Announcer (John Melley): Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast. The place where flight training and your home office collide.
Get tips, tricks and in-depth interviews about flight training, virtual reality and flight simulation.
With your host, Dan Caston.

Dan Caston: Hey everyone and welcome to the Flight World Podcast. Today we’re gonna have a special guest on the show, Calum Martin. So Calum is one of the co-founders of FSElite. He’s very knowledgeable and I’m really excited to have him on the podcast today. So without holding you up any longer, here’s Calum Martin.
Hey Calum. Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast. I’m really excited to have you here. Would you mind just going over quickly, give us a run-down of how you got into VR Flight. Sorry, into FlightSim?

Calum Martin: Sure. So, I got into FlightSim when I was probably about eight years old and my parents bought me a copy of FS2000 and, just FS2000 actually, because some of my family used to work on Concorde. So the big selling point of FS2000 was the ability to fly a Concorde. So my parents got me that and, yeah, I just remember booting it up on my PC back in those days and I didn’t have a joystick or anything like that, so I was trying to basically fly this Concorde with a mouse and keyboard which, as you can probably imagine, didn’t go down too well.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure.

Calum Martin: And a couple of years later after just not really being that involved in the Internet and stuff and eventually I discovered this website called Afsim and then discovered that actually you could expand your whole platform with [inaudible 00:01:46] ,aircraft, and then, from there, my world just grew and grew and grew to where it is today. And, yeah, I think ever since FS2000 I’ve doubled in and out of flight simulation and stuff, depending on what’s been going on in my life, but I think I’m firmly involved in that community now which is pretty awesome and I think it’s a really exciting time, and certainly that threw me back in a lot was this whole introduction of virtual reality and stuff, and that’s what drew me to your website as well.

Dan Caston: For sure. So what kind of system are you running right now?

Calum Martin: So I’m using a Gtx 1082 Ti, but my biggest challenge is I’m not using it to it’s best capacity. I’ve still got a 10ee monitor and, again, the reason I bought a graphics card that was probably way out speccing of my PC, was because of the RN, this whole kind of hype around this particular card was really suited for virtual reality and, like I said, I want to start delving more into that, into that eco system as it were. So I thought I’ll invest now and hopefully it’ll pay off in the future. And then my primary platform for flight simulation is Prepar3D v4 at the moment.

Dan Caston: Okay. For sure. Yeah Gtx 10 Ti is a nice card. I’m actually only running the 1060 with 6 gigabytes so, for me, I have to lower some settings and that kind of thing. But with the 10 ee you should be, yeah, you should be doing pretty well when you go into VR.

Calum Martin: Well what sim do you use, just to-

Dan Caston: I’m actually running, mostly I run X-Plane 11. That’s what I’ve been running.

Calum Martin: Yeah.

Dan Caston: I’ve looked, I haven’t actually went into PreparD yet, but just today I was actually looking at that and I’m probably gonna get into PreparD as well. What drives you to PreparD versus the other sims?

Calum Martin: I think just my … so FS2000 was an ESP platform and I’ve kind of grown up with those platforms and investment as well in terms of the aircraft and I’m sure it we’ll come onto this in a little bit, but I enjoy flying heavy aircraft and studying the systems and stuff and, for me, the only mark I really kind of saw that that level of aircraft at the time was all in FSX and PreparD v1.2. So I invested a lot of money in those aircraft and since then developed a [inaudible 00:04:42] ouverture. Version 4 which is 64 bit which, again, kind of kept me with that back [inaudible 00:04:48]. But, again, I’ve really started to see how X Planes really began to come into its own. I mean the 727 was just released and apparently that’s really great. And there’s a whole bunch of other aircraft for X Plane that offered that level of system depth that I would desire to really enjoy that side of simulation as well.

Dan Caston: Mm-hmm. (Affirmative). For Sure. Okay, so you mentioned you mainly fly with the heavy aircraft or what else do you like to fly when you’re flying sims?

Calum Martin: It depends really. When I fly with a group of mates I quite enjoy flying the smaller aircraft, like the Piper Cherokee, for me it’s way out, it’s an incredible aircraft just because I think there are quite a lot of sceneries out there that are so detailed and full of depth that when you constantly fly jets, jet liners and stuff, you miss all those really cool details and points of interest, and I think we take it for granted quite a lot of the time as Simmers and quite often, try as a developer might, I don’t think they always necessarily give you every information about that product they have so you quite often miss really cool little quirks or details.
So, yeah, when I fly with a group of mates and stuff, trying to fly low and slow is pretty awesome ’cause you can check out different areas and you can compare and make your own little challenges and stuff, which I think is pretty awesome. And, again, it’s why I want to go into VR because trying to fly these aircraft with a static 2D screen is enjoyable, but the numerous times I’ve tried VR at different events, it’s blown my mind every time, but I’ve just, I’ve been a bit too scared and too cautious to do that investment in terms of the headsets and all that sort of stuff.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure. Yeah it’s kind of neat to be able to look around and actually see the plane around you and it brings you right into the plane. You can actually feel it a little bit when you’re doing different things.

Calum Martin: You get a real sense of speed don’t you? And you’re almost ducking and diving to try and find certain things-

Dan Caston: Yeah.

Calum Martin: …and you must look crazy from the perspective of someone watching you but when you’re-

Dan Caston: Yeah. You do.

Calum Martin: [inaudible 00:07:17] It’s amazing.

Dan Caston: For sure. Yeah, you watch people play other games with the headset on and they’re swinging their arms around. It’s pretty funny to watch from the outside but it’s pretty neat when you’re in there.

Calum Martin: Oh, really?

Dan Caston: Yeah. Alright. Right now you have FS-Elite. What is your role with FSElite? Is it your website or how are you involved with this website?

