Inside the metal-jacketed minds of flight-sim heads.
I am the world's forgotten boy,
the one who searches to destroy....
- Iggy Pop
You're a thirtysomething guy, you're in the garage untangling the Weber from the fishing gear and your kid's obsolete roller skates, preparing for another in an endless series of backyard barbecues. You're gonna baste; you're gonna spread red sauce on meat.
Suddenly your nostrils flare as you hear the drone of an Air Force jet in the distance. You gaze past your '93 Ford Taurus, out the garage window at a tiny segment of horizon hidden away in the blunt suburban skyline.
The enemy is out there; the kill is waiting.
And you want to be out in the sky, hunting, searching, destroying. You want to bring the meat home dripping red in your grimy, calloused fingers.
Hormones secrete; your eyes dilate; your nostrils flare; the hair on the back of your neck stands up. The Weber drops from your manicured hands with a clang, and you run inside to your PC and your flight-sim software.
There's just time for a kill.
You got your five basic flight-sim game packages; you got your low-authenticity simulations like Sega CD's Tomcat Alley; you got your PC games like Blue Max; you got your network games like Spectrum HoloByte's MiG-29, ("Go head to head against Falcon 3.0 with up to six players!"); you got your special hardware-fetishized, traffic-control-tower-linked miniature amusement parks like Fightertown; you got your elaborate online games like Air Warrior - which just might be the wave of the future in more ways than one.
The wave rolls like this: Jonathan Baron, like most flight-sim professionals, started as a gamer, a hobbyist. He got involved in helping a new online flight-sim outfit, Air Warrior, get off the ground - and he never quite landed. What with work and after-work play, he lives a hell of a lot of his life gunning in online simulations.
He's digitally reliving the good part of World War II, and - What? You doubt there was any good part to World War II, aside from liberating the concentration camps? Mostly you're right. But a surviving fighter pilot prefers to think about, say, the one-half of 1 percent of the time he was in the air, when he was in complete command of his machine, when it was an extension of his body, when he was closing in on an enemy in battle (because the enemy's in his sights from above and behind and he knows the enemy's going to die and he's going to live). When he wins, he heads triumphantly home, and he feels good.
One-half of 1 percent, maybe? But that's all a pilot will want to remember, except for that time he got drunk with the Irish girl, on leave in Belfast, and he banged her in the cemetery on the graves of her ancestors.
That half percent of a fighter pilot's flight time is what most flight-sim junkies are patrolling for, time and time again. Sure there's the fun of the simulation - of taking off and landing skillfully. And it requires skill - the more realistic the game the more skill it requires. And there are male bonding rewards in the process; though, if you're not on a network, some of it is computer-simulated male bonding, complete with voice-overs.
But the bottom line is the kill.
"It could seem unbelievably strange to an outsider," Baron says. "Most of our clients are devotees of a rather esoteric pastime. They're often very, very different kinds of people. But that hunger unites them."
Air Warrior is accessible at 2400 or 9600 baud: up to a hundred people and more around the world can fly together in onscreen flight sim - they're now running a scenario that simulates the 1940 Battle of Britain, with a brain-numbing variety of specialized personnel involved because of the authentically reproduced wide scale of the thing, in its various World War II battle sectors.
Air Warrior has been around since '86, when it was created by Kelton Flinn. Flinn has a PhD in Applied Mathematics, but his heart is in flying over Europe in a Spitfire; he realized his air-combat fetish digitally as vice president of R&D for Air Warrior's source company, the Kesmai Corporation, a division, oddly enough, of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation of America. Robert Shaw wrote the introduction to the manual; Shaw, an active Air Warrior player and real-life air-combat vet - and the author of the military press classic Fighter Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering - serves as a Kesmai consultant. The fact is, the better flight-sim games, on and offline, are to some extent grounded in real experiences.
Air Warrior is available on GEnie for a mere US$3 an hour (non-primetime); on Delphi you can play 20 hours for a negligible fee and get a free downloadable version of the software. There's also a retail version, published by Gametek for $55, which has stand-alone gameplay and modem-to-modem capability. Gametek's CD-ROM version has actual World War II gun camera footage and Spitfire pilot voice-overs. Talk about obsessive authenticity!
