Page 4
Airport 2000 Volume 2
By Bob "Groucho" MarksThis continues on for around seven or eight minutes. It’s at this point, I do what any Highly-Trained, Professional Pilot trapped in a dead end job flying other people’s crap around the country because the real airlines won’t hire him would do: I firewall the throttles and I take-off anyway. Then, in a moment of sheer cleansing epiphany, I decide to ram that 200-ton piece of Seattle Steel right into the offending tower. Over the objections of my rather effeminate sounding co-pilot, I lift off, gather airspeed, and turn the hulking twin around to face that gorgeous-looking control tower.
I gaze at the Hare Krishnas at the airport bar after a hard day of pestering going by at five frames-per-second. Hoping that my cargo is a mixture of defective oxygen generators, leaky nerve gas canisters, and illegal Mexican fireworks, I line up and wait for my revenge as the glass wall fills my windscreen . . .cringe . . .Nothing. Nada. Zip. I slide right through it like something out of a Casper cartoon. The poof of a co-pilot again reminds me I didn’t get cleared to take off. I wish I could whack him with a virtual Jeppesen approach chart binder. The adventure ends a few short seconds after that with the program saying I had been a bad monkey, or words to that effect. No banana for you.
Psych! That tower isn’t really there!
OK, you virtual airline fans out there will call me a savage, and the both of you would be right. Most civsims bore the hell out of me. I fully realize that the whole idea of an airport is to avoid hitting things---this is, after all, one of the cardinal rules of the air. Or, if it’s not, it should be. But if I do, dammit, I want something to break. To be fair, collisions are indicated when you mid-air with the dynamic scenery (i.e. other airplanes) included with FS2K, but buildings are as insubstantial as Bill Clinton’s word.
