So here's the basic about me and what this blog will mostly focus on post. Basically, I'll be writing about my life as a career flight instructor and near life long flight simulator enthusiast.
My name is Matt and live in the Indianapolis, IN area. I'm married and have 2 elementary age daughters and an infant son. My family is the most important thing in my life so I mention them now because I'm sure I will be mentioning them from time to time as I post. I've always enjoyed aviation, and while I'm only certificated to fly airplanes, I've also flown gliders, hot air balloons, and have skydived.
I have been flying since my parents paid for some lessons in 1998 and soloed that summer. I finished my private pilot certificate in 2000 when I went to college to major in aviation. I earned my commercial in Spring of 2001 and Flight Instructor and Instrument Instructor in 2002. I knew pretty early into my CFI training if I could make a career as an instructor work, it would be a good fit for me. 14 years later, I'm still making it work; it isn't always easy though.
My profesional life now is mostly as a dual-credit aviation high school teacher for my college alma mater. I feel very lucky to have this opportunity to introduce aviation to these students, but since it is classroom instruction, my flight time gets limited depending on what else is going on in my life. Lately though, I've been able to fly more by mostly doing freelance/independent contractor instructor flights.
On the simulation side, I can't exactly pin down when I started but it was in elementary school with a family friend's Atari ST. My earliest sims with the ST were MicroProse's F-19, Gunship, and F-15 Strike Eagle II, so probably around 1990. We later bought our first family computer, a 486SX that I spent many hours in Falcon 3.0 with side flights with Aces of the Pacific/Over Europe, among others. I learned to make some pretty awesome boot disks! My first system I bought with my own money was a eMachines 366mhz Celeron to better run Falcon 4.0. That was my last "box computer" as well. While there has been other sims that I dabbled in, Falcon has always been my favorite.
Most of the sim posts here will probably relate to Falcon specifically and combat sims generally, but that doesn't mean I won't make occasional Microsoft Flight Sim, Prepar3D, X-Plane, etc. posts. I have also been a generic home cockpit builder for a long time, which when I wrote for Computer Pilot magazine around 2005, most of my articles there related to that. I imagine that many here will too. My cockpit philosophy has always been inexpensive and something that is geared towards the F-16 but not 100% accurate.
One thing you probably won't see out of me is a active YouTube channel for reviews and such. I have started yelling at the screen of many YouTube reviews for taking up too much time and not having enough detail. There are channels out there that can definitely do that, but that probably wouldn't be me. I've always felt articles were more efficient for me.
So that's me and you can expect little bit of everything relating to my real life flying and experiences, aviation in general, and flight simulation. Thanks for reading!
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