Of course, you don't risk death in flight sim. And if you're a pilot - and lots of real pilots get into flight sim - you can use all of those maneuvers you wouldn't dare to use in real flight. You aren't tied to those stale old military forms and training scenarios. You can hot dog like a son of a bitch.
Mostly, flight sim is for men - patient, dogged, persistent men willing to learn, then learn some more; to practice until their wives want to smash their PCs with ball-peen hammers.
Besides all the logging on and background aircraft knowledge and practice with elaborate joysticks (for dogged, persistent men willing to learn, the CH FlightStick is recommended for beginners), the flight-sim flying process requires "threedee reasoning" - something kids aren't very good at, maybe just for developmental reasons. If you're one of the adults who is good at it, then maybe you're wired into some ancestral skill left over from our hunting and nomadic stage - a skill that helped your ancestors draw a bow-and-arrow bead on a flying goose and then find their way back through the maze of bogs to that comfortable mud hut.
The interest in air combat is particularly strong in Britain and the US. In fact, the breadth and intensity of that interest amazed even a World War II general from the Luftwaffe, Adolf Galland.
Jonathan Baron tells me, "We have a squadron calling in to us from Tokyo and Germany" - to go online with Air Warrior. Baron says people telnet in through Delphi, people from all over the world. They're planning regular events pitting one country against another.
Are the Germans flying Junkers, the Japanese flying Zeros, the Americans flying Mustangs against one another, online? Should we be invading Haiti online?
I was a tail gunner on a World War II bomber.
Playing Air Warrior. The Battle of the Canal Front, 1942, along the English Channel. I'm in the upper aft turret, tail gunner of a bomber called Witch's Tit; the pilot's handle is Hitech. One of the best three pilots online, someone tells me. Our B-25 Mitchell, guarded by Spitfires, is on a bombing run, wreaking havoc on German-occupied French airfields, defended by Focke Wulf 190s. My wife, Micky, is my co-gunner - she's doing the keyboard stuff, turning the turret, using radio; I've got the joystick with its trigger.
The landscape scrolls slowly by in abstract simplicity, the tilt changing with the axis of the plane. The pace seems real enough; it takes a long time to get to the target area, a long time to engage. Then it's all over quickly. Like real life: tedium and then hellish flurry.
I report our heading, reading out from my dials, over the "radio" - typed out messages along the bottom of the screen. On it you hear intermittent banter, bonhomie, advisements; I hit F1 now and then to check the aerial charts and the radarscope. The trip through this virtual landscape is punctuated by the sounds of explosions; the radio reports someone shot down. No action yet for us, though we can see friendly Spitfires (looking like real Spitfires) through the high-rez reproduction of the interior of the turret, each plane seen representing another Air Warrior player in some other part of the country, the world. (One guy is playing from Britain.)
Hitech advises me to be watchful now, to be sure to use the icon indicators - red icons moving on the top of the screen for friendlies, blue for enemy - to help me (the amateur) ID bad guys. Don't commit friendly fire. Use the numbers flashing by at the right to show the third dimension, depth, distance in yards. Don't fire till within 600 yards.
Then we're under attack. Very sudden. Blue blips and then the outlines of Focke Wulfs tilting, angling toward us from above. A flash of red light and a thud as we're hit. We're not shot down yet and - Micky turning the turret - I track the sighting brackets over the jiggling, veering shape of the enemy fighter. Difficult to keep it in the sights. Then I fire. Miss. Track again. Fire. Smoke and flame blooms on it - it's going down - but now a bevy of others attack. We're hit, we're hit again. Red flash. Red screen. Fade to black.
We've been shot down. We're back in the "conference room" for the debriefing. We're a dead but chatty bunch of flyers.
And for a dead guy, I'm feeling stoked.
Members of the World War II generation have difficulty suspending their disbelief over games like Air Warrior. "Where's my air fuel mixture?" they ask, looking at the simulated cockpits and controls.
