CoolP asked: Lou, what routes did you fly back then, mainly, and what are you flying in the sim now?

We had a talk about those challenging approaches lately. Is the South American stuff, with the hot and high airports, something which attracts you in the sim?
Or are you doing some bush flying besides the heavy metal stuff?

You still wear the white shirt and a tie when you're on the yoke, don't you?

I flew a mix of things, sometimes domestic, sometimes international. I always liked northern Italy in the Milan (MXP) area. If I had the money, that's where I would live, up on the lakes. I also enjoyed flying to the Caribbean. Another fun destination was Stockholm. When you fly in the high latitudes you often see the aurora, but sometimes going to this far north you are even north of the display itself. Very cool indeed.

The aurora remind you why GPS is a secondary nav system. Many times during the year a large solar flare would leave the sun and sometimes within hours the solar wind would impact the magnetosphere as a solar storm. We would actually get an emergency message from our dispatch to divert to a lower latitude to avoid the radiation from the solar particles. Also, the GPS system facing the sun would be impacted by a large storm and sometimes shut down many of the satellites for a period of time. That is why inertial is the primary system for commercial flight.

On the sim I fly all kinds of stuff. I enjoy landing on the carrier with the FA-18 in IMC, or sometimes flying an engine out approach in the CS-727, or with ORBX NA Blue and the A2A cub hopping around from field to field up in Washington state. The CS 707 is also fun to fly using the old doppler nav system and shooting an ILS in low weather into Paris or Berlin or a host of cities around the world. Then I start up the 757 a go out and shoot some auto lands, just like the old days!  ;)

My wife sometimes brings me a crew meal for those long flights!  ;D

No tie, no hat - please, I had enough of that thank you.  8-)

Lou