Calum Martin: So it’s myself, a guy called Greg and a guy called Jordan. We’re all co-founders of FS-Elite and our vision at the time was to challenge the norm for media outlet within the Flight Sim community ’cause we felt we could do it a bit better, a bit differently and find a way to just engage with the community a little bit more. And that was just over two years ago. Without trying to sound too arrogant I think we’ve done a decent job at the minute of doing that, especially that when we’ve attended events and stuff we’ve had those people come up to us and just express their passion and desire for us to succeed, which is really good motivation for us. And the reason I got involved: I’ve always dabbled in running websites, even since I was ten years old, I was doing some gaming stuff which was fun but obviously the gaming market is significantly different and you’ve got massive players out there, so trying to run your own little blog and stuff was almost impossible.

Dan Caston: Mm-hmm. (Affirmative).

Calum Martin: But I enjoyed that aspect of voicing my opinion or writing a story or an article or a review. Just that … even if one person reads the review and finds it somewhat helpful, to me that is kind of success. But I think we’ve been very fortunate as a community FS-Elite. We’ve got an amazing team, like 20 people who will support the website in their own unique capacity, whether that’s a video producer or whether that’s someone who just checks our articles to make sure that they’re all spelt correctly and all be flow and consistent. So, yeah, I’ve got an amazing team. They’re the ones who really should be at the forefront of all the praise and stuff ’cause they do a remarkable job at keeping stuff running whilst I do other things and stuff as well.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure. Actually I’ve had one of the people that follow my blog and my podcast come up when I started this interview section they said: You have to talk to the people at FS-Elite and get someone on your podcast. So that was actually a request from one of them. So when you reached out and I thought that, for sure, this would be perfect.

Calum Martin: Oh my God! That’s awesome! I know I said I wasn’t really aware of your website until you interviewed Sergio who, I think, he is such a passionate bloke about helicopters and stuff and you mentioned helicopters in the FlightSim World and you just automatically think of Sergio.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure.

Calum Martin: He’s one of the best guys out there for sure. So when I saw he spent some time with you and I listened to your podcast. Right, I need to contact you guys and, look, I checked out your site and I think it’s great. So that was why I messaged you in the first place was just to say: Hey, this looks awesome. So-

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure. That’s awesome. Okay, so just jumping ahead here. If you were to get into flying airlines and that kind of thing, where would you start, even without VR right now, if you were start getting into aircraft with airlines, where would you start because you’ve obviously had a lot of experience with that?

Calum Martin: That is a tough question. I think the best advice is just firstly to have fun. I mean there are so many aircraft out there that are different from one another, whether that’s a big 747 or if you’re trying to learn how to fly like a little CRJ or something. There’s a whole breadth of aircraft of different levels of complexity out there. So there’s this big debate between current … some developers about whether one aircraft is superior to the other because one’s more complex than the other, but ultimately at the end of the day, if someone’s moved to the hobby and wants to learn to fly a plane, then the ultimate goal is to have fun.
So if they pick up one aircraft that maybe isn’t as complex as another, the standard operating procedures are kind of the same. If it’s a certain aircraft, it’s a certain aircraft. But as long as they start that learning process somewhere, you kind of develop as you go along. So I would start with just making sure you follow the tutorial flight if there’s one supplied because nine times out of ten they cover the basics and then a few little extras. But the best resource I’ve ever found is just by practicing, flying with friends and just getting involved in different communities, whether it’s Facebook or Discord or forums and just ask questions and be sincere and just be honest with people and just say: Look I’m trying to learn about this. What advice can you give me? And I think that’s probably where, if I were speaking back to ten year old Calum however many years ago, that would have been the advice. Oh, and definitely get a joystick ’cause trying to fly with arrow cues and a mouse is definitely not gonna help you with learning a large airline to fly. That’s for sure.

Dan Caston: For sure. Any communities out there that you could recommend? Someone to look into?

Calum Martin: (chuckles) I think the first community I would go to is whichever developer or publisher you bought the aircraft from. Go to their support forums because obviously they’re gonna be the most experienced of people who understand what you’re asking. But I think there’s a whole breadth of Facebook groups out there. You could just Facebook search PreparD v4 and you’ll find twenty different groups.

Dan Caston: Mm-hmm. (Affirmative).

Calum Martin: And if you just ask the question someone’s gonna give you an answer. I know one of the groups that we help to run. People ask questions all the time and there are plenty of answers and plenty of knowledgeable people. So, yeah, I would just source out … definitely, if you want a specific aircraft, then go to that developer’s website ’cause that’s where you’re probably gonna find the most useful answers.

Dan Caston: Okay. You mentioned joysticks too. Is there anyone that you use in particular or one that you would start out with if you were going to start?

Calum Martin: I think … what did I have? I think I had something called Sidewinder when I was young. And, again, if it’s someone who’s brand new, starting out for the first time, it’s perfectly sufficient to use one of those ’cause they’re cheap. I think they’re about 30 Pounds.

Dan Caston: Really.

Calum Martin: Maybe about 45. [inaudible 00:14:57]. But they’re perfect. They’ve got a little throttle. You can fly around with it. I know there are people out there that buy their first one, it’s the Hotas. This massive thing with about a billion buttons on it.

Dan Caston: Right.

Calum Martin: I use it in a minute and it’s just really embarrassing to admit. I had some issues with joysticks. I bought this game for my PlayStation 4 a little while ago and it came with a plug-in joystick, like a combat sim, or something like that, I can’t remember what it’s called, Top [inaudible 00:15:29]but I use that now ’cause it functions fine as a joystick. It does what it needs. But again I know people who have more sophisticated hardware from Saitek and that stuff is really cool as well. So if you wanna splash out a little bit more cash then that’s definitely a route to go down I would think anyway.

Dan Caston: For sure. Yeah, the Sidewinder seems like a good starting point ’cause you do have throttle versus just grabbing any joystick out there.

