Flight Simulators

It’s winter and Covid is keeping us inside and away from people. I briefly owned the great Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 Laptop. It was intended for use in my transfer business. After I was convinced it would handle the video editing and other transfer software, I thought I would test it on Flight Simulators. I bought MS Flight Simulator 2020 which is a remarkable program with stunningly realistic scenery.

It looked precisely like you were flying over New York City and other places I toured. The Asus laptop did not work out for me for one reason – the keyboard was not good for a writer. Keys were barely identified and important keys were missing such as page up, page down, home, end to name a few. I spend a lot of time writing so this was not going to work. I sent it back to Amazon for a full refund. And I must say they were very helpful. Told me how to properly delete everything I had moved onto the computer and reinstall the operating system.

I am back in the market for a laptop, but in the meantime I bought X-Plane, another flight simulator and installed it on my video editing desktop. I am quickly becoming addicted. I’ve already bought a flight yoke and have been going through the tutorials on the X-Plane site as well as on YouTube. This technology has come a long way since I last played with it ten or so years ago. I’ve mostly been flying out of east coast airports I have known. X-Plane includes some 30,000 airports around the world with accurate runway maps. A free program called LittleNavMaps is helping me file flight plans. I can see how people get completely enamored of this virtual world.

Here’s a YouTube video comparing two flight simulators: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 vs X-Plane. The video is produced by a Certified Flight Instructor, not a hobbyist. Even if you are not interested in choosing between these two programs, this video will give you an interesting overview of flight simulation. If you have a video editing computer, you may already have what you need to do a test flight. Gaming computers are often ideal for video editing.