Pilot Introductions

[bbuckley]

Welcome Michael! This is going to be PERFECT for you. With your background, PE will provide you with a great familiarization of the SOCAL airspace. Looking forward to seeing you online and especially in hearing how it goes when you get to try the RW SOCAL VFR. Don't hesitate to use these forums to ask about the SOCAL nuances, the members and staff are great about helping out and the PE controllers are awesome!

[olderndirt]

Dave Ronaldson, brand new for 2018 - my eightieth year. Got my shirt tail cut in '63 and aviated for about forty years - mostly in Alaska. Counted radar sweeps for the FAA for over twenty and was a pilot briefer with NWS so this looks a likely spot. Started simming with FS9 then FSX and now giving AFS2 and XP11 a go. Must admit, if I'd crashed in RL as much as I do in the sim, you wouldn't re reading this.

[rtataryn]

Welcome Dave. Very cool! Glad and honored to see you here.

[oyapock]

== Summer '93, N3.958 W51.857 ==
A fifteen-year-old boy, sitting just behind the pilots of a small twenty-seater airplane, fascinated by all the gauges and buttons in the cockpit. This might be his second flight, but the previous one was the long-haul that brought him on this continent. Still impressive but really, this was nothing like this one : now it's almost as if he felt the air around him...

But he's also torn appart between his newly-found wings, and the breathtaking view out the window.

A giant green ocean, made almost unreal by the constant roar of the engines, the thick canopy of trees extending everywhere he looks, only broken in the distance by a muddy-ish blue serpent. This is where he's headed, the Oyapock river, the natural border between Guiana and Brasil.

Only a few miles left and he'll land there, on the nondescript strip of Saint Georges de l'Oyapock, about to spend several weeks paddling some 60 miles upriver, toward the Camopi village and its inhabitants.

== Present day, somewhere near LFBO ==
I'm now nearing my forties, but I sure haven't forgotten this Indiana Jones-like experience. My love for aviation was definitely born at that time and I now work as a sofware engineer, for a company designing various avionics systems.

I never got my PPL ($$$), but I "played" flight sims a lot since that trip, starting with that FS4 copy my father had so carelessly left on the desk. While growing up I haven't simmed that much, but I came back to it about 2 years ago, with X-Plane 10 and now 11, flying mostly GAs and happily learning as much as I could from various online sources.

In this regard PilotEdge is for me a new, pretty significant milestone in that self-teaching journey. But I can see there's plenty to read and watch here, so I'm sure I'll be fine.

See you all online, I'll no doubt trigger a few smiles when you first hear my how-so-frenchy accent

-- Pierre-François

[Keith Smith]

Some great introductions here. Welcome Dave and Pierre!

[Frank White]

PilotEdge has driven home just how important it is to have my CFI sitting in the right seat. Alas, he's not there. Only on PE can I work through my errors and live to learn from it or make the same error again. About 10 years ago, I was a bonafide student pilot with about 12 hours of realworld PIC time. A few months ago, I bought X-Plane on impulse and now I'm hooked again. I've reached out to my old flight school and am seriously considering starting the process again - manual E6B, W&B calculations, weather, etc.

Back then, I tried to learn ATC phraseology using a program called COMM1 (anyone remember that?) I never thought I would get comfortable with ATC. Now I want to take my old CFI up in the pattern and make those CTAF calls, but first things first: ground school. Thanks PilotEdge for the environment and the inspiration. If I don't pursue getting my PPL, I can still enjoy a virtual $200 hamburger. I'm glad I found you.

Frank,
For now, 'low and slow'. That's my motto

[Salire]

I’m really touched reading some of these intros. Wow!
I got my PPL decades ago, but wasn’t flying enough to feel safe, so I haven’t been current in a long time, but I’ve always missed flying. I dabbled with flight sims on a whim, on occasion a few times over the years going all the way back to my Commodore 64, but it never really stuck. Somehow, recently, the perfect storm of X-plane 11, fast computers, Oculus goggles, and Pilot Edge have got me hooked. Give me the blue pill and vector me to the IAF. This is AMAZING! Thank you!