Baron wants to "get to the point where you're charging your magneto and you're checking your air-fuel mixture and you're checking your flaps and everything you'd have to do." That seems to be the unspoken motto of the digital gaming industry: make the unreal real. Or anyway, as real as possible.
What'll help, if you're an incipient flight-sim head, is taking the keyboard out of the picture as much as possible and replacing it with joysticks and cockpits. Keyboards take you out of the simulation, see. And you can get just as many cockpit accessories as you can afford. As we'll see, you can get realer and realer. Air Warrior has an online training academy - a seven-week course to combat "infant mortality" (newbies getting creamed). Graduates get invited into squadrons, which are fundamental to the game.
Air Warrior was the first flight-sim game to have accelerated stalls, buffeting, blackouts, everything by the book. "We were terrified," Baron says, "because we thought no one would want to go to that much trouble." Au contraire: it was a huge success. "People will put up with enormous amounts of agonizing if they believe it's real," Baron says. The gaming publications were critical, at first, sniping, This isn't an adventure, it's a job. But authenticity won the battle. About 7,000 people play Air Warrior in the US alone. And hundreds of thousands of people all over the world play all sorts of different kinds of elaborate flight sim games.
No one seems to know how flight sim got from its original military application to games - or at least not precisely. Baron thinks it's an example of simultaneous development, with gamesters learning from military and vice versa. Mustang on the Mac was one of the first, in the early '80s, and the military has incorporated elements of it in its own training. Spectrum HoloByte had a deal to develop tabletop flight sim for the military and applied some of the technology to games.
Falcon, which uses modern aircraft, is one of the top PC flight-sim games. But the Falcon's "flight model" - the overall profile of realism - is not as authentic as some.
How authentic are the players?
"You get a lot of swell-headed jerks who behave the way they think real fighter pilots behave, who taunt you," Baron says. But a lot of friendships are formed in the squadrons too, and there are admirable people to befriend out there in the digital skies. "You really have to have both talent and dedication to reach the highest levels of this game," Baron says.
You want to trace the arc? Just braille the high points:
In the early '80s there was Mustang. Primitive stick-figure stuff, full of bugs. The original Falcon came about as a direct graft from Spectrum HoloByte's military flight-sim work. There was Accolade's Ace of Aces; then around '89, quality jumped with.... (Am I sounding like I know shit about this? I'm no sim-head. But I can feel the pull. I shall resist. But boys, I understand. I too would like to hunt and kill.)
It's accelerated evolution: in a remarkably short time the games developed to higher rez, more color, sharper graphics, faster response, more sound, and greater authenticity. Still, most games, like Falcon and Air Warrior, have limited realism in the landscape and action parts of the visual; the image tends to be a little abstract, under-textured, geometrical. But it's real enough so you can create the rest of the scene in your head if you have a little imagination. The views of the cockpit and the exterior of one's own plane can be quite elaborately detailed, and the plane's response - the most important element for many players - is ever more acute.
Numerous World War I air-combat sims came in 1990: Blue Max from Three-Sixty Pacific, including both the dogfighting mode and a strategy game in which you plot sorties; MicroProse's Knights of the Sky, which broke the modem barrier; and Red Baron from Dynamix, which was more technically accurate (a critical factor).
As the games came, they progressed through 20th-century air-combat history, with Lucasfilm Games bringing out Battlehawks 1942, simulating four air battles from the Pacific and containing more than 40 missions. A year later Lucasfilm brought out Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain. It was a huge success. And the company didn't overlook the average air-combat nut's fascination with the Luftwaffe, delivering Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, as well.
(You get the impression, hanging with sim heads, that some of them would cheerfully take a ride back in time and sign up for the Luftwaffe, given the chance. Not that they're Nazis - they just love the planes, the uniforms, the workmanship, and perhaps the Luftwaffe's grim implacability. It's the very apotheosis of the modern human's hunting instinct ... I vill go und I vill kill fur mein Führer.)
MicroProse brought out its own high quality World War II sims. In 1992, Dynamix's Aces of the Pacific allowed you a variety of missions and made it possible to be a Japanese or American pilot; maybe because of its unusually realistic dogfighting graphics it was a bestseller.
