David Lewis FS Aircraft Hangar

Let me explain. There are several things going on here. The resolution of the instrument is important, as you'll realise if you go back to flying in 320x200 some time. When you look up from the panel and out through the window, you can see a lot of objects made of flat sheets wrapped up with wallpaper (bitmaps). Better resolution means you see the fine print of the wallpaper more clearly, but the thing that gives that real sense of travel, of interest, and above all of SPEED is the number of separate objects that make up the terrain.

It's the difference between a photo of a forest and a lot of separate trees. From 10,000' you can't tell the difference, and the photo gives a better frame rate. But at 250' when you're looking for a landing site in your Piper Cub or helicopter there's all the difference in the world.

For every pixel on the screen that gets drawn, the processor has to do some work. To my way of looking, I'd be as happy to step back down to 640 pixels wide (that's a quartrer the number of dots), if it meant I could see four times the number of objects.

Now that's what I'd call even more real.

I'm 35 years old, and live in Portsmouth, England. My wife Paula takes good care of me and our daughter Amy. Amy is five years old, and has told me that if she sees me buy another aeroplane book she will throw it in the bin.

Mostly I fly the Microsoft Flight Simulator (FS5.1 and FS98), or Aces Over Europe. Jet/missile simulators tend not to appeal to me much. My prefered flight instrument is the mark 1 eyeball. I also love being able to extend the virtual world with new aircraft, scenery, and so on.

The best kind of flying for me is low and slow, admiring the scenery. There's just too little scenery available that's really appealing from 1000' AGL. Fast and low could be even more exciting with the right scenery.

I build planes (you may have noticed) and don't mind doing it the hard way (without Flight Shop) if it lets me do something neat like adding moving parts.

I fly with Noble Air (Heathrow hub, senior flight captain 1062G). Just lately I've started writing for Full Throttle magazine.

Home-grade flight simulation has come on in leaps and bounds. Only ten years ago I was staring at wire-frame graphics in black-and-white (and was impressed), and now I get to gripe about full-colour photographic scenery. Who knows what we'll see in another ten years?

I work for IBM, but this website is not work, and the views expressed in these pages are my own, not IBM's.