Calum Martin: I mean if you don’t wanna buy a joystick and you already own a controller from a games console, I mean they’re not perfect but again you’re only starting out and want to keep your costs down then that’s definitely a way to do it ’cause ultimately you’re trying to learn how to fly something not necessarily … just trying to think of different ways for people to get involved and stuff because that is the point of this, I suppose. For someone new.

Dan Caston: Yeah. For sure. And you mentioned: would you start in a little plane or go straight to the large aircraft? I guess large aircraft seems a lot more procedural and that kind of thing but, yeah, I’m just curious if you would start in something like a Cessna, like a typical flight train? Or would you, because it’s FlightSim and you can crash as many times as you want, go straight to the 737 or something big?

Calum Martin: I don’t know really. It’s really hard because when I started I just booted up the Concorde straight away and tried my luck with that.

Dan Caston: Yeah. It’s the joys of a FlightSim. Yeah.

Calum Martin: Yeah, exactly. I think I wouldn’t wanna say what someone should start with because I think it should be whatever holds your interest. I mean if you go into FlightSim because you wanna try flying a 737 then screw it, just jump in and turn on the engines and see what happens. And I think that’s how you’re gonna learn from things very quickly. And I think the great thing about airplanes is the logic applies to pretty much any aircraft, whether it’s a Cessna or an Airbus or a Boeing. You’ve got the same laws of physics working with or against you, so if you can grasp that concept then applying it to different aircraft doesn’t really matter what you’re doing as long as you understand they all fly a bit different or the procedures are a bit different. And, yeah, that would be the advice I would give.
But it’s so hard because it’s been so long since I started that whole journey but I’d be really excited if I was new to the community again just to see the breadth of the products and stuff out there. I mean it’s just insane.

Dan Caston: For sure. Alright, so just moving on here. If someone was into FlightSim already and they want to take it to the next level, they wanna start bringing more out of their sim, like they have the basics; they just have the standard scenery, they have standard weather, everything’s just basic. Where would you suggest they go next? What would be a first purchase you’d make if you had to buy something like weather, textures, planes or anything like that?

Calum Martin: Ooh. That’s a really hard question because I think it depends what you want from the sim. I think you have different people who would prefer something to look good compared to someone who maybe wants to maybe make the experience better in terms of the flight. So I break it down into your aircraft, you’ve got utilities and you’ve got scenery and they all do their own unique thing to enhance the simulator. Oh, I don’t know. That’s really hard because maybe my best advice would be if you’ve learnt the basics then I would pick up a scenery like maybe your home airport or something ’cause there’s so much out there. I’m sure it’s just … maybe like even some developers do regions and stuff so it’s not just one airport but it’s a whole city or a whole country or a whole continent. And just start exploring and then build up your portfolio from there and, before you know it, you’re gonna be adding on hundreds of Dollars worth of stuff.
For me, I think, the one of the best purchases I made was a weather engine because the default stuff is not very … it’s fine for just doing maybe … making a couple of circuits and stuff, but when you start doing more adventurous routes and stuff and you wanna experience different weather formations or learning about how weather will impact your aircraft, then you really need to buy a Payware add-on to enhance that. And the great thing about this community is there’s such a choice, whether you’re flying in PreparD or whether you’re flying in Xbian, you’ve got options for whatever you need, whether you want to be more visual or whether you want more realistic effects, you can do a bit of research and find the one that’s right for you.

Dan Caston: For sure. So what are the kind top contenders for weather?

Calum Martin: (chuckles). So, in PreparD’s world you’ve got high phase, active sky, which is what I predominantly use as my weather engine. You’ve also got a company called REX who have been in this industry for a long, long, long, long, long time and they produce some extremely good texture sets for different weather systems, different ground markings, and their latest software Sky Force integrates the weather engine aspect as well. So, again, and because they’ve got that texture stuff, both of them have texture sets and stuff but, yeah, I think you’ve got a really good choice there. In Xbian’s world I wouldn’t quote me on this because I’m not an Xbian expert and I don’t preach to be one, but you’ve got a couple. I think there’s something called [inaudible 00:22:14] weather and xEnviro. Again, two weather engines. I don’t know really what either of them really do in terms of the specifics, but a bit of research will be able to tell you whether it’s the right engine for what you desire in your simulator.

Dan Caston: Okay. I had Bel Geode on the podcast just before Sergio and he was mentioning that some of the weather doesn’t co-operate with VR, so I guess when you turn your head the actual weather changes and the clouds rotate or they cause issues like that. But have you had anyone come up to you and say: It’s not working for me in VR with PreparD?

Calum Martin: I think VR and PreparD is still quite in its infancy. I think none of my team members have really talked to me about it. I think one of my video guys did some video work on it. Hasn’t really done much since. My knowledge would be that it’s still … so I know there’s lots of issues with weather in terms of, like you said, if you move your head and the clouds start doing spins on its axis and stuff, I think that’s just down to the simulator and the oldness of the engine as such.

Dan Caston: Mm-hmm. (Affirmative).

Calum Martin: I’ve not really heard of any issues with VR and the weather, not so like what Bel Geode had said, but I can’t really speak from experience, having not really seen weather in either of those sims in VR.

Dan Caston: Okay. Have you used any of the air traffic control systems out there like the VATSIM? I see you had a recent article on VATSIM or PilotEdge, like those kind of things. Have you used those before?

