“If you’re ever in the Bay Area, you should head out to the Nut Tree and say hello to Duncan Miller … he’s been around a long time … still flies, and has hangars full of interesting stuff. If you’re lucky, you can sign his guestbook like about 4 million other people.”

This bit of advice came, more than once, from my friend and former colleague Marty Blaker. (Marty – if you’re reading this, “Hey.”) It came most recently about a week ago on a trip that found me in said Bay Area with a bit of extra time on my hands.

Now, I’m a gregarious sort of fellow – after all, one doesn’t become the single best Flight Simulator Community Evangelist in a company the size of Microsoft without being a bit of a people person. But I already know a lot of people, and I’m inherently skeptical when anyone says “Oh, you have to meet so-and-so”. Given that, my knee-jerk response to such a suggestion is to want to simply smile and nod, say “I’ll be sure and do just that” while gingerly filing the whole thing under “I’m really just being polite.”

(Besides, the last time I went to the Nut Tree, a roadside fruit-stand turned fly-in restaurant and mini-theme-park, I had a soul-shatteringly terrifying experience involving a miniature train and a scarecrow; was I really ready to go back to that area, only 36 years later?)

Thankfully, I have two knees, and, in this case, the second one jerked and reminded me that Marty wouldn’t steer me wrong, not to mention the fact that I’m a connoisseur of interesting stuff. So, like George Costanza ordering a chicken salad on rye, I decided to give it a go. I called Marty and asked if he would call his friend Duncan and give me an introduction.

Marty’s response filled me with the opposite of confidence when he said “Oh, he won’t remember me at all! Just show up, and tell him that you heard that, if you’re into old airplanes, you have to stop and say hello to Duncan. It’ll be great!”

So … I was not only expected to just walk into some stranger’s hangar and say “Hello”, I was supposed to do it entirely unannounced. With a jaunty “why not?”, I set out to do precisely that. And I would have made it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids at the TSA who decided to erect fences and security gates around this little airport in a fit of post-9/11 spending. Thanks to those precautions, I arrived at the airport and found myself peering at Duncan’s hangar and what I could see of his airplane collection, clutching at the chain link fence like a Dickensian orphan or a really easily deterred terrorist.

“I am,” he said.

“Well … my name’s Hal, I’m an old airplane guy, and I’ve heard that, if I’m in this area, I have to stop by and say hello. So … hello!”

Duncan sized me up for half a beat, then said “Head down to the gate over there. The code is and I’ll meet you back at the hangar.”
When Duncan said “hangar,” he may well have said “museum,” or, simply, “home.” I walked in past the Lockheed PV2 and the Grumman S-2 Tracker parked on the ramp and saw two beautiful restored Stearmans, two vintage Fords, and a spotless Piper Cub, all surrounded by photos and parts and memorabilia, the seeds of a thousand stories. Duncan got me a soda from his refrigerator, and we sat in an air conditioned “ready room” in the corner of his hangar. One of his hangars, that is.

There’s an unspoken ritual when pilots meet, especially those of us with a penchant for the old and unusual. It’s something that my friend Jim called “authentication,” and he was spot on. In this case, I was the interloper, the stray punk off the street who may or may not have been selling something, so the burden to authenticate was clearly mine. This process usually, and often very subtly, involves answering three questions in the course of a conversation: “Do you know what you’re talking about?”, “What have you flown?”, and “Who do we both know?”

My authentication took the form of interested commentary on some of the pictures on the walls, and then we started leafing through one of Duncan’s sixty-five overstuffed photo albums. He pointed at one picture and asked if I recognized the location—I did, it was Reno/Stead. Other pictures came and went, each with their own stories, spun quickly and handed off by a man who has been flying nearly every day since 1939. I mentioned flying Tiger Moths and growing up with a “Bamboo Bomber” (a 1944 Cessna T-50), and, naturally, Duncan used to own one, back when he started a non-scheduled airline flying C-46’s out of Boeing Field near Seattle, which reminded him, did I know so-and-so, oh, great, he thought I might …. The connections were found and forged almost synaptically, and before I knew it, it was time to go.

Time for Duncan to go, that is. He had to run an errand, so I started to take that as my cue to leave, but he asked me to stick around. He gave me the keys to his other hangars, reminded me about the refrigerator, asked me to sign his guestbook, and told me to make myself at home. I’d clearly been authenticated. Wandering through his hangars I saw Stearmans and T-28s and more classic cars and even a Vultee BT-13, not to mention countless more bits of aero-ephemera. I was like the proverbial kid in a candy store except that nothing was for sale and there was no risk of diabetic coma.

After about thirty minutes, some kind of 70s Oldsmobuick docked itself outside, and a guy named Mike hopped out.

“Hello there. If you’re looking for Duncan, he went to get a part and said he’d be right back,” I offered, helpfully.

“Oh, hi … yeah, Duncan told me he was going to go get a part, and said he’d be right back” said Mike.

With that superfluous redundancy out of the way, Mike and I sat down for a chat. He’s based in Alaska but had come down to stay for a few weeks and fly the BT-13 to a few air shows. I never did get Duncan’s age, but Mike is 86 and adamantly identifies himself as the younger of the two. They’ve been flying and working together for a long time, at least as far back as the early 50s, and, when Duncan got back, the three of us settled in for a marathon of story-swapping and a few more test questions for me, though all in good fun.

There was an unobtrusive wooden sign on the wall that read “Pals Forever.” It seemed a little trite at first, frankly, but, in talking with these two guys, the cynicism ebbed. Sometimes, people actually do say just what they mean.

