Welcome To The PRE-Flight Forum

[xxmikexx]

I’ve had a life-long interest in radio-controlled model aircraft (R/C) but I’ve never done anything about it in the real world other than to a) continue to read R/C magazines, and b) occasionally visit, as an observer, an R/C club based in nearby Boulder, Colorado. Nevertheless I’ve been aware of the PRE-Flight simulator of R/C aircraft for several years though I didn't buy it until yesterday, 28 July 2010. (From this point on I'll refer to PRE-Flight as PF.)

 

What prompted me to finally act was the PF developer’s announcement of his Gee Bee Model R racer addon. You can read about it here, https://www.flightsim.com/main/notams10/pref0728.htm. This is just one in a long line of free addon simulated R/C aircraft created by the PF developer.

 

Last night I bought the download version of the product from the Pilot Shop, https://www.fspilotshop.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=226&products_id=1721. In spite of minor product problems I was so delighted with it, and so convinced that other people will want to work with it, that this morning I asked webmaster Nels Anderson if we could have a forum dedicated to this unique product. He agreed, and here we are in that brand new forum.

 

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The product isn't perfect -- no product is -- and making it work with a joystick sometimes will take some hacking, and addon aircraft must be installed by hand (it's very easy). Those things said, if you want a program that will teach you how to fly R/C model aircraft from the simplest to the most advanced, PRE-Flight is for you. Not only does it work with joystick+keyboard, if you buy a certain expansion module from the developer you'll be able to drive PRE-Flight using actual honest-to-goodness real R/C transmitters, as long as they have USB capability.

 

This means that PRE-Flight solves the long-standing problem of learning to fly R/C without having an unaffordable series of crashes. In the past, a beginner usually would partner with an experienced R/C flyer. Today, after using PRE-Flight for a while, you would be able to solo with confidence on your initial flight in the real world.

 

A free PF demo is available at the developer's website, http://www.preflightsim.com/. (I have not used the demo and don't know anything about it.) The developer's own free downloadable aircraft also are available at that site. While you can purchase the base system at this site, I hope that you'll instead buy it from the FS Pilot Shop, see the link above, since this will help support FlightSim.com while also helping support the PF developer.

 

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All those things said about R/C, PF today goes beyond basic R/C simulation. Scenery addons are available, and a free one from the developer models a small region on the surface of [a moon of Saturn?]. Similarly, one of the free "aircraft" available is a simulation of the Apollo program Lunar Lander.

 

Furthermore, if you like hand flying, PRE-Flight presents a challenging but fun flight simulation environment even if, like me, you have no plans to do R/C in the real world. Trust me, if you intend to land on the same "runway" you took off from, this is usually more difficult than in FS because in PRE-Flight