Skipping the Korean combat and going right to Vietnam, Three-Sixty Pacific brought out Thunder Ridge, in which you basically bomb the living hell out of the Vietnamese. Lovely. A new extreme in symbolic digital dehumanization.
Spectrum HoloByte's Flight of the Intruder put players in A-6 Intruders and F-4 Phantoms. It featured polygon graphics and sound-card support. A big stride in realistic experience.
Air-combat sim is rockin' out today. Falcon's updated versions feature detailed cockpit instrumentation, and all of it means something. Then there's MicroProse's Strike Eagle sequels and its F-19 Stealth Fighter.
One of the best introductory flight-sim games is Electronic Arts's Chuck Yeager's Air Combat. Your instruction comes from General Yeager himself. (I wonder what ol' Chuck really thinks about this stuff? He probably tries not to think about it and just kisses those royalties checks.)
In LucasArts's X-Wing, we jump into the future with startlingly detailed flight sim in outer space.
You wanna play this stuff? Are you insanely driven? The learning curve is steep. But Wired talked me into this. So me, poor dimwitted right-brained John Shirley, I get out Falcon 3.0. I'm supposed to interpret this head-up display and cockpit with its G-force indicator, flight-path marker, pitch ladder, altitude scale, air-speed scale, HUD mode indicator, RPM indicator, five-mile radar ranging scale, distance to way-point indicator, altitude indicator, flare and chaff indicators, AOA indicator. Where's my male hardware fetishism when I need it? It's not kicking in.
Dip into a flight-sim specialty magazine, Intercept: "The MiG's weaknesses are the lack of FBW control (which increases your workload), the lack of a G limiter.... Strengths are its two RD-33 turbofans (each rated at 11,240 pounds of thrust at full military power) ... its 'RST system which doesn't register on the target's TWI, the HMS sighting system."
Who gets this far into this stuff?
Well, Neil Johnston, for one.
Neil Johnston, an early-middle-aged guy who works at Spectrum HoloByte, overseeing flight-sim games, has been in the flight-sim scene for 20 years. He used to do SubLogic flight sim on Apple II as a lad. He used to go into the computer store and play till the salesmen kicked him out. He was in Airforce Jr. ROTC, but couldn't fly because his eyes were so bad he'd couldn't hit the broad side of a barnstorm. He lived up there anyway, in his imagination. He was into books and movies about air war. Into, as he told me over lunch, "the whole 'Knights of the Air' mythos."
He figures there are from 80,000 to 150,000 "hard-core" flight-sim nuts. But Falcon has sold 700,000 copies to wannabes. There'd be more, but it costs between 600 and 800 bucks in online time to get good and involved.
It's the appeal of 3-D computer space; it's a love of flying, a love of competition - that one especially - and under the table, Johnston allows, it's all based on "I'm tougher than you" posturing. Fantasy. Hunting instinct.
And, Johnston tells me, a chance to "relax in rowdyism" - highly technical, gearhead, wirehead rowdyism - is an important factor. Not just anybody's qualified. You don't need to be a pilot - most sim heads aren't - but you do need a "visceral understanding of the physics of flight."
Do women get into it? Not many, Johnston says. He figures that women go in for certain games, like Tetris, where you are putting something together, gathering, repairing.
Men go for hunting something down and blowing it apart.
That, of course, is the basic payoff in lots of kill games, but flight sim buries its primeval engines of motivation under layers of "flight modeling" authenticity and a sort of psychological actualizing of military trivia.
The youngest players, says Johnston, who's done his market research, tend to be grad students blowing off steam; the largest group of players are men in their 30s and 40s, with significant discretionary income. Is this the game of prosperous Young Republicans?
As for that, Johnston recommends I check out the 510th Tactical Fighter Wing.
"Are you going to cast us as paramilitary wannabes, drinking and muttering racist and sexist comments while glorifying death and military hardware?" one guy in the 510th jokingly asks. Only he's not entirely joking; he's a little nervous about being ridiculed.
The 510th Tactical Fighter Wing, based in the San Francisco Bay area, is a flight-sim user group that gets together physically and cyberspacially to go on missions.