Calum Martin: Yeah. I use VATSIM, not as often as I probably should. A lot of the time if I’m doing some flying I might do it in the background while doing some work or something so I don’t really wanna be distracted by air traffic controllers all the time, but when I do fly it’s predominantly on VATSIM. PilotEdge is an interesting one because what they offer is very unique, I think, and really good for the community. It’s just not in a region that I particularly would want to fly in. So if they start expanding to Europe and stuff, then maybe I’d be a bit more keen.
Then there’s, obviously you’ve got IVAO and you’ve got a few other ones in development in the minute, such as Koskon. But, again, I think it’s a really good tool. Again, if we’re thinking about new people to start learning to fly in the flight simulators and stuff, I think they’re really helpful. They can be quite scary. I remember my first time I wrote down almost like a script of what I was gonna say ’cause I was worried I’d get told off by a controller. And it’s not to suggest that you’ll get told off, but you don’t wanna step on anyone’s toes or embarrass yourself.
So it can be a little bit scary ’cause a lot of the time we fly in our bedrooms and we don’t really speak unless its via text. So my advice is just get involved, get stuck in. There’s plenty of You Tube content out there to show you how it works or show you how to set things up. It is quite straightforward. But if you don’t feel confident with ATC online, if I remember rightly there’s some software prepared called PRO-ATC/X. I think I used it years and years ago. I’m not sure if it’s still available, but it’s a good tool to start learning phraseology and procedures and stuff to enhance your experience if you decide you’d rather fly offline than online.
But honestly, flying online is great ’cause you meet people, recognize names if you fly to and from airports consistently and it’s certainly how I met a lot of the guys on the FSElite team as well where we’ve just being chatting online and we fly together and stuff. So it’s a pretty cool experience.

Dan Caston: Okay. Cool. And you said PRO-ATC/X is the one? That’s the one that like a computer ATC?

Calum Martin: Let me just quickly Google it whilst I’m here-

Dan Caston: Sure.

Calum Martin: …’cause I’m sure it exists. I just haven’t seen it. Yeah, it does exist. Is it for sale? I think it is. Yeah.

Dan Caston: Okay.

Calum Martin: It’s 50 Euros. That’s a lot.

Dan Caston: Okay.

Calum Martin: When was it? Ah! Upated back in May. So there’s quite a lot of work. I haven’t used it in here so I’m not suggesting everyone should buy it.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, people should do their research before going into it, but I’ll leave a link anyway. Some people can make their decision if they wanna check that out.

Calum Martin: Definitely. From what I remember it was pretty decent as an alternative. So-

Dan Caston: Okay. So, as you’re flying around is there anything else you could use that if you’ve been flying around for a while, you start to get in the same routine? Is there anything else you could do that could take you out of that routine and maybe add some extra, like I’ve heard of FSEconomy? I haven’t actually used it but those type of things that almost bring a situation into flying?

Calum Martin: Yeah, FSEconomy is really cool from what I remember. I haven’t used it in years. There was a … what was it? I think it was called an FS Passenger and that was a really cool tool at the time because even though you were the pilot of the plane, you were also the cabin crew.

Dan Caston: Oh, okay.

Calum Martin: You had to press a button to serve the coffee and if you didn’t the passengers would get annoyed and then, before you know it, there’s like a fight broken out on board so you’d have to end it, divert. (chuckles). And it was [inaudible 00:28:28] thing available and I swear I had a heart attack on my flight every single flight.

Dan Caston: Yeah.

Calum Martin: So that was pretty cool. There’s a couple of others as well that simulate kind of cargo ops, which I think are some of the more interesting things you can do in the sim because there’s so much freedom with cargo operators and, yeah, it just kinda, like you said, it brings new situations and scenarios into it as well.

Dan Caston: Kinda gives you a goal.

Calum Martin: Yeah, and I think as much as my imagination would help, sometimes it’s nice to be given the goal as well.

Dan Caston: Mm-hmm.

Calum Martin: But what I also like as well is that a lot of developers for aircraft in particular at the minute are integrating. So basically if you do something in your aircraft and you do it really wrong or you push it to its limits, it has a lasting impact. So A2A’s a really good example of some of this. If you do too much of something, you might ruin the spark plugs or you might cause an engine failure; you might break your flaps and that effect will last until you repair it. So that kind of stuff also helps with that whole situational awareness of you’re actually flying a plane, you’re not just flying a model on a PC. You’re actually flying something that you can technically break.

Dan Caston: Yeah. Yeah.

Calum Martin: That kind of thing is really quick in the minute as well.

Dan Caston: Yeah. That’s neat. It takes it from being a sim to actually doing flights. You wouldn’t be doing crazy maneuvers in your Cessna if you knew it’s gonna break.

Calum Martin: Yeah.

Dan Caston: Brings a little more realism I guess.

Calum Martin: And it beats the whole, if you have the Crash Detector on and stuff and you do something like that, and then the sim just freezes with a little green box at the top that says: You crashed.(chuckles).

Dan Caston: Yeah.

Calum Martin: Definitely adds a bit more realism in that kind of outcome if you were to do that just by default sim.

Dan Caston: Right. Yeah, for sure. Is there any Cessna 172s or 152s that you’ve seen that have come out that would be a realistic sim for someone that actually wants a very solid flight model or is it just something that looks really good?

Calum Martin: The company I mentioned just now A2A.

Dan Caston: A2A’s the one. Yeah.

Calum Martin: They do incredible GA aircraft and they also do Cessnas as well. So, yeah, if you’re looking for something that not only does it look photo-realistic, but it also, like I said, has all those extra characteristics so you can damage the plane and stuff like that, then definitely check out their stuff. They use some technology, I think it’s called AccuSim, and it kind of just replicates a living, breathing environment inside the sim which the airplane reacts to. So you can practice anything from your stored techniques to speed turns and you’re gonna be able to tell the difference between that and any other aircraft.
I mean there are some other great stuff out there for sure but I think if you’re a student pilot and you’re looking for that level of detail to practice when you’re not actually flying in the actual thing, then I couldn’t think of any other aircraft. When it comes to X-Plane users, again I’m no expert. I couldn’t tell you. If your listeners are interested I can ask a couple of my guys and I can forward you a link as well and we can include that.