Between the two of them, I’m fairly certain that they’ve flown everything and been everywhere. We talked about the handling of the BT-13 compared to the Harvard, we talked about Moths and Bamboo Bombers and Beech 18s, about one of their friends who flies a DC-3 out of a 700-foot grass strip. Duncan talked about ferrying an RP-63 King Cobra during WWII, and how heavy it felt with the additional armor plating. It seems the R model was used for gunnery practice— not as a remotely piloted drone or towing a target but as a manned target that fighter pilots shot at with plastic bullets, their hits scored automatically by what the pilots called the “pinball machine” inside the cockpit.

Lousy work, if you can get it.

Duncan had mentioned earlier that he was going to show me “something that Churchill gave back.” When I reminded him, he responded with a question, another test:

“Do you know what an AT-19 is?” he asked.

The wheels turned, the gears ground…. AT was the U.S. Army Air Corps designation for “Advanced Trainer.” Our very own Cessna T-50 was known in some guises as an AT-8 or AT-17, for example. In addition to those, I could identify an AT-6, AT-9, an AT-11 …. Then something clicked, and a picture snapped into my head.

“Was that the gullwing Stinson? The V-77?” I asked with what I’ll call “confidesitancy”.

As it happened, I was right, and that seemed to be the last of the tests. Duncan asked if I wanted to go and look at one, and I replied with something articulate like “well, duh!”, but before we got up, Mike interjected.

“Wait. What was the AT-19? Did we figure it out?” he asked.

“Yes, Hal got it. It’s a gullwing Stinson. Where were you?” Duncan replied.

“I was busy trying to remember what the hell an AT-19 was!” Mike responded.

“Don’t you remember? You crashed one!” said Duncan.

“I crashed? Are you sure? I don’t remember … “ Mike said.

Duncan gave an exaggerated eye-roll and I said something about hoping to live long enough and spend enough time flying that I’d someday not be able to remember something as dramatic as a crash. They both laughed, and then Duncan said that it was great to see that the younger generation was taking an interest in these things. Having accidentally turned 40 a couple of days ago, being referred to as “the younger generation” was surely the best present I could hope for.

As promised, Duncan took me to look at the Stinson, and, as expected, it was absolutely gorgeous. Of the 500 or so built, about 380 of them went to the UK as part of our Lend-Lease agreement and this was one of the aircraft that was given back—truly lent, rather than leased. This example looked factory new in British Royal Navy colors, ready to patrol the seas on the lookout for enemy Unterseebooten. It’s for sale, too; a fact that I immediately tried to forget.

At this point, something like six hours had flown by, and I started to politely make my exit, not especially looking forward to the 90-minute drive to my hotel with a stop at a restaurant where some fancy waitress with big hair and fake nails tries and fails to find a polite way of saying “Oh … just one of you tonight?” Then, mercifully, the idea of the three of us having dinner seemed to spontaneously suggest itself. I agreed to join them, but only if they were sure I wasn’t intruding, and if they’d let me treat.

It was then that Mike suggested Taco Bell, and Duncan shot him a look filled with what I’m fairly sure was mock indignation and said:

“Mike! We have a guest! We are NOT going to Taco Bell!
We… are going … to Denny’s!”

And so we did, Mike and I shrugging and shaking our heads while every waitress in the place cooed and giggled with Duncan, all but sitting on his lap to take his order. Duncan must be somewhere around 90 and belies the old adage about there being no such thing as an “old, bold pilot.” If he ever does leave this world, heaven forbid, the odds are it won’t be in an airplane, or in a hospital, but at the hands of a jealous husband. God bless ‘im.

After dinner, we (and by “we” I mean Duncan) got one of the waitresses to take a picture of all of us, after she had several taken with him, of course. While we sat smiling for the camera, I heard Duncan whispering something. It wasn’t “cheese,” it was something that sounded like part toast, part mantra: “Pals forever, pals forever.” There was obviously a story behind it, but it seemed private, and I was perfectly happy to just take it at face value.

And so it is that I’ve found another home-away-from-home, a reminder of the kinship of aviation, where just a few key pieces of trivia are a viable shortcut to a very real friendship. And all I had to do was trust somebody I already trusted anyway, and then simply show up.

Pals forever, indeed.

So, here’s a bit of advice. If you’re ever in the greater Bay Area north of San Francisco, California, and you like old airplanes, you just have to stop in and say hello to Duncan Miller. And if you go out to eat, don’t settle for Taco Bell.

Note: Anything in the following that might remotely resemble an opinion is mine and mine alone, and reflects neither the stuff nor the things of the Microsoft Corporation, its subsidiaries, associates, customers, antitrust investigators, or anyone who ever has or has not actually heard of the company.

So.

A while back, somebody sent us a fax. Faxes, or facsimile transmittals, for the cognoscenti, all go to one place at Microsoft, and are then routed individually thanks to the tireless efforts of our crack team of certified faxographists. If a fax isn't specifically addressed to an employee by name, sometimes it takes a little while to find the right person, but, eventually, they get there.

(Postal mail works the same way ... the customer who sent back their boxed copy of Combat Flight Simulator 3 to "Microsoft" with a piece of paper taped to it that read "won't download" with no other identifying information would be happy to know that it arrived on my desk just about one week after it was sent. This timeliness is appreciated on my end as well, since the sooner something like that arrives, the sooner I can start spending weeks and weeks frowning at it, wondering exactly what it is I'm supposed to do about it.)