Bryce Whitlock, a professional guy from the suburbs, Weber jockey and garage scout, is seriously into the 510th - hell, he was its organizer. Sometimes the 510th plays together online, at home, with a headset-mike telephone connection and ThrustMaster rudder control system. These guys go on some serious missions together. They're up there in person - in a way.
Or in, at least, the Dunfey Hotel, in San Mateo, California. The place looks like a simulated Germanic castle, a cheaper Disneyland version of one of those World War II-movie Nazi-commandeered mountain mansions assaulted by Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. Maybe the Dunfey was unconsciously chosen for its Luftwaffe resonance.
Whitlock and the other club members have rented a slightly undersized conference room at the Dunfey, where they've set up a dozen or so PCs, all of them somehow wired together. A few of them are Pentiums, and the lads joke that they have so much hard drive, their electromagnetics will make you sterile. When I first get there most everything is set up but no one is quite off the ground. (One guy with a Pentium has a "Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe" mousepad.)
A few of them are pilots, but most of them have sublimated their flying lust into flight sim. They're all short-haired, middle-class white guys, except the treasurer, who is black. A few are young, but most are in their 30s or early 40s. (That must have something to do with the flight-sim equation: it's a restless age for a man. He's not sure he's bringing home the kill along with the paycheck.)
"Basically we're a bunch of grown men - " one begins.
" - trying to get away from our wives!" another breaks in.
" - playing with toys," finishes the first.
You already knew that. And you can imagine it just as it is: they're constantly wisecracking, as they set up and play. "Only we can fly an F-16 with a beer in one hand!" The beer flows as liberally as the jokes, but at certain moments you can see through the screen of humor to see how seriously they take it - you can see it in their eyes, in the dewy foreheads and the hunched shoulders and bared teeth as they struggle to escape enemy fire and to drop bombs.... And you can see it in the facts, as you consider how much time all this takes out of their lives. They'll be here all day today - and that's nothing compared to the weekly PC time at home. How many flight-sim widows are twitching away at Tetris, out there - or in some Holiday Inn with the grocery boy - while their husbands are grappling with joysticks and straddling digital airplanes?
To one side, half the wall is covered with an enormous pilot's chart. An authentic Tactical Pilotage Chart for the area of the Middle East where today's air/ground battles will be fought. Most of the lines on the chart, under its mylar sheath with more lines newly penned on it, are utterly arcane to me.
It takes four hours to really get this mission off the ground today.
How do we determine who gets which plane?
I dunno.
And here's official aeronautic phraseology, from one pilot to another in the 510th, on a trial mission: "Hey, whatcha do that for?"
The 510th has been going for a couple of years. They're already bored with their basic flight-sim tool, the Falcon 3.0, and looking for variations. Three years, they tell me, is old for a game. They play Falcon because it's a "network" game they can all play together, but it's basically outmoded as flight sim. And bugs in the software make it go down at least 20 percent of the time on network.
This time, they've edited the game with a "special software" to make it possible for them to introduce more elements from outside the normal programming. The uncertainty is half the fun, and the purveyors of uncertainty are two guys - The Generals - who are in charge of the battle design. One of these is an intellectual bear of a guy, name of DiRicco. The other is Martin "Moggy" Morris, a slender, detail-oriented Brit who used to work on the Rolls Royce Harrier engines. Not a pilot, he admits to me he'd probably get airsick in a real fighter plane.
"Set-up for the mission is the hardest part," Whitlock explains sheepishly, as set-up goes on and on, adding that much of it is incurred by the program itself. In charge of the mainframe that sets up the missions and all its dangers for the others, the generals are dressed in pilot's jumpsuits replete with 510th patches. They're sending the fighters, at the rows of PCs crammed into the little room, on a mission to rescue Israel from the Warsaw Pact, some arm of which is apparently Jordan, Egypt, and Syria moving against the Jewish homeland. On the way Kuwait City has to be taken back - then they must move against Iraqi and Iranian tank positions on the ground (never mind the improbability of Iran and Iraq working together or Egypt working with any of these people against Israel....) The 510th is attacking tanks and installations, attacking ground troops, flying against Migs that support tanks.
