Flying the User-Friendly Skies

Walter Mitty pilots pack up their programs and take off

Actor John Travolta was in the middle of a business meeting with a computer software publisher when someone mentioned Flight Simulator II, a program that puts Walter Mitty pilots into the cockpit of a single-engine airplane. An amateur aviator who flies a small jet out of his ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif., Travolta could not resist taking the disc out for a quick spin. Much to the publisher's dismay, Travolta was still at the computer two hours later, doing daredevil stunts 5,000 feet above Los Angeles in an imaginary Piper 181 Cherokee Archer.

Travolta is not the only person entranced by computerized flight. Every day thousands of Americans climb into their armchairs, ease back on their joysticks and head for the electric blue skies of Microsoft's Flight Simulator, which runs on the IBM Personal Computer, or SubLogic's Flight Simulator II, a version for the Apple, Atari and Commodore machines. More than 200,000 copies of the $49.95 discs have been sold to a diverse corps of enthusiasts, from first-graders bored with their video games to professional pilots who cannot seem to get enough of their jobs. Some businessmen regularly fly to Chicago during their coffee breaks, helping make Microsoft's package the best-selling entertainment program on the IBM PC. The current version lets pilots land at nearly two dozen airports, but an improved one that features 80 airports is going on sale next week.

Computers programmed to simulate the flight characteristics of complex aircraft have been used for training pilots since the late 1960s. Each space shuttle astronaut logs a minimum of 200 hours on a pair of $100 million NASA simulators before his first shuttle flight. In 1979 a University of Illinois engineer named Bruce Artwick squeezed all the features of a full-fledged simulator into a tiny microcomputer, thus giving the general public a chance to sit in the pilot's seat. The early Apple and Radio Shack versions of his program developed a cult following among computer hobbyists, and the 1982 IBM version soon became an industry standard. This year, when Flight Simulator II appeared on the mass-market Commodore 64 computer, the program flew to the top of software bestseller lists.

"It's the best game I have," says Carl Hutter, 7, an ace from Carson City, Nev., who once flew the simulator from New York to Los Angeles. "The hardest part is landing at Chicago at night." Abbott Paine, a pilot from Orange, Calif., praises the program's realism: "The view is terrific. When you turn, the landscape turns."

Dr. Felix Sassano, a Connecticut obstetrician, claims Flight Simulator has nearly cured him of his fear of flying. Retired Navy Officer John Chartier says that the 30 hours he logs every week are preparing him for upcoming flying lessons.