Dan Caston: For sure.

Calum Martin: Yeah?

Dan Caston: Yeah, if you have something, we’d definitely include it on the show and know it’s there for people to check out. Are any of your staff … is there any pilots on your staff? Or are they all just flight sims experts?

Calum Martin: (chuckles). A bit of a mix.

Dan Caston: Yeah.

Calum Martin: Jordan, who I mentioned earlier, a pilot for an airline in the States, who fly dominantly Saabs. So he’s always sending us pictures and stories of how they operate and stuff, which is quite unique. We’ve also got quite a few private pilot license holders as well within the team. So they’re very useful for people like myself for example, ’cause I’m hoping to learn to fly in the next year or so. So they’re really helpful to get that sort of information as well.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure.

Calum Martin: But, yeah, it’s nice to have a mix of pilots, not pilots, pilots, sim fans. Maybe not everyone on my team is a massive flight sim expert but they just have real passion for it and they learn a lot from being a part of our team because of the range and experience that we have as well. So that’s something else that I really appreciate of the team that I work with.

Dan Caston: Is there anyone on there that does instructional videos?

Calum Martin: So we have our own You Tube channel but the way we produce our content is we have a really good team of video producers who also have their own channels and stuff. So on the team we’ve got a guy called Patrick, who’s The Flight Sim Deck and he’s not a real, real pilot but he does really take the whole learning thing very seriously so a lot of his videos on his channel are showing you how it operates but based on his learnings and stuff. So he goes into quite a lot of detail in terms of how he learns certain aircraft. Shane is another one, Aus Flight Simmer who, again, he just does a lot of research into the way he flies; and a guy called Kuwait Pilot as well who, again, I don’t believe he’s a real world pilot and, if he is, he’s kept that very quiet from us. But they all contribute their own things to the channel, which I think is really cool and adds kind of variety to the content we produce. And also from different perspectives as well which I hope the community see.
In terms of who I would follow: when you asked that question there was one name that came to me and he does incredible videos I feel of A320 operations, and I believe his You Tube handle is BlackBox. There might be some numbers at the end of it but he’s really, really detailed and he shows you more than just how to take off a plane. He will show you the integral systems and the hows, the whats and the whys which is crucial, I think, to learning aircraft of that level. And there are plenty of … I mean, I think that’s the great thing about our community, is that you can search very easily for something or someone and you’re gonna get a really helpful individual who wants to share their knowledge and experience at the other end.
So, yeah. I can’t really at the top of my head just think of loads of people for loads of different products but it doesn’t take too long to figure out who you think will be helpful. And again it depends on who the person is. I mean you may resonate with the person teaching you or you may not. And if you don’t then just find the next person in the long list of people who will teach you how to fly an airplane.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure.

Calum Martin: You see.

Dan Caston: Okay. And so that one you said was A320 was the BlackBox? You figured something like that we could always put a link to him in the show notes as well.

Calum Martin: Yeah. I’m pretty sure it’s BlackBox. Mm, yeah. We can add it to the show notes after.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure. Alright. What is your favorite plane to fly and why?

Calum Martin: I have a big … so I think my favorite plane to fly is the A319 and 20. I used to work for a UK airline that flew those two aircraft so I worked on them quite a lot. So I enjoy … I think because I worked on them quite a lot, when I fly them in the sim I can picture myself, it reminds me when I was working on the aircraft, which I can’t really resonate as much with other airplanes. And I think that’s why it’s my favorite because I think one of the most immersing factors for me is the sounds.

Dan Caston: Mm-hmm. (Affirmative).

Calum Martin: There are some excellent add-ons out there which really replicate the sound quality to exactly how I remember it or exactly as it is when I fly and stuff in those particular aircraft.

Dan Caston: For sure.

Calum Martin: It’s so versatile as well. You can do a 40 minute hop or you can do five or six hours in those things. So, yeah, they’re quite good.

Dan Caston: Okay. What did you do at the airline, if you don’t mind sharing?

Calum Martin: I’d be cabin crew.

Dan Caston: Okay.

Calum Martin: And then I used to work as a trainer as well for the ground ops side of things.

Dan Caston: Okay. Nice. So where would your favorite place to fly be?

Calum Martin: I wouldn’t say a favorite. I mean, depends really. If I fancy a challenge then I know what airports to look for. Sometimes, especially during the Winter, a big factor will be weather. I’d like fly into places that maybe not have great weather.

Dan Caston: Mm-hmm. (Affirmative).

Calum Martin: I dunno. It depends. It depends on the aircraft I fly. If I’m flying a little Cessna 172 I don’t really want to be flying into a big international airport. I’d rather fly into some little bush strip or somewhere a little more unique and where I can take those type of aircraft. Yeah. It’s hard to say what my favorite destination is. I think there’s a big world out there. I think there’s a lot-

Dan Caston: For sure.

Calum Martin: …of variety for what you could fly to.

Dan Caston: Yeah. Definitely. So do you mind telling us a little bit about what’s new in FS-Elite? You were mentioning before that you have a new, is it called directory or DCTRY? I’m not sure how you pronounce it but do you have something new coming out?

Calum Martin: Yes, we got it straight away actually. It’s a new site called DCTRY and actually it kind of links back into your previous question of favorite destination. So basically what DCTRY intends to be is a kind of a, I mean … let me ask you. When you use a flight sim, you use X-Plane and stuff, so when you search for a scenery, what is your process to find a new piece of scenery at the minute?

Dan Caston: Google and probably looking at, following the people on You Tube. I’ll go through and I’ll find for example Bel Geode. I’d look at what he was doing lately. I’ll grab some of his scenery. Wherever I see some scenery I’ll grab it. That’s kind of my process. So, it’s a little bit sporadic at the moment.