Strange thing is, Moggy and DiRicco (like a couple of names from yet another World War II movie) are playing both the Allies' generals on this mission and their enemies. They're sending in the bad guys as well as the good guys. "We may slip them some bad intelligence too - they don't know," Moggy tells me with a wink.
Compare it to the Dungeon Master in Dungeons & Dragons, they suggest (I've never played D&D but all these flight-sim guys seem to know it). Like the Dungeon Master, the generals create a fun fight scenario.
"These marked-off zones," DiRicco tells me, indicating the map, "are actual kill zones in the game and as they fly over them we activate those kill zones. The guys have to be smart enough to figure out what they want to go around and what they don't."
The generals have the power to decide what planes you get to go up in - and since each plane has its distinctive simulated capabilities, that's critical. The F-16 is the standard. The most popular one after that is the
F15, a "multirole" aircraft. The ease of flying in the virtual world of the game corresponds to how easy the plane is to fly in real life; the British Tornados are nimble but only carry 12 bombs. If you're in a F-117, it flies "like a pig" but carries five times as many bombs.
The room is getting hot and muggy as the mission gets seriously underway. They're all wearing headsets, working with elaborate joysticks; there are special sound effects on the headsets, different squawks for different radar configurations, incoming fire, radio com, "lock noises" to warn when friend or foe has locked onto you.
Some of the 510th are going on a SEAD (Suppress Enemy Air Defense) mission, hunting SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles). They're going to protect their compatriots who've gone on bombing runs.
Follow me ... something over here ... I'm heading 151 ... don't forget you have to be under 300 knots ... who's locking me?! I'm locking someone!
Getting locked on by a friendly can be a problem - Moggy tells me about a real-life case, where a Mig-29 locked on one of his own planes, and his cannon was on "auto" and BOOOM! Same thing can happen in the game, if you're not careful.
We believe there's SAM activity in this area so be careful ... I'm gonna climb to 12,000 feet ... Shit, I just got pegged by a Triple A ... we're getting hammered, we're getting hammered! ... you got any more pretzels?
At the debriefing, Whitlock shakes his head. "It's amazing how much we simulate real life without knowing it till later...."
At home, many of the boys of the 510th have ThrustMaster "home cockpits." This is how the ThrustMaster brochure describes them: "Scaled to duplicate the structure of a real fighter jet, you'll feel the excitement of battle like never before. Why play games when you can experience reality?"
The Basic Cockpit structure - something you climb into like one of those elaborate video-arcade games - is made of "medium density fiber board and shipped ready to assemble." The external shell is fiberglass with "appropriate decals." The basic unit costs $695; the switch kit and controller is another $449; the external shell, boys, is an ass-kickin' $975.
Or you could just go to Fightertown.
You'll find it in a big, big old hangarlike building in Lake Forest, California, south of LA. Fightertown may be the current apex of flight-sim experience. This is as real as it gets so far.
Inside the building, past the cashier and Tactical Planning room and the office and The Officers Club (restaurant and bar), the glass doors take you into the hangars, where you find startlingly realistic, lifesize fiberglass and metal cockpits, detailed and cherried out to look like the planes and complete with, in some cases, the sleek nose of the plane and a canopy that closes over your head. Most Fightertown aficionados wear helmets and flight suits with patches. Typically, they come in with dark aviator glasses and shiny black shoes. There's a manly locker room to change in.
A former Marine pilot and Pac fleet officer, Gary "Six Gun" Woods runs the place, along with Dave Kinney, the CEO, also a former Marine. Kinney grew up without parents from age 14, lived in a basement through high school, getting through by dreaming of flying a jet. He joined the Marines, but because of his less-than-perfect vision was unable to pursue his dream of piloting a jet. So now he does it virtually. (There are a lot of myopic top guns flying aviation cyberspace.)
Fightertown was grown from a bean. But the place is making money now: they're planning on building another in Santa Monica.
They use something called Fighternet to set up for local networking missions - they're waiting for better phone transmissions and the existence of other sites to really realize the remote network gaming potential. In the meantime, you can climb into the state-of-the-art simulated cockpits here at Fightertown.
