by Bob "Groucho" Marks

The Author

Bob is the penultimate aerogeek, and has been since he was four or five. He soloed a Cessna 150 on his sixteenth birthday and has a hundred hours logged in his log book, but due to various reasons never finished training or received his private pilot license.

Because of his various aviation related jobs and experience as an airport bum, however, he has stick and throttle time in many varied aircraft, ranging from high performance homebuilts like the Rutan Long-Eze and Defiant, to big antique DC-3s, to Schweitzer sailplanes, to commuter aircraft like the Cessna 414, and to spam cans such as the Beech Duchess and Grumman Tiger.

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Bob's first computer sim was a primitive proto-sim that ran on his Dad's Timex-Sinclair Microcomputer. Flash forward to the early nineties where, as a true MacAddict, he has played every last drop out of all the Apple Macintosh flight sims- Hellcats Over the Pacific, F/A-18 Hornet, and A-10 Attack / A-10 Cuba.

Seeing EF2000 on a PC made him see the error of his ways and he switched to The Dark Side- primarily because all the good sims ran on Wintel. I now am proudly conversant in all things combat sim (got the scars to prove it), and embroiled in an epic struggle to build a simulator cockpit and huge waste of time and resources dubbed the MachPit.