Exploring realism in flight simulation.
Rudder technique, trim, keyboard shortcuts, VR settings, tidying up the cables, and a home cockpit built out of a sim racing frame.
About me
I’m Ed. I’ve been flight simming since Microsoft Flight Simulator 2.0 in 1984, on an IBM PC with a keyboard, a monitor, and nothing else.
I still remember the thrill of taking off from Meigs Field in Chicago for the first time and flying toward the Hancock Building. Forty years later, I’m still doing more or less the same thing, with better scenery and better hardware.
I’ve spent decades in software engineering, most of them hands-on and most of them at Silicon Valley companies — Adobe, Intuit, and Apple among them. That’s the other half of why this channel exists: I can’t leave a system alone until I understand how it actually works.
I’m also a student pilot, with about twenty hours of instruction accumulated across several years, and I spend a good deal less time in real airplanes than I’d like. I live in North Carolina.
Most of my flying, real and simulated, is in general aviation aircraft. I’ve flown the Cessna 172 in real life and built a sim for it, but my latest fondness is the Cirrus SR20 — I have a highly realistic sim for that one, based on RealSimGear’s Cirrus cockpit.
Lately I’ve been branching out into airliners, and trying to learn the 777 myself is what prompted me to build Albert — an app for flight simulator pilots learning to operate an airliner properly. It’s the first time my engineering and my simming have met.
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ALBERT
Coming Soon…
Albert is an app that runs alongside Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and displays in any browser on your local network.
It flies an airliner through the aircraft’s own autopilot and tells you what it’s doing and why — or sits and coaches while you fly it yourself. I’m writing it myself, which is the day job and the hobby pointed at the same problem. I expect to open the beta in September 2026.