Post by flyingsinger on Apr 14, 2022 12:18:01 GMT
Hi all,
I’m Bruce Irving. I live in central Massachusetts, near Worcester (the American one), and I have been an airplane and space nerd since Project Mercury (early 60’s). My first flight sim was Microsoft on the original Mac around 1987. I got into Falcon 3 on PC-DOS in 1994 and later tried many other combat and civilian sims. I got my private pilot in 2001 but for various reasons, didn’t fly very much after that, except for many hours on commercial jets for business (I was the international distributor manager for a software company until I retired in July 2021). I became so obsessed with the free Orbiter space flight simulator from 2005 to 2010 that I wrote a book about it, “Go Play In Space,” and became a JPL Solar System Ambassador to do educational outreach. In 2020, MSFS got me excited about flight sims again and I now spend many hours touring the world in it, mostly in VR. This in turn revived my interest in real flying and I’ve started to take some refresher lessons in a 172. I’ve also planned a “flying vacation” to London and Cambridge in June, to fly some old airplanes and attend the Duxford Air Show. This shows the power of addons. I only got interested in Duxford when I found the great version of it on flightsim.to and started flying there. Next thing I knew I was booking a flight to Heathrow!
Thanks to Jonathan for setting up this great forum along with all the other Virtual Flight resources!
-Bruce
I’m Bruce Irving. I live in central Massachusetts, near Worcester (the American one), and I have been an airplane and space nerd since Project Mercury (early 60’s). My first flight sim was Microsoft on the original Mac around 1987. I got into Falcon 3 on PC-DOS in 1994 and later tried many other combat and civilian sims. I got my private pilot in 2001 but for various reasons, didn’t fly very much after that, except for many hours on commercial jets for business (I was the international distributor manager for a software company until I retired in July 2021). I became so obsessed with the free Orbiter space flight simulator from 2005 to 2010 that I wrote a book about it, “Go Play In Space,” and became a JPL Solar System Ambassador to do educational outreach. In 2020, MSFS got me excited about flight sims again and I now spend many hours touring the world in it, mostly in VR. This in turn revived my interest in real flying and I’ve started to take some refresher lessons in a 172. I’ve also planned a “flying vacation” to London and Cambridge in June, to fly some old airplanes and attend the Duxford Air Show. This shows the power of addons. I only got interested in Duxford when I found the great version of it on flightsim.to and started flying there. Next thing I knew I was booking a flight to Heathrow!
Thanks to Jonathan for setting up this great forum along with all the other Virtual Flight resources!
-Bruce
Great to hear about Orbiter! I've tinkered with it over the years, but the learning curve is horrendously steep