Page 5
Airport 2000 Volume 2
By Bob "Groucho" MarksLet me come clean with you two virtual airline guys who may be reading this, as by now you are probably saying something like "Yeah, if you fly like a 13-year old kid in the depths of a Mountain Dew-and-puberty frenzy, these things will bother you. The whole idea is to fly like a professional."
You can do anything you want on your last day on the job
Look, I am a pilot---at least this piece of paper in my wallet from the FAA says so. I don’t pretend to be a professional pilot, that would explain the "Student" prefix on it. I use my copy of Microsoft Flight Sim 2000 Professional Edition for two purposes only. The major one is an educational one; I use it to fly light general aviation aircraft to brush up on my VOR/NDB navigation skills, or to practice a cross country before actually flying the route for real (a great way to help learn navaids and visual cues). I may even shoot an ILS approach or two with the weather turned up to "hideously nasty."
The second reason I keep MSFS2K on my hard drive is to try crazy, demented, stupid stuff that can only be done in a sim. Hey, it’s fun remember? Split-S a 737 over Chicago? Sure! Thread a V-22 through LA skyscrapers? You bet! Fly a SR-71 at high mach under the Bay Bridge? Oh yeah, baby. That’ll blow a couple of morning commuter’s minds!
But actually flying an entire airliner route, intersecting waypoints, and hitting switches reminding the cattle (oh, I mean passengers) in the back that " . . .there is no damn smoking and fasten those seat belts and don’t make me stop this plane and come back there!" is incredibly boring to me. When you buy a program that invites you to try these things using clearance deliveries that don’t work properly and populate the world with buildings I can taxi through. Well, that just makes it annoying, too.
