I totally agree with Matt's comments!

When they see Condor, the first question out of most people's mouths
is "Does it have my home airport?"

But I've come to the conclusion that the LAST thing you want to do in
Condor is fly your home airport! It will never match the real life
location 100%, and changes to the real-life landscape over time won't
be reflected in the computer. Plus, it will encourage people to fly
via ground-references; which most instructors and books DIRECTLY
caution against doing!

Learning to fly the traffic pattern by launching from a bunch of
"foreign" airfields will teach pilots to use visual angles like we're
all supposed to. Its much easier to do this with a student in Condor,
than to actually take them to a couple of different airfields in real
life - illustrating another great way in which Condor is a valuable
learning tool.

I stopped flying Condor after I got my glider endorsement (I was
already a PPL SEL pilot). But then after I read all of the various
Cross-country books and manuals I returned to Condor and found it to
be a GREAT tool for learning how to safely stretch a glide (and find
out what happens when that doesn't work out), how to figure out which
clouds or markers to go for, how to set a goal and work towards it,
and how to center thermals (Condor thermals are a little more stable /
ideal than in real life - but that consistency actually makes for
really good practice at centering thermals if you set the strength to
be weak and the width to be moderate or narrow. If you can keep the
vario steady throughout an entire circle, you know you've nailed
it).

I recently discovered how much fun the Speedbattle tasks are, and how
flying these tasks online can really help my real-life flying. In our
real-life club we deal with weak weather conditions and so XC flying
is very casual - we launch and then see what conditions will permit,
and work our way slowly along from marker to marker. It was very easy
for me to never get far from the airfield as a result. With a pre-
determined Goal, the Speedbattle tasks and other online competitions
FORCE you to head out on course and make the most of what you can
find. Being on the computer, there's no risk to being daring and
trying different techniques. And Speedbattle lets you try each task 5
times - so you can fly it in different ways and see how the outcome
varies based on your tactics and risk-level. There are benefits to
flying these online tasks even if nobody else is logged into the
Speedbattle servers and you fly it solo.

This practice has fed back into my real-life flying and made me a
better cross-country pilot. I'm still SLOW in my real-life flying;
but I'm making better distances and having more fun! I just posted my
first real-life flight to the OLC, in fact. Its not too impressive on
the surface, but considering that I was dealing with 3000 to 4000 foot
cloudbases and only ~4 knot lift, I'm pretty happy with the flight:
http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0...Id=-1550701213

Take care,

--Noel