Air Osama

For 10 years, "Microsoft Flight Simulator's" motto has been "As real as it gets," and anyone who hasn't seen the game lately might be surprised at how real it has gotten. Gone are the days when the software was good only for a trip around the traffic pattern in a Cessna seemingly made of Legos; users now fly all over the virtual world in everything from light planes to helicopters and jets, viewing detailed cities and landscapes, encountering variable weather, and employing true-to-life navigation systems en route.

A new version of the program, due out this month, is packaged on four CDs and contains more than 5 million lines of programming code. An estimated 7 million people use "Flight Simulator." It is the bestselling PC game of all time. "There's something about flight that resonates well with a lot of people," says Darryl Saunders, a Microsoft product marketing manager for simulations. "People come up to me and say, 'I got into aviation because of Flight Sim.'"

In its infancy, however, "Flight Simulator" couldn't show someone how to fly a biplane, much less a 767. The program is nearly as old as Microsoft, in fact, but the two didn't start out together. In April 1975, at the same time Bill Gates and Paul Allen were founding the future software giant, a graduate student at the University of Illinois was preparing a thesis entitled "A Versatile Computer-Generated Dynamic Flight Display." The student, an avid recreational pilot named Bruce Artwick, proposed that a Motorola 6800 processor -- one of the first microcomputers -- could handle both the math and the graphics required for real-time flight simulation.

The concept lay fallow for a few years until Artwick and partner Stu Moment formed the software company SubLogic to develop and sell graphic programs for the budding PC industry. In 1979, using his thesis flight model as the basis, Artwick wrote a game for the Apple II, followed shortly by a version for the Radio Shack TRS-80. He called it "Flight Simulator."

The software reached the market the following year. It supposedly replicated a Cessna 172, a popular training aircraft, but the program's limitations rendered the effect hopelessly generic. With two gauges, eight colors, and ground "scenery" consisting of jagged outlines on a black background, it didn't exactly suspend disbelief. Yet it combined the action of an arcade game with the fantasy of flying and struck a chord deep within the souls of wannabe pilots -- and it beat spending hours typing and debugging lines of BASIC code to play a round of hangman or a dinky anagram game, which was about the only alternative for computer fun back then. By 1981, "Flight Simulator" was the bestselling title for the Apple II.

The success caught the attention of both Microsoft and IBM, and a brief bidding war for a stake in the software license ensued. Microsoft won out in part because Artwick liked what he called the "small-company atmosphere" of the firm. Featuring a new coordinate system, "Microsoft Flight Simulator" 1.01 hit the shelves in 1982 and was soon followed by version 2.0. The instrument panel was creeping toward reality and the scenery was improving along with it: The ground and sky were now distinguishable, and a few skyscrapers were visible in downtown Chicago, the default starting location.

The game had earned a serious following, and each update brought some of the features and refinements for which fans had clamored yet taxed their hardware's ability to keep pace. Version 3.0 offered the first external view of the aircraft; version 4.0 introduced dynamic scenery. Microsoft began expanding the product line in 1990, introducing an aircraft-design program written by Artwick's new company, Bruce Artwick Organization, that let users create and fly their own planes. Other software makers began writing add-on modules such as regional scenery enhancements -- FlightSoft's "Ultimate Hong Kong" is still a big seller -- and a cottage industry took root.

The rise of the Web saw an entire flight-simulation subculture materialize. Fans met in chat rooms and surfed message boards to discuss frame rates and swap flight plans. Some began to organize virtual airlines, for which other users -- or simmers -- would volunteer to fly designated routes again and again, often in aircraft bearing the imaginary carrier's livery, in hopes of earning promotions and new assignments. Multiplayer gaming eventually became a reality, with simmers seeing each other's aircraft in real time and even talking on the radio via Internet connections or local-access networks. Virtual "fly-ins" have become commonplace, with pilots from around the world flocking to a designated airport at a preset time, and actual flight-sim conventions are now held each year. Last September, more than 300 hardcore simmers attended the 2002 Avsim convention in Lake Tahoe.

Compared with other PC titles, one hesitates to call "Microsoft Flight Simulator" a game at all. It's nonviolent, noncompetitive, reality based, and relatively slow paced. No points are awarded, no winner is ever declared, and the only way to lose is to crash. While other gamers hunt mutants in bizarre fantasy realms or impersonate a drug-dealing Miami hoodlum, serious flight simmers simply want to take off from, say, an airport laid out exactly like Chicago O'Hare in a plane that operates exactly like a Learjet 45 and fly to a city that looks exactly like Tulsa, taking the exact amount of time it would take to get there in real life. The goal, if there is one, is the Zen-like satisfaction that comes with mastering the art of on-screen aviation.

Microsoft has gradually added more aircraft over the years, and the new edition offers 24 choices, from a tiny Schweizer 2-32 sailplane to a hulking Boeing 747-400 and even the recently retired Concorde. Extensive multimedia lessons in some of the aircraft are provided in the "Learn to Fly" section, which offers everything from a comprehensive series of private pilot lessons to instrument and commercial training to a checkride for a virtual Airline Transport Pilot rating.

With such instruction available, it was inevitable that some simmers, even those with harmless intentions, would begin to view "Flight Simulator" as a de facto training program for flying a real airplane. Many armchair pilots fantasize about landing a widebody the way baseball fans dream about pinch-hitting in the World Series, and on popular flight-simulation message boards, they sometimes discuss how a seasoned simmer would fare if asked to take control of an airborne jetliner. One writer referred to such a scenario as a "Holly/Black Syndrome" in reference to actresses Lauren Holly and Karen Black, each of whom has appeared in a Hollywood movie as a flight attendant forced to fly a 747 after the death of its pilots.

A well-versed simmer might do better than expected -- even within the structured, challenging confines of a normal flight, not some lawless suicide run that begins midair. Matthew Sheil, who has spent the last four years building a full-scale, fully functional 747-400 cockpit that runs on flight-sim software at his home in Sydney, Australia, won a visit to a Quantas 747 training simulator in a charity auction in 1999. During the four-hour session, Sheil "had no problems at all manipulating the aircraft, from engine start to programming the FMC, takeoff, cruise, and approach," he says. "The landings took a little longer to master."

Sim enthusiast Niklas Enggaard found an Airbus 320 training simulator run by Swedish airline SAS even easier to use. "First I was very focused on flying and did not relax, but after five minutes in the air I began to feel at home in the cockpit," he says. His very first landing went smoothly. "When touching down there was only a slight bump. It was easier to fly the A320 simulator than the PSS A320 [a popular add-on airplane] in 'Flight Simulator.'"

Could the me-too arrogance bred by such success stories embolden a would-be hijacker to carry out his plan? The brazenness of some would-be heroes is disquieting enough, even if the simmers' boasts contain as much truth as fantasy in some cases, thanks to endless hours in the virtual blue yonder. "Airplanes are airplanes, regardless of how big they are," wrote one unlicensed pilot in an online message thread last August. "Given the right plane (say 767) and some time to analyze the situation, I would have no problem bringing the beast down."

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