GAVIN HALL
Guest columnist Gavin Hall explains how Psion’s Flight Simulation for the ZX Spectrum kickstarted his career as a pilot
Guest columnist Gavin explains how Psion’s Flight Simulation for the ZX Spectrum kickstarted his career as a commercial pilot.
“Po pular Computing Weekly said of Psion’s Flight Simulation on the ZX81: ‘No words can do justice to this most elegant of programs. You will not see a better computer game until Psion produce one for the Spectrum.’ Here it is.
Learn to fly, bank, dive and climb, see the world outside through the cockpit windows, land and take off with the aid of many cockpit instruments.”
So reads the inlay of the cassette tape for the 48K ZX Spectrum version of Flight Simulation by Psion. Deep in that area of the brain where earliest memories and nostalgia swirl into a dream-like haze, I long held an image in my mind of the cover art for that game. A cockpit… nighttime… runway lights. An image search and there it was, along with the sensation of neurons firing as an ancient memory rises to the surface.
I was about five years old when my dad came home with that little computer, along with a collection of a dozen games such as Jetpac, Cookie and Pssst. Despite it not being as “fun” as the others, Flight Simulation held a strange allure.
Later on, having seen fast jets at the local airshow, we acquired a copy of Fighter Pilot. Objectively, it wasn’t much better, but it had guns and now we were in an F-15 Eagle! Any Top Trumps player worth their salt knew that if you had the F-15 you’d won before you started.
For years, I played with the keyboard until I managed to get hold of a Kempston interface and joystick. The key with computer games is always the suspension of disbelief – ten-year-olds are strong in this department – but having that joystick took it to a new level.
Later on, long after those who could afford it had moved to the
Amiga, it was the turn of F-16 Combat Pilot to punish the little Sinclair. In hindsight, how this was done with 48KB of RAM I’ll never know. Air-toair missiles, radar, a mission planner…
By now we’re up to 1995 and our 1988 vintage PC (Intel 8088 processor, Hercules graphics adapter and black/amber monochrome monitor) was also being press-ganged into running an early version of Microsoft Flight Simulator.
My parents were now enduring nagging for a new PC. A year earlier, a family friend had bought Tactical Fighter Experiment ( TFX) by Digital Image Design (DID) for a 486 PC. The packaging for TFX was a masterclass in 1990s excess, the huge box constructed of sturdy cardboard. Prising it open revealed the most beautiful manual ever seen for a piece of software. This wasn’t just software to run, it was a thing to own. My brain nearly melted when I first saw the Eurofighter in flypast view. And don’t even mention the night-vision bombing missions. I had to have it.
Eventually, my mum relented at a point when my dad was away with work. It was a bad moment for her to do so. Esco m, the high-street computer chain, supplied a Pentium P60 with 8MB of RAM and a doublespeed CD-ROM drive, running DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 – very similar to the machine reviewed in the first issue of PC Pro!
Computing historians may recall that the Pentium P60 was a dud – the 486 DX4-100 was faster – and, by the end of 1995, the same money would have bought a P75 or even a P90, a quad-speed CD-ROM drive, 16MB of RAM and, crucially, Windows 95.
However, none of that mattered as my brother and I set off down the runway of Chicago Meigs Field airport in a Cessna 172, scenery smoothly scrolling by in full colour. Nor did it matter as we shot down countless enemy aircraft and obliterated enemy airfields with cluster bombs launched from an F-117 Nighthawk.
The deficiencies of that PC manifested in the run-up to Christmas 1995. DID was about to release EF2000 – we’d been staring at screenshots in PC Zone for the past six months. It seemed impossible that graphics like that were possible on a home PC and so it proved for ours – it fell a long way short of the minimum specs. Gutted doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Taking to the skies
“My brain nearly melted when I first saw the Eurofighter in flypast view”
When I was growing up, the received wisdom was that it was tough to become a pilot, which I took to mean that I couldn’t do it. Yet, somewhere along the line, self-belief emerged, and I decided to give it a go. I chose the A-levels I guessed would be helpful: maths, physics and computing.