Anyway, so I got this fax from someone who identified themselves as a pilot and Flight Simulator customer who had some questions about our latest release related to an upcoming book that he'll be self-publishing and selling out of a van down by the river. Click the thumbnail to see the actual fax, censored so I can take the moral high ground and avoid a lawsuit.

I made the call, and it was answered promptly by a reasonable-sounding gentleman who seemed glad that I was able to make the time to contact him.

He was right, it was brief. Of his promised 3-5 minutes, he spent three of them berating me for the fact that a company as high-tech as Microsoft had to rely on something as archaic and "totally 1975" as a fax. He was wondering why he hadn't been able to simply reach us directly by phone, a method that I didn't point out is archaic and "totally 1876". I did, however, suggest that he could have gone to our website and clicked the link to send us an email, something that might be charitably referred to as "fairly 1995 or so", at which point he changed the subject.

The subject to which he changed was a question of realism. He said a few kind things about our products and the time and energy he presumed we spend on details and things, but said that there was one gigantic, glaring error.

My first thought was "Only one? You're not paying attention!" My second through fifth thoughts were quick guesses as to where we had failed this particular pilot-author. Stalls and spins? SIDS and STARS? Winds aloft? No yaw string on the glider?

I could have been precisely none more wrong.

"Now, I got my numbers straight from the FAA - you can check them yourself", he said. "According to their statistics, only 2% of all the commercial pilots in the US are <edited> or women. In FSX, though, when I look at the exteriors of the airplanes and see the pilots inside, they're 25% <edited> or women. My book is about how political correctness is ruining this country, and I'd like to know whose idea it was to make this one area so unrealistic? Is it company policy, just somebody's idea, or is it part of your settlement agreement with the government?"

Wow.

Never mind the fact that I dislike political correctness more than most, personally (though people like this make curmudgeons like me look squishily sensitive and fanatically open-minded.)

Never mind the fact that we sell Flight Simulator all over the world, so US-only statistics are bogus to begin with.

Never mind the fact that we sell many times as many copies as there are pilots in the world, so, if the appearance of the figures in the cockpits were to reflect anything, it would be our customer base.

Never mind the fact that the makeup of the characters modeled in FSX was all but random - if there was an edict, it was something like "Let's show more than just middle-aged white guys flying the airplanes", and it would have come from retired FS artist and middle-aged white guy Jason Waskey.

No, let's set all that aside.

Let's also forget terrorism, high gas prices, sub-prime mortgages, the falling dollar, our own apparently anti-competitive tendencies to charge too much money for some things and too little for others, people with mullets, war, and the impending return of the Camaro, and pretend that political correctness is the thing that's actually ruining this country.

Having swept the elephants in the room under a rug, I'm left with one question:

Is there anyone, anywhere who actually thinks that some textures wrapped around a handful of polygons and viewed through a virtual camera system that doesn't let you get that close anyway could actually influence anything?

Well, okay, yes.

There's one.

And he's writing a book. A book that I, on behalf of Microsoft, declined to support, with Herculean politeness.

I won't mention his name here, tempting as it is. But I will say that when one Googles performs a Windows Live Search for his name, it turns out that he runs a consulting company that trains sales people by modifying their thoughts and institutionalizing behaviors to help them better connect with their customers.

I wonder if he teaches a section on what to do when you get a fax from someone like him?

Not too long ago, I published a few million words on FSInsider about my role demonstrating Flight Simulator X to His Royal Highness Prince Philippe, Duke of Brabant, Prince of Belgium. For those of you that read me here but not there <Hi, Donna! - ed.>, here's a link to the article:

http://www.fsinsider.com/team/Pages/UsetheHatSwitchtoLookAround,YourHighness.aspx

This particular article was, I report with happy confusion, quite well received. So much so, that a number of people were compelled to comment via electrical mail.  In order to keep my perpetual vanity machine well lubed, I thought I'd share excerpts from two of my favorites here.

The first was from a gentleman in Germany, who said:

Gentlemen,

I'm a (mostly silent) fan of the Flight Sim since Version One was released on 5,25" disk, later swapped to the Amiga and returned to the MSFS with version 4.

Normally I prefer to stay silent but Hal's very honest and subjective report about this incident is really a rare PR stunt with more benefit for the company (MS) than a few millions of normal (and likewise stupid) advertisement for those, who can't read anyway...

Hal, I bow deeply and "Chapeau" for this great article!

As someone who knows a thing or two about stupid advertising and PR stunts, all I can say is Vielen dank!

My other favorite came from an actual Belgian, who wrote:

As a Belgian resident I can safely say that Hal Bryan’s ”A tale of a Royal visit!”  is by far the funniest FS related story I have ever read. BTW, in Belgium the prince is also known as <no need to reprint it here - ed.>, but let us not be too disrespectful (anyway, he prefers to be called <skipping this one too, just in case - ed.> ).

Also, Hal forgot the “accent aigu” in chargé d’affaires - but otherwise not bad for a ‘yank’ ;-)   And his Dutch is excellent – “eenvoudige missies” indeed, “te eenvoudig zelfs!” :)

Best regards!

For the record, it was Sharepoint Designer <no need to reprint my occasional nicknames for it here - ed.>, that stripped the accent aigu, but I should have caught that and fixed it after the fact. Excellent eye, safely anonymous Belgian customer! Excuseer me en Dank u!

I spend a lot of my workday these days tinkering with web stuff. I'm no stranger to the mysterious vagaries nor the vague mysteries of dynamic content roll-up queries and the like, nor am I an expert. I know just enough to get it wrong three times, then right on the fourth try. At least one of the three tries finds me cursing the designers of a particular software tool we use occasionally, though I tend not to do so loudly, as there's at least slim chance they'll overhear.

