Fly the airplane
The past few days have been quite a roller coaster for those of us at Microsoft, and for everyone in the flight simulation community. I've found that, emotionally speaking, reading the forums has made matters both worse and better for me. Worse, because there is lots of negativity being expressed that triggers my own. Better, because there are many clear thinkers out there, putting things into perspective.
In an atmosphere filled with chaos, panic, rumors, and anger, a handful of posts convey a level-headed professionalism of the sort that the best pilots exhibit in times of crisis. No amount of conjecture—no matter how well-researched or well-reasoned—will change the fact that we won't be arriving at our planned destination on time. I'm angry about that, I have my own theories about why, but anger and conspiratorial finger-pointing isn't going to help me land safely. Any trained pilot knows that the most important action for surviving crisis in the cockpit is a simple one: fly the airplane.
So tonight, I decided to take that a bit literally. I closed my browser ... took a deep breath ... and booted up FSX for the first time since this all started last Thursday. I went to KCQX, the little airport on Cape Cod where I soloed a real Cessna 152 in 1987. That summer I was working three jobs to pay for flying lessons, and I rode my bike five miles each way to get to the airport.
Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined back then that 21 years later I’d be climbing into a virtual Piper Cub, cranking up a virtual engine, and taking off to explore a virtual Cape Cod that looked almost identical to the real one. But alas, technology has come a long way in the past two decades.
I taxied out to the runway, took off, and climbed out over MegaSceneryEarth's aerial photo-based rendition of the Cape. As I leveled off at a thousand feet, the memories came flooding back. Down there off the left wing was Hardings Beach, where I had spent many a lazy afternoon. Further west, Wychmere Harbor, where I had spent a third of my work-life that fabulous summer more than half my life ago.
I continued chugging on up the coast, past Dennis Port and the Bass River, and made a squeaker of a touch and go at Barnstable Municipal in Hyannis, the first "big" airport with a control tower that I ever flew to. I made my way back to Chatham along the north shore of the Cape, found some more memories as I went, and touched down on runway 24 just in time to see the last moments of a spectacular sunset.
I taxied in via a concrete taxiway that didn’t exist back in ‘87, but parked on the grass just like I used to. Pulling the mixture, the engine stopped and the world returned. First the virtual world there in Chatham, then the real one at my desk. If you’ve been simming for any length of time you know what I mean.
It took a few long minutes before all the mental chatter started up again, and I rushed to my browser to write this post quickly for fear of peeking at the forums again along the way. In a moment I'll click Publish, shut this machine down, and rush off to bed so I can savor the lingering sights and sounds of what I just experienced thanks to the magic of simulation.
We’ve come a long way since I learned to fly for real that summer. My first attempts at re-creating the experience using Flight Simulator on my first computer left a lot to the imagination. It boggles my mind to consider where technology will take flight simulation over the next 20 years. What I do know is that we’ll get there. The course we take might not be the one we planned, the journey might not be a smooth one. But we’ll get there, and when we do we’ll look back on what we have today and wonder how we thought this experience was realistic at all.
The next generation of flight simulations will come. In the meantime, there’s a big round earth and a whole lot of simulated flying machines available to explore it with. As you peruse the forums and ponder, as you write nasty emails and engage in thoughtful conversation, don’t forget to fly the airplane.
Go lose yourself in the sim. You’ll remind yourself, like I did tonight, why you care so much in the first place.
Extras 
