Junji Hirayama 's Home Flight Simulator 211
hifiandrew writes "I love seeing home mockups of cockpits for Flight Simulator like the recent Slashdot article of the person who used 13 Monitors and 9 PC's. But this one takes the cake for cockpit coolness! While doing a Google search for 747 cockpits, I ran across a web site of a person in Japan who has the coolest home cockpit for Flight Simulator I've ever seen. It has a perfect built-to-scale layout, backlit panels and even a projector for the scenery! All running on relatively modest PC hardware. I'm envious!"
Wow cool! (Sorry 'bout that website though....) (Score:4, Insightful)
(too bad about that website of his though, it's a shame really...)
Is real flying too scary? (Score:2, Insightful)
Envious? (Score:1, Insightful)
You really need to get out more often
Flight Sims as Terrorist Training Tools (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's why: no way, no how will that tactic of "hijack plane, crash into structure" ever work again.
The only reason it worked the first time was that it was so unexpected. Previously, the MO of a plane hijacking was to fly to some remote location and hold the passengers for ransom. As such, your best chance for survival as a passenger was to lay low, not attract attention to yourself, and wait for either rescue or for the hijackers to get what they wanted.
The more passive you were, the better things were likely to turn out for you.
But those days are now irrovocably GONE. Now anybody who even makes the slightest move towards the cockpit is likely to be dogpiled by every passenger on the plane, no matter what weapon the hijacker might be carrying.
In fact, the days of the "passive hijackee" were over before all the 9/11 planes were out of the air. The news of the change in tactics spread SO quickly that the passengers on Flight 51 (?) prevented the final plane from reaching its target.
The only way a hijacker can get ahold of a plane these days would be to buy/rent it - and you can be damned sure that the people holding the keys are being VERY dilligent about who can get their hands on something large enough to cause any real damage.
That's a trick that would only work once.
DG
One word: Freedom. (Score:2, Insightful)
- Freedom to fly from anywhere you want, instantly.
- Freedom to fly whatever plane you want.
- Freedom to disobey as many rules and laws as you want: FAA regulations, laws of physics, any international laws.
- Freedom to stop whenever you want, from the comfort of your own home. If you suddenly feel like stoppping and taking a nap, it's pretty hard to do that in a real plane.
- Location. Yes, real flying gets you somewhere. That's not exactly the main purpose for (most) pilots- the actual flight is. It would be a major inconvenience to end up halfway around the world if you just wanted to fly, and it wouldn't be much fun to just limit yourself to flying around your city/state.
- Freedom to fly whenever you want for as long as you want. No need to spend time going to the airport, setting up your flight with the airport or FAA (however that's done, I'm not sure). No need to go through too much hassle to fly.
- Safety. Make a mistake in a flight sim, no big deal. Make a mistake in real life...
- Partially, money. Sure, the initial investment might be bigger than when buying a plane, but the maintenance costs of a real plane would be bigger than a simulator. There's fuel, labor costs, mechanical costs, airport/FAA costs (if there are any, I'm not sure).
Oh yeah, IANAP. :)
Re:What are your favorite flight sim games? (Score:3, Insightful)
X-Plane's flight model pwns FS2004's in terms of realism, but you can head down to the store and pick up FS2004 now for less as opposed to X-Plane, which you have to get via snailmail. (Both programs require the CD in the drive for copy protection.) The global scenery for X-Plane is $20 extra, and Mars is $10 over that, so a full X-Plane install is almost $90. (You can download the global scenery if you want to, but their servers are throttled to 2-3 kb/s, if they're even up.)
X-Plane's interface, not to put too fine a point on it, blows. It is very difficult to use compared to FS2004, it's very non-Windoze-standard. FS2004 owns it on graphics quality as well. Both sims can use real weather downloaded off the Internet (built-in w/FS2004, requires a downloadable utility for X-Plane). The big plus for X-Plane is that it comes with world scenery and aircraft builder tools, which FS2004 doesn't.
FS2004 is (IMO) the better buy for those who just want to pretend they're a pilot. X-Plane is better for the hardcore pilot who wants maximum flight model realism, the "what if" hobbyist that wants to design and try out their own aircraft, and for folks who aren't scared off of a clunky interface. And, a big plus, X-Plane works on OS X.
You can check out x-plane at www.xplane.com [x-plane.com]. You can download the 122 MB program there, it's the full program but unless you have an X-Plane CD in your drive, (a) it's limited to the Southern California area, and (b) it disables your joystick after 6 minutes.