Anyway, I've noticed every once in a while that Slate Magazine's headline listings on the MSN home page get munged together in wonderfully senseless ways. If I happen to see an instance of this first thing in the morning, I'll stare at it angrily for a minute or so, as if the downward pressure of my eyebrows will somehow squeeze that part of my brain that is certain that, while it agrees that what I'm reading should make sense, just shrugs and returns only a gruff "...can't help ya."

Then, happily, I remember the immortal words of Francisco d'Anconia--"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

Of my premises, I'm not sure if "Things on the Internet must make sense" or "Software people don't make mistakes" is the faultiest.

Regardless ... here's my current favorite. Don't stare too long, it won't get any better.

Being called Hal, spending so much of my life intertwined with computers,  and having been born in 1968, the year that the film version of the now late Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in theaters, it was inevitable that people around me would associate me with the fictional HAL9000 computer. I meet a lot of people in my line of work, and it seems that about half of them get a self-satisfied conspiratorial sort of twinkle in their eyes as they suggest the connection - "Oh, Hal ... and you work in computers ... have you ever seen ...?" A few take it a step further, confiding authoritatively the old myth that HAL was so named because he was one (letter) better than IBM, alphabetically speaking. If I don't like the person, which is pretty rare, I'll point out that HAL was actually an acronym for "Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer", usually pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose and spitting a little on the S's to complete the image of irretrievable geek.

The one connection I've found most entertaining is the one that no one has pointed out to me but me: In the mythology of the various books and films, HAL9000 was first activated in 1997 (1992 in the first film) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The very first iteration of what would become Microsoft Flight Simulator was born there, too. Original developer Bruce Artwick graduated from UI in 1976, and his company, SubLOGIC, was based in Urbana-Champaign, releasing the first version of Flight Simulator for the Apple II in 1979.

Maybe that's too much of a stretch, for most people, and I should simply attribute any connection with my not-quite-namesake to my extraordinarily placid demeanor and my constant stubborn refusal to open any pod bay doors, anywhere, at any time.

Regardless, I've been a fan of Clarke's writing, and, to an even greater extent, an admirer of his mind, for as long as I can remember. He had a permanent spot, now sadly vacant, on my list of people I'd have loved to have met. As it happens, there weren't that many degrees of separation between us - you can even find both our names on the same page of supporters of the X-Prize Foundation here. (You'll find mine towards the bottom, due south of the important people.) Last summer I was lucky enough to meet and spend time with Rob Godwin through a close mutual friend. Rob is the CEO of Apogee books, one of my favorite things about Burlington, Ontario. Clarke was a friend of Rob's family and a supporter of his business. Rob has posted a touching memorial page here.

As Rob said, we have lost far, far more than an inventive and well respected writer, we've lost one of the truly great minds of our time. I leave it up to the likes of Kira, Kiersten, Annika, Quentin, Charlotte, Garrett, or any of my other honorary nieces and nephews as yet unmet (or even unborn) to grow up and help fill the gap.

Updated: See the YouTube trailer below!

I have previously disclosed on this site, more than once, my habit of collecting DVDs, especially those that have anything, whatsoever, to do with flying. There is, apparently, a masochistic underpinning to this, because so much of what I collect with such joy is, by most objective standards, terrible. (I somehow managed to inherit this trait sideways from my brother, a man who won't bother with the culturally accepted worst movie of all time, Plan 9 From Outer Space, because it's too good.)

In other words, I own a lot of movies with airplanes in them that are so bad they're ... well, still bad, but, as I said, they have airplanes in them.

Once in a while, though, something will find its way into my collection that reminds me that not every movie with an airplane in it is a guilty pleasure. Some of them, but not many, let you check your guilt at the door, and are simply pleasures.

Fearless Widget Productions' Flying the Finch is just that: a pleasure.

It's a lavish and loving look at at a fairly obscure airplane, a 1940 Fleet Model 16B "Finch", used as a trainer by the Royal Canadian Air Force as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Program during World War II. The film features one of the few surviving and actively flying examples of the type, owned and operated by my friends the Tiger Boys in the city of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. (More disclosures on my connections to the film in a moment.)

Flying the Finch presents the history of the type and of the individual airplane, as well as an affectionate look at Tiger-Boy-in-Chief Tom Dietrich and a  "rotten little airport kid" who grew up to be really nice guy named Bruce. Actor and, more importantly, exceptional pilot Michelle Goodeve serves as host, while pilot's pilot and long-time filmmaker Glenn Norman took care of things behind the camera, and in the editing room.

And then there's the flying.

Shot in rich, warm high-definition, the blue sky and the green grass and the yellow airplane made my television disappear, and replaced it with an open window. It made me happily homesick for my belov'd southern Ontario, and I'm betting it will have the same effect on other viewers, even those unlucky enough to have never been. It captures the essence of flying for its own sake, especially the passionate finesse of flying an antique.

A documentary like this strikes a balance: it's part history lesson, part human interest, part pilot-talk, and part "Holy crow, would you just look at how beautiful that is! Really! Just look at it! Are you looking?!?! How do I rewind this thing?!?"

In so many cases, that balance is, well, unbalanced. Usually, the human interest and history bits are about right, the pretty bits are shortchanged because it's cheaper to Ken Burns your camera across an old photo than it is to buy avgas, and the pilot-talk is just a tease, if it's there at all. Some films can talk about an airplane, but not really offer a look at the cockpit, never mention things like approach speeds or how soon you lift the tail up on takeoff, or, most unforgivably, not actually show a landing for goodness' sake. If you're going to tell me about an airplane, you had better tell me what it's like to fly it, or there will be trouble.

