I always wanted to be a pilot when I was growing up. Who didn’t? Flying is cool.
Fast forward 10 years – I am not a pilot. But that didn’t stop me ordering X-Plane 9 to try my hand at the “ultra realistic flight simulation”. Sans any sort of flight joystick.
Things didn’t start well. At all. I accidentally chose to install all 60GB (6DVDs) of global scenery, so my departure time of around 14.30pm was delayed by 3 hours. Very true to life I thought. When I returned and started the game I was put straight into the cockpit of a small plane staring down the runway. This was it. In the absence of a joystick I found the corresponding throttle key on my keyboard, and pressed down hard. Nothing. Frustration. 15 minutes of mouse shaking and button mashing led me to shift+b. The brake. Things changed quite quickly after that.
Armed with my understanding of releasing the brake, I began to thunder down the runway. Violently swerving left to right. Even the tiniest movement of my mouse was enough to take me off centre, and the more I tried to compensate, the more I swerved. This was made much worse by the herd of reindeer that had made the runway their home.
After scaring Rudolf and pals out of my way I managed to keep (relatively) straight enough to take off. Bliss. Just me and the sky. Climbing up and up and up. Quickly. Too quickly; the screen flashed red and the plane began to stall. So I moved my mouse forward to dip the nose and discovered that the over sensitive runway controls extended to the pitch, roll and yaw. I performed what seemed like the most audacious set of aerodynamic maneuvers possible. Tiny shifts of my mouse to try and righten the ship were sending me in barrel rolls and suicide dives. This wasn’t fun, I just wanted to find the damn autopilot button so I could look for a runway and attempt a landing. Attempt being the operative word.
If you’ve recently watched Derren Brown’s Hero at 30,000 feet you’d be forgiven for thinking that landing a plane is as easy as pushing four buttons, and gently lifting up the nose… What I can tell you is that had the team at Channel 4 replaced the control stick with a mouse, poor Matt would’ve had to accept a swerving, rolling, plummeting death (before being told he’s perfectly safe and already at sea-level). Just as I did.
