Northwest Flying Photography Blog

In 1982, Microsoft first published Microsoft Flight Simulator. In 1996, I had the fantastic opportunity of join the Flight Sim team, where I was happy to work until I left in 2003. Yesterday, the news came that the entire Flight Sim team had been given their layoff notice, and the studio that made Flight Simulator was disbanded. Some good friends of mine have just lost their jobs, and a lot of Flight Sim fans, myself included, are wondering about the future of the longest continuously developed PC title in history. The status of the franchise in not clear right now, but by all appearances, (and I have no inside info here) Flight Simulator is dead. I have a lot of great Flight Sim memories, totally apart from working there. I learned how to intercept and track a VOR radial in Flight Sim long before I took my first flying lesion, and I still fly the Simulator when I can find the time.
Hopefully all my friends will find something that they are equally excited about as Flight Sim, and I know that any other team in MS (or outside of MS) would be lucky to have them.

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The FAA recently published the current edition of the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge. This is the publication that the FAA considers the authoritative source for private pilots. It also has a lot of information that folks who are just interested in aviation might find useful or interesting. What’s even better is that it’s free to download.

Thanks to BruceW for the pointer.

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So I took a few pictures last year. Not as many as I would have liked, but enough. I thought I’d take the time and go over some that I liked in an effort to pick the best photo (aircraft related) that I took in 2009. A retrospective of one if you will. It turns out that this was easier said than done. I’m not sure I took any that I was particularly happy with. But I it gave it the old random number generator try, and here is what I came up with:

Taken as the McCord airshow, Thunderbirds 5 and 6 make a pass down the show line. It’s a good shot, with good lighting and exposure, but it’s not really anything that shows off my “eye” , whatever the hell that is. Other shots I’ve taken were better as art, but this one I think shows the best airshow stuff, which is by its nature limited in its ability to be really creative without fancy photochopping crap.

Other shots I liked include this one taken at the end of the airshow season, it’s the Kilo 6 collection’s P-51 “Hell-er Bust” taking from behind and showing off the shinny.

Most popular with the Flickr crowd is this one, that shows the FHC ME-109E during one of the fly days.

Also from FHC, is the Hurricane.

Although only slightly related to airplanes, I really like this shot of my son. We went on a short vacation to the coast and stumbles onto a fly-in as Copalis airport.

I had an opportunity to shoot the very first 777F flight. It’s not every day you get to see the first flight of a new aitcraft type.

Some honorable mentions: The Olympic Flight Museum’s replica Zeke and two FHC aircraft in formation:

Well, those are my picks, feel free to peruse across the flickr-scape and pick one you like. Comments are welcome.

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