Flying the Finch pulls it off. Fearless Widget found the secret to producing a balanced documentary: include the right amount of everything.

One of the very best things about this DVD is that it is "just" the first in a series.

One of the most remarkable things about the DVD is how much it made me want to fly the Finch on my next visit to Guelph, even though that would inevitably mean taking time away from flying the Moths that drew me there in the first place.*

Which brings me to my previously promised disclosure:

I know most of the people involved in the production of the film. Glenn and Michelle are like family, only better, because they're family by choice, not by chance. (Nothing by chance, after all ...) Tom, the man for whom they invented the word "avuncular", and his business partner Bob "knock knock" Revell actually made me a Tiger Boy on my first visit, a decision that was every bit as kind but potentially ill-advised as feeding a stray dog; I just keep going back.

Conventional wisdom demands, then, that I apologize, or, at the very least, somehow qualify my opinion, because it's presumed that more knowledge equals less objectivity. Yes, the people and places and things in the film carry some extra meaning for me, but that doesn't mean I suddenly forgot the difference between a good airplane movie and a lousy movie with airplanes in it.

I have way too many of those to be considered anything less than an expert.

If you like airplanes, especially old ones, if you understand - or want to - why absurdly lucky chumps like me fly them, then do what I told you at the beginning: Buy it. Right now.

You'll love it, and, besides, 50% of the proceeds go to the restoration and upkeep of the Tiger Boys' Antique Aeroplane Collection - aeroplanes that deserve to keep flying.

Here's the trailer, courtesy of YouTube:

*-Note: I was also drawn to the place by the people. But don't tell Bob. He'll never let me hear the end of it.

No, not Sweathog Travolta.

Not Vincent Vega Travolta.

Not even Battlefield Earth Travolta.

No, in this case, you can be like Airliner Pilot Travolta thanks to the Interweb and this great and surprisingly high-res VR view of an A380 cockpit courtesy of French photography Gilles Vidal. Use your mouse to look around and the wheel (or the controls on the bottom of the screen) to zoom in and out. It's the next best thing to being the sort of person that a company like Airbus actually invites to be the first non-test-pilot to fly an airplane like the A380.

Even if the slight fisheye and so-close-but-you-can't-quite-touch-it effects of the VR do make you feel a bit like (wait for it ...) the Boy in the Plastic Bubble.

Sorry. I couldn't resist. That's we we in the self-aggrandizing world of online self-aggrandizement call "an easy one."

The latest Electric Moth, a regular email update from the de Havilland Moth Club in the UK, included the following invitation, something that is nearly as irresistible as it is British:

Tiger Moths at Cambridge
Saturday 26 January will be the 70th anniversary of the arrival of the first Tiger Moth with Marshalls at Cambridge Airport. It is believed to be a unique record that a Tiger Moth has been based on site continuously since January 1938. Terry Holloway, Group Support Executive, has issued the following invitation:

"If any Tiger Moths would like to fly in to Cambridge Airport on the morning of Saturday 26 January 2008 we would be delighted to provide a bowl of soup and to take some photographs for posterity which we will distribute to the world's media."

I can't begin to express how much I'd actually love to go.

If I could talk some of (my fellow) Tiger Boys into loaning me an airplane (because why not?), starting in Guelph, ON, would give me a nice head start, as opposed to flying from here at home. Flying during daylight, I figure I could make it from Guelph to Cambridge in about 5 days, with approximately 89 stops for petrol, one way, setting aside the cold and wet bit in the middle.

There is, of course, a very real possibility that the trip could end in tragedy - the soup could be cream of mushroom.

Such are the risks we aviators, jaunty daredevils and captains of the clouds, must consider any time we slip the surly bonds.

The other day, someone on the Flight Sim team sent around a screenshot of an early version of FS, side-by-side with a contemporary shot from Acceleration. This started a lot of us stumbling down amnesia lane, sending screenshots and other reminiscences of versions we remember. Such are some of the slightly curmudgeonly joys of working on the longest-running consumer software franchise we know of. There are people on the team, myself included, who've been customers since Version 1.0 for the IBM PC ... and there are others who haven't even been alive that long.

Then there's our own Dave Denhart, who worked alongside Bruce Artwick in the earliest days of Flight Simulator, even before Microsoft got involved. Dave loves to enthrall the team with colorful tales of those heady times when you had to whittle your software by hand, with only a rusty buck knife, a bag of pistachios, and a healthy dose of determination to see you through. Then sometimes he starts to spit a little bit, his voice goes up an octave or two, and he explains what's wrong with the government and that he can prove that Steve Jobs is monitoring his thoughts while we mutter excuses and sidle out.

Anyway, as more people started jumping on the thread, seizing the chance to surf the web and reply all (what we call "pulling a Hudson"), I did a bit of reminiscent waxing myself, thinking back to what was, technically, one of my very, very first flight simulators. It may not have been hand-carved, but it did predate software, at least in our house. It was produced by Schaper, a company that was blissfully unashamed to refer to itself as "the Cootie Company", and it was called, simply, "U Fly-It".

And I did.

So much so, in fact, that it might have been called "U Fly-It and Then U Fly-It Some More Did I Say U Could Stop?", "U Fly-It And Ignore Your Parents, You Can Always Eat Tomorrow Besides We're A Big Corporation And U're Just a Four Year Old Kid So U Should Do What We Say", or "U Fly-It Because If U Don't U'll Get Cooties."

