Squawk 3000

Sitting on the sofa last night with my old laptop and trying to fly a Cessna 172 using FlightGear - which seems to be a great sim program - but my laptop isn’t up to the task. Its a few years old, was a hand-me-down, and even with all other apps closed it struggles. Frequent long pauses while scenery refreshes makes it kinda difficult to fly straight and level, and key/mouse inputs while frozen produce some fairly dramatic (and disastrous) results.



So… time to buy a new ‘puter - the software really needs a 2GHz machine with a fast graphics card to do it justice. But that’s the nature of the world today, isn’t it. Gee, I remember back in the late 80’s when the first version of Microsoft Flight Simulator was on a single 360kb floppy drive, and ran quite happily on a 128MHz IBM AT. Mind you, the scenery was pretty darn basic, and there weren’t many aircraft to choose from. You flew what they gave you, and that was that. Even so, it did help me to learn all about navigation using ADF, DME, VOR, and did keep me happily occupied for many sleepless nights.

Still can’t beat the real thing though. It’s always been easier to control a real aircraft.