the movies: Fast forward to now. Well, not exactly now, but a few years ago, when I ran across a little metal box with a DC-3 on the front cover, in a Best Buy, something called Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004. By then I'd pretty well abandoned any thoughts of ever flying again, but brought the little box on home, got it all to working, and while not exactly obsessed with it, I spent many enjoyable hours immersed in the intricacies of flying airplanes, big and small, pretty well anywhere in the world.
One of the things I like about a flight simulator is you can get away with things that would get you met by armed representatives of the FAA upon landing, if they didn't shoot you down first. Things like landing a J-3 on the ramp instead of actually on the runway first, which is the FAA preferred method. Or just blowing into town with a 747, then setting down at Teterboro without so much as a howdy-do to ATC. Or slipping under the GWB in a C-5. And it's OK to overshoot the runway a little bit, then just taxi back through the mud until you get on a taxi way.
It's all just so, well, stress-free.
Fast forward again to not so long ago. I'd never been much of a YouTube fan, until a buddy of mine, and another flight sim pilot, showed me what some of these people were doing with flight simulators. I was approaching the point in my computer graphics studies where I had a few animated videos to show off, and YouTube seemed the place to show them off. After watching a few of these flight sim videos is when the obsession really began to take hold, and nowadays there seems to always be "The Next Video" taking shape somewhere in my computer.