Thanks to the miracle of space-age Ethernet technology, U can can actually watch the original "U Fly-It" TV commercial, delivered straight to your face in conveniently pre-encoded data packlets, courtesy of the good people at Like Television. Give it a look - I'll wait: 

Even though this brings back a flood of childhood recollections, I should probably point out that, unlike the kids in the commercial, I was listening to the Beatles and not to the soul-numbingly repetitive instrumental strains of what sounds like a bad Fifth Dimension cover band and I paid regular visits to both barbers and dentists. And, most importantly, never, not once, have I ever goofed a landing.

Amazingly, about this same time, my dad actually built me, in effect, a life-sized (kid life-sized, anyway) "U Fly-It" as part of an elaborate scheme to get me to go outside and make my mom nervous. It was a pedal-plane of sorts that ran on a wire what seemed like miles up the hill from our house, ending with a carrier-style landing on our back deck. Unfortunately, I don't think any pictures have survived over the years, but I'll ask the family archivist over the upcoming holiday.

After the "U Fly-It", it was a pretty steady progression to the Vertibird, then Star Wars, then Flight Sim, and, finally, girls, where the aforementioned haircuts and dentistry suddenly seemed even more relevant.

Well, perhaps not all of them; I've never been particularly good at hypobole ... But a number of visitors to this edge of the Internet do take a moment to post a comment or send an email. More often than not, it's a race between my undeservedly good friends Owen Hewitt and Francois Dumas to see who can be the first to offer some undeservedly good feedback on whatever I've just published.

Other times it's just a word or several from someone that I don't know, but who happens to have enough time on their hands to say something nice to a stranger. Every once in a while, that something nice ends up being a request for tech support, but those are uncommon and surprisingly polite. (A quick note to anyone who sends feedback or questions via the "send a message" link rather than posting them as a comment - please make sure to include your email address, because most of the time when I try to respond, it's rejected because of your privacy settings.)

And then there are the Spambots, which are exactly the opposite of being as cool as they sound. The term conjures images of great tin behemoths with rounded corners and impossible expiry dates, lumbering through cities leaving only destruction and sticky bits of jellied pork shoulder in their wake. Instead, they're just software, malevolently irritating little snippets of code written by malevolently irritating little snippets of people, repeatedly smearing what we used to think would be called cyberspace with their ineffectual grimy nonsense.

The prolificacy amazes me; I have to wonder if anyone, ever, at all, in the once and future history of words on the Internet, will read an article I've written here, see the comments posted below it, and actually buy some Viagra?

And then there are the corrections, which are often my very favorites. In my post Inattention to Detail, I publicly thanked a reader called Tom who pointed out that I had made a well-intentioned mistake of astronautical import. In reviewing my comments the other day, I came across not one, not three, but two such comments that I'd overlooked. Both of them involve my unwittingly reckless and flippant abuse of the German language, and deserve to be addressed.

The first, from someone called "derMicha", referenced a post in which I asserted that the word helicopter is the same in both English and German. derMicha's comment reads as follows:

"You're wrong about "helicopter". "Helicopter" in german means "Hubschrauber". Sometimes people just use the english word "helicopter" for some reason. More and more the german language gets destroyed by stupid anglicanism."

To derMicha, I offer my standard but sincere entschuldigung, bitte - I was only going by what I heard, but I enjoy your language far too much to participate in its dilution. Believe me, I'd never lazily skate by with helicopter if I knew that I had the opportunity to use a word as much fun to say as Hubschrauber! (And, since I know you're reading this, your Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dr. Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, I am quite certain that derMicha meant Anglicization, not Anglicanism. Mea culpa, Your Grace.)

The second correction came from returning visitor Heiko Bröker. In the past, Heiko has helped keep my translation skills sharp by posting entirely auf Deutsch. I enjoy reading those posts, almost as much as I enjoy not admitting how long it actually takes me to understand them. This time, though, Heiko wrote in English, and caught me in the one of the best kinds of mistakes: the misheard lyric.

From the ubiquitous classics, like Hendrix singing "'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy" and Creedence's timeless "...there's a bathroom on the right", to my own insistence that Mike Hill of the Dave Clark Five was ordering "...a huge egg salad and tall steak soup" in the song The Name of the Place is I Like it Like That, a title nearly as ponderous as this dreadful run-on sentence,  people have been practicing the time-honored tradition of mis-hearing lyrics nearly as long as they've been hearing them.

Anyway, thanks to Heiko, I know now that the song I learned in high school German class (and wrote about here) was not, in fact, Bude Jacke, but Bruder Jakob. When translated, it does seem to make a great deal more sense to sing "Brother Jacob, are you sleeping?" rather than asking the same question of something called a "booth jacket".

My ongoing thanks to people like Tom, derMicha, and Heiko for paying attention, and keeping me honest.

It's never too late to get it right.

And Now ... The Rest of the Story
Heading into Reno, Nevada last September, I was inevitably reminded of a trip I'd taken to the city just about exactly 15 years prior, back in September of 1992. I'd taken off from Geiger International Airport in Spokane, Washington, in a Cessna 172 (grossly over-) loaded with 3 friends and weekend baggage.

There was a girl at the FBO with friendly eyes and a quick laugh that were more interesting to me at the time than the fact that she'd misunderstood my fuel order and given me half as much gas as I'd asked for. The fuel gauges in that airplane were wildly inaccurate and tended to read a half tank high until it had gone down to below about one eighth. I might have seen this when I "dipped" the tank during my preflight, but I was in a hurry - the airplane was about 100 pounds over gross weight, it was getting hot, and my planned route was going to take us across some rough landscape, out of range of any navigational aids, so I wanted as much daylight as possible.