Calum Martin: So the whole purpose of DCTRY (chuckles) is almost like I paid you to say those answers but I didn’t. That is your legit answer.

Dan Caston: Oh, no.

Calum Martin: So what we wanna do, because I do exactly the same, I either Google the IKEA code and then followed by FSX or a p3 or whatever.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure.

Calum Martin: I will see what some of the You Tubers and stuff they follow are doing. So there actually is gonna be a huge database of all scenery from modern sims to whether it’s p3db4, X-Plane and Evelyn or Aero Flyer, that’s two which, by the way, is amazing for VR. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it.

Dan Caston: Yeah. I do have Aero Flyer actually.

Calum Martin: But what we wanna do with DCTRY is have all the scenery available for those sims in one place so instead of Googling it, you come to DCTRY and you can search, I dunno, Challenging Approach, because that’s what you fancy to fly, and it will search the database for whichever sim you want and it will find airports that have been defined, and again it’s quite subjective. But it will find things that are deemed as challenging. So you can go: Right, okay, well I’ve got 25 Dollars to spend so you can set your budget and then ultimately you then get a list of three or four airports and it just simplifies that process of trying to find something because it’s all in one place. And what we are trying to do is work with You Tubers and streamers so I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a streamer called Squirrel, but we spoke to him at the FX Expo and we showed him it, and a guy called Chewwy as well, another streamer, and they both really loved it.

Dan Caston: Yeah.

Calum Martin: And that gave inspiration for … actually a lot of people ask all the time, like You Tubers and streamers: Oh what scenery do you have? So we’re gonna give them a way as well to basically look at our database and go: Right I have these sceneries, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they can have their own custom page. So if you went to Directory.net/geo for example, he would have his whole, his directory out there. So you can go: Oh, I see he’s got this airport so I can click on there and each airport will have full details. So everything from screenshots, videos, if there’s any news on it from the scenery. The idea is just to put everything into one consolidated place rather than having to try and search 20 different stores or Google it or search dozens of You Tube videos and stuff like that.

Dan Caston: Mm-hmm.

Calum Martin: So it just brings it all into one simple place and, yeah, I think it’s gonna be a very beneficial tool for the community. And not only that, but also I think it will support developers a lot more in terms of having their content more viewed. I get the impression that once a scenery is released by a developer it kind of tales off pretty quickly.

Dan Caston: Right.

Calum Martin: So this, hopefully, will kind of help to sustain that a little bit more for them as well. So it benefits everybody essentially.

Dan Caston: Yeah. I can see that. Is this gonna be a paid membership type thing? Or do you sign up for free? Or how is it gonna work?

Calum Martin: So anyone can use it for free. So once we launch you would just go to DIRCTY.net and then be able to use it. We’re gonna have an accounts-based system which includes some more cool details. So, for example, each listing you’ll be able to add to something cool in My Directory account. So if you just click the button then it will populate a list of all the scenery that you have chosen. So you can use that as either a wish list or you can use it as a list of all the sceneries and the stuff that you own. So we’re not gonna say what you have to do it for, but it’s just a function that’s there.

Dan Caston: Mm-hmm. (Affirmative).

Calum Martin: So in the future we’re gonna be looking at doing live pricing so if a store is having a sale on, then you can compare all the different stores in one place rather than having to go to different stores to find it and stuff as well. So that will be-

Dan Caston: Nice. So where can people get in touch with you if they want to, like, website, Twitter, You Tube or wherever you’re out there?

Calum Martin: So the best way to get in touch with me personally is just through the contact page FS-Elite. I mean you can use our Facebook, Twitter or You Tube to message. I might not always pick up straight away so you’re better off just emailing me through that. So, yeah, I think that’s probably the easiest space and I tend to get back to people pretty quickly. I’ve always been very passionate about listening to people’s feedback, whether that’s positive or you’ve got something else you’d like to say to me. But I think we’re on board and I’ll always try and give you an answer or some reason behind our logic and stuff as well.

Dan Caston: Right. Sounds good. Well, I think we’re gonna run out of time here.

Calum Martin: Typical Brit talking too much.

Dan Caston: (chuckles). Yeah. No, it’s perfect. Alright so your website there is FS-Elite.net. Right? That’s FS-Elite.net? Is that correct?

Calum Martin: That is perfect.

Dan Caston: Alright. Awesome. Alright. Well thanks for coming on the podcast. Glad to have you here and we will talk to you soon.

Calum Martin: Thank you very much for your time as well and just before we go I just wanna say you guys have done some really good work on educating for virtual reality. So, yeah, definitely the advice on here has just been amazing that I’ve read so far. So I want to say thank you for your hard work as well on that.

Dan Caston: Ah, thanks man. Talk to you later.

Calum Martin: Cool. Thanks again.

Dan Caston: And there you have it. Thanks for joining us for our podcast. Hope you guys enjoyed it and make sure if you do enjoy you subscribe to our channel. If you’re using iTunes there’s a subscribe button there. Hit that and you’ll be notified any time we have any new podcasts coming out. Also check out FS-Elite. This is the website that Calum Martin has been working on. There’s tons of great information on there. He puts out news articles all the time. So make sure you guys check it out.
So we’re always trying to find new guests for the podcasts and I really wanna make sure I’m focusing on the people that you want on the podcasts. So make sure you send me an email. My email is dan@vrflightworld.com. That’s dan@vrflightworld.com. Let me know who you want on the podcasts and I will look through it and see if we can find some of these people and we will contact them and see if we can get them on our show.
So for anyone interested, we’re gonna have the show notes at VR FlightWorld.com/9. That’s VR FlightWorld.com/9. Doesn’t matter if it’s a number or the word. It will lead to the same place. You can also see the show notes in the description of iTunes and all those links on there will be ones we’ve mentioned, as well as the equipment that I use for my flight sim, as well as anything that’s mentioned by Calum, we will try to include that in those show notes. So I’ll add all the links there and it should make it a little easier to find the information you need.
Thanks again guys for listening and I hope you guys have an awesome day. We will see you guys in the next episode, which will be about two weeks from now.