A part-time job working in McDonald’s began paying for all sorts
of PC upgrades, allowing us to continue making the most of the flight sim golden era that was the mid-tolate 90s. My brother bought Jane’s
F-15, which came with a manual that detailed pretty much every nonclassified thing about that aircraft. If you wanted to play, you had to read and digest – I could never bring myself to put in the effort. Being honest, we were now more interested in Quake and Half-Life than simulation.
At 17, I flirted with the idea of joining the RAF. It was an exciting time for prospective pilots as the long-delayed Typhoon (formerly Eurofighter) was due to enter service at any moment. To cut a long story short, life took a different route, and in the January after A-level results, I ended up moving to the US for 14 months to train for my airline pilot’s licence. It was a fantastic time – a real case of work hard, play hard.
Flying in the US has a sense of space and freedom that doesn’t exist in the UK. Cruising around the Michigan skies on a summer evening, sometimes in convoy with friends, is something I’ll always treasure.
Those 14 months passed in a blur of study, exams, flying, tests and road trips. Before long, we were back in the UK for the final hurdle of getting a professional licence: the Instrument Rating (IR).
What you soon realise is that each test is nothing more than a ticket to move on to the next stage. Even once you’re “fully qualified” and working as a first officer (or co-pilot) with an airline, every day is a school day. There’s only so much that books can teach, and I am hugely indebted to the many older and wiser colleagues whose patience, grace and good humour guided my development.
Magnificent flying sims
So two decades on, does PC simulation have a place in my life? As you might guess, it doesn’t occupy the same spot in my affections that it once did.
That’s not to say it has no place at all
– I do have several options to play with, and still enjoy a few minutes of hooning around in a fast jet at low level, imagining the road not taken.
Can PC simulation aid in actual flight training? To a certain degree, yes, and certain groups have been taking this option more seriously in recent times. Anything that you learn in a flying lesson can be practised on a PC simulator, which is good from a consolidation perspective.
Using a PC-based simulator to instruct students on new skills has its challenges, but it has definite value. With book learning at one end of the scale and actual flying at the other, “simming” can provide a middle ground where concepts, such as the importance of altimeter settings, can be brought to life. Flight training is an expensive business, so if basic concepts have been squared away by the time you climb into the aircraft, you’ll get more value for money.
Where I’ve found it handy is before a conversion course from one jet type to another. Conversion courses are intense and don’t have much room for delays, so the more prepared you are, the better. Some of the aircraft expansion packs on the market offer enough detail to learn panel layouts, scan flows, and even give you a feel for how various failure modes work. These things are not “certified” from a regulatory standpoint – for that you’d have to add a zero to the price tag – but as pre-course homework, they certainly don’t hurt.
It is possible to add another layer of realism using the Virtual Air Traffic Simulation (VATSIM) network. This allows simulator pilots to speak to real people acting as air traffic control. They operate as close as possible to real-world procedures, and there’s a good deal of professionalism in the whole setup. In fact, some of the VATSIM controllers are real-world air traffic controllers.
Looking back, I’m convinced that the mucking about with aircraft from our living room was pivotal in selecting my career path, even if you couldn’t map that at the time. I suspect that this is not a unique story, either. It’s been exciting to watch my godson have a similar experience.
His father is a private pilot, which has had a tremendous influence, but he has been playing with various flight simulators from a young age. In the last 18 months, gliding has become a passion for him, with powered flight on the horizon as soon as age allows.
I would say to anyone who fancies getting a private pilot’s licence but can’t afford it that PC simulation gets you so much closer than you’d imagine. Sure, it’s not exactly the same – of course it isn’t – but the spirit is there. For my money, the joy of taking a light aircraft somewhere picturesque, setting the time to sunset and noodling around the sky, even if it’s only for 15 minutes, is still immense.
As for the new version of
Microsoft Flight Simulator…
gobsmacking ( see Gavin’s review on p42). Suspending disbelief scarcely seems like a requirement. Popular Computing Weekly would be impressed. And will I be playing it? You bet.
“Even once you’re working as a first officer with an airline, every day is a school day”