Several hours and at least that many more foolish-young-pilot decisions later, I was lost over desert mountains in the dark, effectively out of gas, and asked to respond to a ghoulish request from Oakland Center to "...state (the number of) souls on board."  There were four souls on board, though I'd have sold mine in a heartbeat for more gas or the sight of an airport.

That trip ended successfully, and the lessons I learned have helped keep me and my passengers safe ever since. This latest trip ended successfully, for me and mine anyway, as well, but, as I've mentioned in a prior post, three pilots were killed at this year's event.  Fitting, if grim reminders from a city known for its gambling that, sometimes, it just comes down to luck. But, while each of these incidents cast their own shadows over the place, it seems a much better idea to break the spell and talk about the rest of it, the parts where nobody died, or even came close.

The Arrival
As I mentioned about eleventeen years ago in the Prologue,  I'd recruited a team of employees, MVP's, and volunteers to help demo the Flight Simulator X:Acceleration expansion pack at the National Championship Air Races. For anyone to whom it isn't terribly old news, Acceleration features the Reno course along with other single-and-multiplayer racing missions. The timing was mostly good, since Acceleration RTM'd (Release To Manufacturing - software-speak for the moment when we take our stuff and give it to the people whose job it is to burn DVD's by the zillions and stuff them into boxes for sale) just a few days after the show, making the Air Races our de facto launch event. I say "mostly good", not because I'm equivocal and like using adverbs as adjectives, but because this also meant that a lot of the team was so busy finishing the product that they couldn't break away to help show it off. In spite of the aforementioned mostly part of the mostly good timing, however, I had strong support from the team, not to mention a great group of volunteers.

15 Characters in Search of an Exit
The ragtag, fugitive band I brought included my boss, Community and Partner Development Manager Brett Schnepf, and Experience Architect Mike Singer, also from Brett's team. Test, Design, Development, Program Management, and Art were each represented by Mike Lambert, Paul Lange and Brandon Seltz, Susan Ashlock, Eric Matteson, and Irvin Gee, respectively. Joining us from elsewhere in the recesses of Microsoft was Milen Lazarov, and rounding things out (by which I mean "doing all the work") were Flight Sim "alums" Roy McMillion and Matt Gamboa, MVPs Brian Gefrich and Norman Blackburn, and homeless drunks pilots and "friends of the team" Dan Sallee and Scott Marshall.

It's amazing to me to see the number of volunteers we get from outside the team (in Milen's case) and outside the company to help support us at events like these. While I have to admit that I'd jump at the chance myself if I were still strictly a Flight Sim customer (as opposed to a Flight Sim customer and employee), I still think we're remarkably lucky to have such a dedicated and passionate group of people willing to come to the rescue. I've been reasonably pleased with, say, the Dyson vacuum cleaner I use at home, but I can't imagine working their booth at a vacuum cleaner convention. Yes, I suppose that it is a terribly unfair comparison, but I'm the one doing the typing so just sit comfortably and leave the awkward analogies to me. 

Messrs. K & H Assure the Public, Their Production Will Be Second to None
I'd also be remiss (not that I remember being miss the first time) if I didn't mention Steve Mallinson.  Steve works for a legitimate-sounding company called The Production Network, and we employ their services on those occasions when A) we have a major event to run and 2) we're behaving intelligently. Anyone who has read much of anything here or seen us at Oshkosh, AOPA expos, and now Reno knows that we have a large booth property, designed and beautifully realized by our friends at Moto Art. Contrary to my long-held assumptions, this booth doesn't just magically appear whenever and wherever we need it, like Billy Mumy wishing things into a cornfield in The Twilight Zone. No, the booth actually has to be stored somewhere. And transported. And maintained, and even upgraded.

That's where Steve and TPN come in. Case in point: When I staggered into an early planning meeting for the Reno  show, unshaven and reeking of Hot Tamales, I blurted something incoherent about decorating the centerpiece "control tower" of our display to look like one of the pylons at Reno. Steve took the idea and ran with it, along with every other random request I had - shelves, coat hooks, improved cooling for the computers, dancing girls, new logo banners, mid-desert wireless Internet - ideas that could only dream of making it to the back of a napkin. You name it (or, actually, I named it) and Steve just made it happen. I only hope we pay him enough.

(Pink and) Blue Meanies in Pepperland
We stayed in a hotel called the Peppermill in downtown Reno. I'm presuming that the place was memorable, since I can still see the subtly understated explosion of pink and blue neon that covered every inch of the decor any time I close my eyes. The rooms were spacious (or at least seemed to be, the mirrors made it difficult to find the edges), and included the wonderfully named Robo-Bar, with a sign right next to the lock that read "no key required". 

Another delightfully anachronistic retro mod con was the Valet-o-Matic, an automated scanner that, through the miracle of an allegedly harmless bombardment of sizzlingly visible laser radiation, summoned guests' cars from the valet, with a functional success rate approaching 30%. If I concentrate, I can still smell the ozone crackling off the back of my hand. Not to be outdone, the human service was courteous and helpful, though it will take a team of economists another several years to make sense out of the 33-page receipt they gave me for my expense report, including a single unspecified charge for exactly one cent. 