Announcer (John Melley): Thanks for listening to the VR FlightWorld podcast online at VR FlightWorld.com.

John Melley: Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast! The place where flight training and your home office collide. Get tips, tricks, and in depth interviews about flight training, virtual reality, and flight simulation, with your host Dan Caston.Dan Caston: Hey everyone and welcome to the VR Flight world podcast, this is episode number eight. Today we’re going to be interviewing Sergio Costa, who is the owner of Helisimmer.com. He is very knowledgeable when it comes to flight sim specifically when it comes to flying a helicopter. I’m sure you guys are gonna get some great information from him, so stay tuned, we’re gonna be talking about VR, we’re gonna be talking about helicopters, and just flight sim in general, so here we go!
So hey Sergio! Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast! Glad to have you here.Sérgio Costa: Thank you, and thank you for having me here.Dan Caston: Yeah no worries, we are really excited to have you here. I know you have a ton of experience with helicopters and flight sim in general. So do you mind just giving the audience a quick overview on what got you into flight sim and helicopters?Sérgio Costa: Yeah, yeah, sure thing. Well, I think there’s this thing that all of us who are in flight simulation have which is a huge passion for aviation. Right, so, I don’t know anyone that’s about flight simulation that doesn’t have a huge passion for real [inaudible 00:01:23] aviation. And that’s something that obviously I share with the rest of the community. I started having contact with aviation as soon as my brother was in the Air Force.
I was kind of thinking about joining the Air Force as well, but then I got interested with other things, and I kind of side tracked and started working with computers, but back in, I don’t know, ’94 perhaps, I started looking at flight simulation as something that could be very exciting for me. And so I started playing with Microsoft Flight Simulation. And from there, my passion for the hobby just grew and grew.
And back in, I don’t know, perhaps 2000, 2002, something like that, I started looking at helicopters. So, everybody likes to fly airliners, everybody likes to fly the jet fighters, everybody likes that kind of stuff, but I was in flight simulation for so long, that I was looking for a new challenge. I was already flying airliners for quite some time. I was already flying general aviation for quite some time. Not exactly, I wasn’t exactly giving the best use to my flight sim, I was just flying around like crazy and doing, you know, funny stuff, and low flights, low passes, and what not. And back in 2000 or 2002 or something like that, I started looking at helicopters as another challenge.
And that was actually what kind of kicked in something in me that, you know, brought me to actually want to learn more about flight simulation, want to learn more about how actual flying works. How pilots use procedures to get from point A to point B. I started learning about navigation, about patterns, about everything that usually pilots start to learn, I started learning much later down my flight simulation experience. I found a website called OverControl.com, which still exists but it’s very, I wouldn’t say it’s bad but it’s pretty much stopped right now, and so I learned a lot with the community, and with everybody that was around OverControl and the helicopter flight simulation.
And back in 2006, 2007, I launched a PDF magazine called Rotorwash Magazine, which was an awful amount of work. Having to lay out everything, all the information, trying to get the articles and the reviews and a plethora of things from the guys that were helping me, and eventually the project ended up dying. But my passion for helicopters kept on going. And two years ago, I decided to start and launch HeliSimmer.com, which is my website, and basically give back to the community everything that the community has been giving me for the last twenty plus years.
So that’s pretty much my road down the flight sim.

Dan Caston: Yeah, wow, that’s quite impressive. You started in ’94? Is that where you got your aviation passion? That’s cool.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, well, in ’94 I was eighteen years old. But my passion for aviation has began much much earlier, with my brother.

Dan Caston: Oh okay, what was your first sim you were using?

Sérgio Costa: My first one? I think it was FS, Flight Simulator 4? Or something? And it was actually at my friend’s house, they didn’t have a computer back then. But I managed to get to purchase a copy of Flight Simulator, of FS4, from a guy that was abandoning flight simulation. He didn’t like it, it was just, you know, back then too much of a hassle for him. He wanted something simpler, and we look back, FS4 wasn’t actually that much complex, but he wanted something more simple and just shoot down stuff and so he was selling a copy of FS4.
I bought it, and brought it to a friend of mine, and told him that I had this amazingly cool game, and the guy fell asleep while I was trying a flight sim so, yeah. I don’t think he liked it that much, but I loved it. I was completely hooked. I was completely hooked.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure. So, what kind of system are you now running?

Sérgio Costa: I have an Intel i7 7700, not the K, the regular one that’s not overclocked, and NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX1060 which is the very bare minimum for you to be able to use VR, so I advise you guys to get a 1070 at least, but the 1060 allows you to get VR. Sixteen gigabytes of RAM, then I have 256 gigabyte SSD, and it’s terabyte hard drive. Oh, and the HTC Vive of course.

Dan Caston: Right. And what, is that the six gigabyte 1060, or the three, I think they made two.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, they made two, they made the three and the six, it’s the six one, yeah.

Dan Caston: Right. That’s actually the same one I have now too, so, and I always recommend probably a 1070. Because I could run VR right now, but, if things… Because every few weeks, things are improving, and it’s always getting harder on the system, so I’m always saying, you probably wanna go with 1070 or, if you can afford it 1080.

Sérgio Costa: Definitely. Definitely. Yeah the 1060 was, for me, was a compromise. I used to have an old laptop, so I had to buy an older system. And you know, things are not actually cheap, right, so I had to compromise and to get a good CPU, to get a good motherboard, to get you know, the SSD and what not, I had to compromise with the graphics card.
And, I’m not sorry that I bought it. It’s like this investment that you know that, eventually you are going to have to re-do in the future. But it’s keeping me, it’s allowing me to use VR and to use my sim so far so, I’m happy right now.

