X-Plane

I'm still hoping that the gizmo I ordered on eBay will let me hook John & Theresa's flight yoke to my laptop. It hasn't come in yet. (Ordering problems online).

In the meantime, I'm flying with joystick. If nothing else, it shows me how much difference practice makes. Sometimes I actually fly smoothly.

The airport is accurate, and the roads and bodies of water are too, but the ground is "simulated" house and such. Between that and the fact that it's just plain hard to see, flying the sim is a lot harder than flying the plane. It is really worth doing, though. If nothing else, I get to be the voice saying, "Nose down." "500 ft. per minute." "Airspeed."

I've flown sim at Bowman Field, Clark County, Standiford Field. It gets the weather from the current METAR. Today it thought it was raining at Bowman Field, so I flew in the rain.

Since I have the baby MacBook. without the graphics processor, I don't know whether my scenery is the norm for this program, or if there's more to it if you have the processing power.

Regardless, the sim makes me use all the instruments and clues I can find, which is increasing my fluency a lot!

The new Microsoft Flight Simulator looks to be awesome, with real satellite imagery. It doesn't run on my Parallels. I checked.