On Thursday, in article bmXsb.333$%b2.8@lakeread05
"mrhct" wrote:

A couple of years ago, my wife's boss's husband called to see if I wanted to
fly up to N.H. with him for lunch. I'd been doing the F.S. deal since MS98
so I jumped at the chance. I was amazed when I got in the cockpit of the
rented 172. I knew what everything was. Tom was using a handheld Garmin GPS,
a really neat unit. I asked why he wasn't using the installed GPS. He said
he really didn't know how it worked, but I did. During the flight up I shot
radials. He asked how the hell I knew all this stuff, I'd never been in a
plane before, I'm sure you all know the answer. So on the flight home, I
took the controls during climbout, flew the radials while he watched on his
Garmin, and flew the approach to the thresh hold. He was shocked and so was
I. Was it the same as F.S.and vice versa? No way. Could I have done what I
did without F.S.? No way. If he had become ill during our flights could I
have kept us from crashing? More than likely! And no it's not a game!

My own suspicion is that one of the big differences is that FS
experience tends to discourage head movement. It's certainly a factor
in such as CFS, and the other flight combat products which try for
realism.

--
David G. Bell -- SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.

"History shows that the Singularity started when Tim Berners-Lee
was bitten by a radioactive spider."