Washington Apple Pi Journal, July 1986

40 GREAT FLIGHT SIMULATOR ADVENTURES
and 40 More: A Review
by Thomas Johnston
(By Charles Gulick, published by COMPUTE!
Publications Inc., for Flight Simulator IT on the Apple II.)
I've rediscovered my Flight Simulator! Charles Gulick
takes the co-pilot seat and like a Charles Kuralt of the sky,
takes you places you've never been and shows you wonders
you never noticed, accompanied by knowledge, insight, and
humor. Unlike Mr. Kuralt, he also takes you on hair raising,
"Ohmigosh, are we gonna crash?" type adventures.
Picture yourself headed straight for the twin towers of the
World Trade Center. Is there enough space to fly right between
them? Aiyeeee. Each adventure begins with a list of night
parameters that you enter into the FS2 editor (he tells you
how to do that). Then you read along as you fly, making
frequent use of the pause key (P). The narrative makes you
feel like the author is sitting right next to you in the right
hand scat, chatting away about what's going on around you.
Remember the scene in one of the James Bond movies
where he nies through a hangar? Yes that's right, you are
going to fly right through and out the other side. You hope.
"Yes, you're close to the floor, but there's also very liule
clearance between you and the roof."
In the midst of these adventures, in the second book,
Charles Gulick, teaches you to fly and fly right Most of the
Flight Simulator's own manual is very thorough and rather
intimidating. My computer came with Flight Simulator II as
part of the package. I learned how to get off the ground. I
learned how to stay in the air and tum without crashing.
(Remember when you first learned how to steer the Piper, you
headed straight for the John Hancock building to see what
would happen?) I could even take off from LaGuardia, tum
south, and fly down the length of Manhattan. But I never got
the hang of landing, and I certainly couldn't land at the airport,
straight down the runway. Maybe I could land off to one side
in the grass. I know that I'm not alone in this.
Charles Gulick becomes your own friendly night instructor,
explaining simply the use of this navigational radio or the
importance of that RPM setting. He tells you specifically the
proper method for taking off, flying straight and level,
adjusting altitude with precision, entering the pauern at an
airport, and landing on target. For me a bigger thrill than hot
dogging through the open hanger was making the final left
tum out of the pattern to find the runway right in front of me
and being able, for the first time, to land straight down it No
more anxious grass landings.
Even without the night instruction you can enjoy most of
the adventures, even the hair raising ones. In several of them
you don't even have to know how to fly. After the night
training you can enjoy the harder parts of the more difficult
adventures. "You're straight and level at 5000 feet when your
engine quits. You must make a dead-stick landing on San
Clemente Island...." "Keep your nose pointed straight at the
Statue of Liberty. You're going to land this airplane on the
island, right at the foot of the statue."
In one adventure he shows you how to use the slew
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controls (I call it the 'flying saucer mode' because you can
move around and freeze in midair anywhere you want).
Slewing and using the distance measuring equipment, you can
locate a favorite location of your own that might not be
clearly marked in the simulator world, like your own house
for instance, or the field behind your nephew's house in
DeKalb. You can save that position and make it your own
private tie down location from which any time you can take
off and fly your nephew over Chicago.
Some of the adventures are simply tourisling. Like
Charles Kuralt, Charles Gulick chattily describes the passing
scenery as if you were really looking out the window. Telling
history, local color, and scandal, he breathes life into that
graphic landscape. "You're at Somerset airport on Nantucket
Island, which is off the southern coast of Massachuseus. So
many ships were wrecked from this storied whaling port that
they built a windmill from the timbers that washed ashore."
To add to the realism buy some aeronautical sectional
charts (try the Map Store). The radio frequencies in the FS2
are real and the same as on the charts. You really see where
you're going and can chart interesting courses.
Unfortunately the adventure books were written before the
release of the Microsoft Flight Simulator for the Macintosh.
The Mac version docs not have the extensive editor that the
FS2 has. You cannot preset all the night parameters so that
you come out of the editor flying straight for the Manhattan
Bridge. You can only preset your position and the weather
conditions. An editor at Compute! Publications told me that
he did not think the books were suitable for the Mac and had
no current plans for new books. From my own experimenting
I found that is was possible to fly several of the adventures, at
least the ones that start on the ground somewhere. The
position coordinates are the same. I had to first taxi or slew
to the right heading since I couldn't figure out how to preset
it, then I could follow the adventure. Unfortunately this
technique leaves out the more hair raising fly-through type
experiences. Examine the books yourself. A Mac user might
want to buy one anyway to get the flavor of what you can do
with the simulator.
It's almost midnight. "You're over Jersey City, New
Jersey, pointed across Upper Bay of the Hudson River and
toward the Statue of Liberty as weIl as the lower tip of
Manhattan. The city is a festival of lights in the distance, as
you'd expect. Beyond the statue are the familiar World Trade
Center Towers." Around the city you can see several tower
beacons flashing in the distance. In the pitch dark beyond,
you're going to look for the blue runway lights of Westchester
County airfield.
The editor in the Apple II FS2 allows you to change not
only the position and the weather (such things as cloud layers
and wind sheer, which I never learned about until I bought
these books) but also your heading, airspeed, and the settings
for all your controls. This means that you can enter the
parameters given for an adventure and exit the editor to find
contd. on pg 23
July 1986 Washington Apple Pi