Sally

[jimson]

My name is Jim, i am a post solo sport pilot student but had to take a break for financial reasons. Me and my dad have recently acquired aircraft to start a club.
We have a hanger at a controlled airfield so I thought I would sim on pilot edge and get comfortable with ATC since I will need that endorsement when I resume lessons.

[Mr H]

Hey folks. My name is Gary, 52 yrs young, and I am a student pilot from Spartanburg, SC. I have almost 20 hrs, training in a C150, waiting on a day without hurricane-force winds to convince my CFI that im ready to solo! I fly out of a non-towered airport, and have no ATC interaction. i hope to learn what i can with you guys at PE as i will eventually have to move on from the non towered strip if I ever want to fly somewhere different. I have a pretty neat sim package with XP11 and a modded REP C172. Amazing how realistic the simming is. Anyway, I hope to continue with you guys, but I do work nights here and wont have a whole lot of time to sim before you guys shut down for the eve. Any help is appreciated, because I am sure I will have plenty of questions before this flight is over.

[RogerW]

Okay, I've been on PilotEdge for about a month now and figured I'd post a message on here and say 'hey'.

My name is Roger, I'm 63 and live in east-central Florida. I'm a husband of 1 for 37 years, a father of 4, a grandpa to 18, and a great-grandpa to 7. It's a big family reunion around here!

I got my ears wet flight simming with my Commodore-64, a 12" color portable tv, and two Atari joysticks back in the early eighties and have never looked back. From there it was a pc with FS95, 98, 2k, and eventually FSX. I flew exclusively on the pc's with the keyboard until just about 5 years ago when I acquired a joystick. Then it started getting serious. Wow what an improvement! Then a couple more joysticks. Garage sales can be awesome! I only used one for the joystick but all three for the switches. I just had to remember what switch did what, but it was cool! I then got another one, a duplicate of one I already had. Just happened to be the one with the most switches! I had plans for this one. GUT IT! I fabricated my own rudder petals and yoke. It all worked pretty good considering it was all held together with wood screws, glue, and wires. I was moving up in the world! Then... a couple years ago I saw a used Saitek bundle being sold on Ebay. I Still use the rudder petals and the built in seat that comes with it, but my yoke is long gone. And then a month ago, the best thing I could have ever imagine experiencing on my sim: PilotEdge. Live ATC from a real person. I have found the missing link! So now I have to follow the rules and un-program myself of decades of bad habits. I've always considered myself a good pilot and don't really have that many bad habits but this Cat-10 I'm looking at scares me a bit!

My first RW airplane ride was in a 172 with the pilot and my two sons. A 30 minute plane ride around town was my father's day present that year. The tail number... N7365? I have no idea what the last character was. My son was blocking it in the picture of the occasion. So, with my last initial being W it was only a logical choice, right. Thus Cessna 182 N7365W was created. Yes, I have looked up that tail number and it belongs to a cherokee in RL but I don't care! Below are some pictures of my repaint of my A2A Cessna 182.

As far as real world experience I got serious in the late 80's, starting with ground school at Palm Beach Community College. I then passed the exam and signed up to be able to call myself a student pilot. After 7 hours officially logged in my logbook I had to quit with the lessons. Reality got the best of me and I didn't make the money to support a family of 6 and take flight lessons. I have to say that even as my simulator was back then, still my C64, I remember my CFI telling me how advanced I seemed to have been. At 7 hours she was telling me I would probably solo around 12 hrs. FYI... Plane rental, wet, was $27/hr back then. If I remember right, the instructor was like $35 or somewhere in there. You probably couldn't find somebody to clean the windscreen for that these days!

Okay... I will shut up. Blue skies, and I will see you all online!

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