Fightertown is always upgrading software. And the stuff is painfully sophisticated, depending on your level of mission. I'm able to go on the first level, the toddler mission - but there are people who can pass through 11 "gates" of flight tests to qualify for a full network mission with a squadron. Takes months of training to go on a squadron around here - maybe a year or two.
Even so, the place is user-friendly enough that even a right-brain dimwit like me can fly a solo mission. And I get a major buzz doing it. For the lower levels of the experience - which were impressively real to me - Kinney and friends wanted to created something that was as fun as it was authentic. "We wanted to keep an eye on the experience you're trying to achieve and not get lost in the distractions of hardware," Kinney says. The hardware should enhance, not distract.
And don't make a big deal of crashes. If they crash, get 'em up in the air again.
The Fightertown simulators are sleek and sexier looking than military simulators, with their glimmering noses and their bubble cockpits. In the dimly lit room, their lines stream into the shadows. You almost see the rest of the plane there, ready to take to the air and kick some Migs in the teeth.
What did I just say? What's happening?
Am I becoming ... a flight-sim head?
Anybody got a number for the 12-step group?
Someone stop me.
They strap me into an F-117 Stealth fighter sim, state-of-the-art, with moveable cockpit. Just putting on the vest, the straps, the realistic helmet with working headset, and lowering the hatch so I'm snug in my own little world of military symbolism, that alone gets me off. Now the fetishism kicks in.
They gave me a video briefing, showing me how to control the stick by looking at the heads-up display, moving "the diamond" on the screen. You got to "think in 3-D." You got to control the center of gravity of the plane, it seems. Drive a car, it's only two-dimensional travel; fly a plane, it's three-dimensional. You don't turn a corner, you become a corner - the whole plane must change its axis in space for you to turn and remain in control. I find if I pull back and to the side as I turn, center the guidance diamond as I'm told, don't jerk the stick, don't think about it too much, and rely on some mysterious inner wiring that seems to be there in my head, I can do it. I'm flying!
Specifically, I'm taking off from an aircraft carrier. And I've got the best cockpit in the place - it moves physically, in amazing coherence with what's happening on the flight-sim screen in front of me. The response of cockpit motion to image is remarkably refined. This is Fightertown's own proprietary platform.
There's all kinds of techy-tacky stuff I'm required to do in the cockpit, to give me a feeling of real interaction with the hardware: I've got to lower my tailhook when I'm landing, I've got to engage and disengage radar, release speed brakes, move flaps up and down, landing gear down for approach to carrier, throw this switch and that ... and best of all, I've got to talk to the tower on my headset. They have a tower where there's a guy who sees what I see on my screen, and he's guiding me, telling me how to take off and land, bring my nose up, go to heading 151 (going to headings digitally is a very authentic feeling and inexplicably exciting), increase altitude, reduce speed to 350 knots, report in.
Somehow voice contact with the tower closes the circle of illusion. There's a jet engine sound too, and you can almost smell the fuel.
I was pretty good at flying, but not so good at firing missiles at ground targets. That requires a little more 3-D than I've got, because the process, here, is a lot more authentic than on, say, Sega's Tomcat Alley. (The latter is, though, maybe the best introductory game for those who want the flight-sim feel but don't want to climb too much learning curve.)
Getting into position to fire the missile, I tended to overmove the stick because ... because ... because of the kill excitement, I guess. I got all tense with it.
Iron Maiden's lead singer loves this place, I'm told. And as I get out of the cockpit, adrenaline still singing, I seem to hear an old Blue Oyster Cult song, "ME-262" about a German fighter plane going up to shoot down English bombers headed for Berlin: These bombers are ripe ... like some heavy metal fruit ... my great silver slugs are eager to feed ... I can't fail, no not now ... For if these Englishmen live then I might die.
If they live, then I might die....
There's no way I'm going to go to a flight school; the learning curve, for me, is too steep. Haven't got the time, Holmes.
But I'll be back here, to Fightertown, all right. It wasn't just the sense of having a living weapon under my hands....
I really feel like I flew.
I tell you, I flew!