The Biggest Little City in the World (and home of the squandered oxymoron)
I've found that the overall feel of the hotel matched that of the city itself, in microcosm. Reno is like a high school kid dressed up for homecoming: he cleans up pretty well, but the tux is rented and a bit out-of-date, he fiddles with his tie and cummerbund a little nervously, and hopes that nobody knows that he's not nearly as sophisticated as he's trying to act. Once you get past the "Shut up - we are just as good as Vegas!" attitude of some of the casinos, though, you'll find that the people are nice and approachable, and the city seems to relax quite a bit.

Entschuldigung, bitte, mein Gambling ist nicht so gut ...
Being an unabashed Ian Fleming aficionado, it was inevitable that I spend at least a short time in a casino, preferably playing James Bond's card game of choice, baccarat (not Texas Hold-Em, as shown in the otherwise fairly faithful Daniel Craig adaptation of Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale). The fact that I really had no idea how to play ultimately worked in my favor as I threw myself on the mercy of the terribly bored looking dealer sitting ruefully alone at the only baccarat table in the Peppermill. The dealer, a kind and slightly maternal blonde woman called Hyde, was a patient instructor, once she gave up trying to convince me that I shouldn't play this game, especially at $25 a hand, until I know how.

As I eventually, learned, the baccarat I played that night is not the same as what features so prominently in the Bond novels. The European variant that Fleming describes in such detail is also known as chemin de fer, and lends itself to complex strategies, careful decision making, and alternating alliances and antagonism among players. The variation found in American casinos is known as punto banco, which is French for "no skill or thinking required." Basically, punto banco is like Blackjack, though the goal is to get to a value of 9, rather than 21, most of the cards aren't worth anything, and the player has no say in any aspect of it except where on the table to pile up the chips before they're removed by the nice lady in the red vest.

It goes like this: First, you place your bet by putting your chips in either the box labeled "Player" or the box labeled "Banker". (It took some time for me to grasp the idea that I wasn't the player, and the dealer wasn't the banker, though the complete absence of anything for me to do other than to try to pick a winner helped drive the point home.) Once you've bet, the dealer deals hands for the player (who isn't you) and the banker (who isn't her) and each hand stands or gets "hit" according to the proscribed rules. One of these two fictional characters wins and the other loses, or sometimes they tie. You, the real player, better described perhaps as an invested observer, win or lose based on who you guessed would win before things got complicated with the introduction of cards and numbers and things. Truly, you don't so much play this game as watch it, and, because it's a 50/50 shot, the equivalent of betting on a coin toss, it has some of the lowest "house advantage" of any casino game. Of course, even when you win, the house gets a commission.

Interestingly enough, I did ultimately win. I started with $100, and walked away with $200. I suppose it was only fitting that I won at a game where you only pretend to participate, since the only reason I played was the fact that I was inspired by a fictional character, usually under cover, no less. Not to mention the fact that I spend my life working on ... a simulation. Before I follow this to its logical conclusion, one which most likely involves some kind of existential breakdown, I'll switch gears and head for a more important bit.

On With The Show
Our presence at this show was the most extensive we've ever had, a total of 22 computers setup in two different locations. The first was in the general admission area, behind the grandstands, and consisted of the Moto Art booth - 8 PC's stuffed in airliner galley carts mated to bits of TBM Avengers with a control-tower-turned-race-pylon in the middle - along with an additional 8 PC's at desks for competition races. The second location was in the racing pit area, only accessible to pilots, crew, event staff, and those members of the general public who either paid an additional fee to get in, or just wandered up when nobody was looking. We took over a substantial portion of a hangar for 6 demo PC's and a bar, and built a VIP lounge under a tent out front. The lounge and the hangar were decorated with Moto Art bits - a radial engine desk, a DC-9 cowling bar, and chromed propellers. Moto Art also brought a set of first-class airliner seats that reclined in case the heat, lack of oxygen, and free-flowing drinks weren't enough to induce napping.

Our two spots were quite a ways apart, and the distance fluctuated wildly with the ambient temperature. It was the shortest at about 11:00 AM, while the  beastly afternoon heat and the spiky morning cold each tried to outdo the other in making the walk seem longer and longer. One of the many side effects of the walk (or at least that's where I have chosen to lay the blame) was my constant and shocked misreading of a sign at a booth selling handdipped corn dogs. Have a look at the picture to get an idea of what I imagined I saw, and thank Photoshop for helping me bring my "dreams" to life.

V is for Visitor
Both locations proved to be well placed, and gave visitors the impression that Microsoft was everywhere, but not in an oppressive "call the DOJ" sort of way. In fact, the reception from the crowd and the treatment we received from the event staff was fantastic. Steady streams of spectators, pilots, and crew got hands-on with Acceleration, on their own or in scheduled races, and the response was excellent. There was a nice mix of "I had no idea I could do this sort of thing on a computer!" and "It's about time you guys added racing!", with only the occasional "When are you guys going to do a version for the Xbox360 / Mac / iPhone?" and the odd "The bartender says I have to talk to you if I want more than two drinks..." A man I called "the guy in the hat, no, not that one, the one who hugged Paul" turned up several times to announce that we'd be fools to charge anything less than $200 per copy.

The multiplayer races that we had at the booth were far more successful than I'd expected, frankly, since most attempts to introduce any kind of organization to the crowded chaos we're used to end in a whimper of cat-herding futility. This time, though, thanks in large part to the crisp efficiency of Mike Singer, (and the booming note of authority lent to his voice by the portable PA we found at Wal-Mart) the races ran smoothly, and proved to be a major attraction. The race winners became minor celebrities, and a number of them have since received spectacular prizes by mail.

A Day at the Races