Dan Caston: Yeah, same here. So, with your equipment, you said you have the Vive. What else do you have for equipment, like, what kind of flight controls and that kind of thing?

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, I’m sorry, I forgot the flight controls! I use dedicated helicopter flight simulation controls. I use the Pro Flight Trainer Puma, which is a kit that replicates helicopter controls. So it has a collective with throttle, it has the pedals, that do not center, they are like inverted L’s, like in the Bell 206, and everything is positioned the same way that is in a real helicopter.

Dan Caston: Okay, nice. And those are, you said, Pro Flight from Puma?

Sérgio Costa: The model is Puma and the manufacturer, actually, the manufacturer is a Canadian company. I know you’re Canadian, so, those guys are from your neck of the woods. The company is called Pro Flight Trainer.

Dan Caston: I’m kind of jumping ahead here, but is there other flight controls that are available for helicopters? Or is it pretty limited?

Sérgio Costa: Well, there are other manufacturers. There’s Komodo Systems in the UK, there’s Max Flight Stick from, this is a guy from Hong Kong, and then you have more professional line of controls from a guy from Australia called Chris Ryan, and his company’s called Ryan Aerospace.
Now there’s a problem that these manufacturers have, and people complain and people are right. These controls are really, really expensive. The Pro Flight Trainer Puma, the kit that I use, is one of the cheaper out there. I’m not coming with another one, I actually don’t remember the name to be honest, but it’s one made of plastic, old plastic, and the one I have is made out of metal, but the Pro Flight Trainer Puma is one of the cheapest kits that you have.
And we’re talking about $1200. Okay, so.

Dan Caston: Oh wow.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, it’s not cheap.

Dan Caston: It’s not cheap, but.

Sérgio Costa: But it’s not because. Yeah, no, it’s not. But it’s not because the guys want to rip off simmers or anything like that. For one they are using good materials, this is metal, this is actually aluminum, very sturdy, very solid. But the thing is, just like in real life, you have a very low amount of helicopter pilots when compared with fixed wing pilots. You have like tens of thousands of fixed wing pilots guys that fly Cessnas or airliners or what not, and then you have a handful of guys in the whole world flying helicopters. Not a handful, but when compared to the amount of guys flying fixed wing, that’s the reality.
And the same happens with the helicopter flight simulation community. We are a very small niche inside the community. You can see, for example, there are groups inside the flight simulation community with tens of thousands of users, and the group that we have on Facebook has less than 4000 guys. And most of them are not active. I would say that probably 80% or more are not dedicated helicopter flight simulator simmers, so, these are guys who like helicopters, but their main simming is made out of fixed wing aircraft.
What happens is that manufacturers have to produce a lower amount of their kits, so they’re not manufacturing these in huge factories in which, the more you build the less expensive they become. So they are building a low amount of units, of their products, so the price is obviously much higher than a bulk environment. So that’s the thing, yeah, so it’s not cheap. It’s well worth it, it’s well worth it. It’s a whole new dimension for those who fly helicopters. But it’s really not cheap, and it’s not easy to get one of these kits.

Dan Caston: Right, and the ones I’ve looked up look like high quality. Like you were saying, they’re made of steel. When you get the stuff for the fixed wing, a lot of it’s plastic and a little cheaper feeling, but I guess they have the bigger manufacturers, they can-

Sérgio Costa: Yeah that’s the thing, even the ones you find in metal, for example, the Thrust Master, the Warthog, which is absolutely incredible, you can buy it for like $400 or something right now. And it’s still less than half the price of a helicopter system.

Dan Caston: For sure. That makes sense. So, going over to kind of training here, it seems like you taught yourself from our conversation before, you don’t have any official training in an actual helicopter. Did you teach yourself or did you have… Where did you find all your training on helicopters and that kind of thing?

Sérgio Costa: Yeah well, like I told you, I found out about OverControl.com that website I was telling you before, and they have the forums, where you know you could talk to other guys on there and ask them for stuff, or just watch the conversations flow and learn from what people were telling each other. And they also have, they still have it online, like this program that you would follow, that would teach you how to hover, how to perform certain maneuvers. They had this scenery that you would download for FSX, and they had these little circles painted on the floor, that you would use for reference and for flying over and doing a lot of maneuvers.
So basically I have learned with other guys that were already in the flight simulation community in the helicopter flight simulation community. And by following this kind of program that OverControl have, it really allowed me to become a better pilot and to learn a lot.
And you know, just like in anything in life, and just like with real flying, you always keep on learning. Not just because, you know, sims evolve, and with the evolution of sims, they start to have new stuff. Like, for example, back in 2000, didn’t have things like vortex ring state, or asymmetric lift, or anything like that, which is very specific to helicopters. Very specific aerodynamical conditions for helicopters. And they start to have them on X Plane and DCS and a bit on P3D if you use an external module.
So you keep on learning with other people, and with real pilots, and by reading books of actual, you know, real world instructed pilots that have released books on the subject. So, yeah, but basically I’m kind of a self taught guy, but always with the help of other guys, other people around me.

Dan Caston: For sure. Is this OverControl.com, you said there was a program you used. Is that program still available, or is it-

Sérgio Costa: No it’s still there, it’s still there. The program is not a piece of software, it’s a program you follow, it’s like you know, you have chapters or parts, yeah you have chapters or parts and you just follow it, and you get to learn a lot. And I’ve actually, I haven’t gone so deep as they went on some of the maneuvers, but I’ve tried to translate a lot of what they had, what they still have on the website, to my own website so you can actually at helisimmer.com, my website, you have the huge banner on top and you can access a section of the website that teaches you to fly helicopters well.
So, you’ll be okay if you go to OverControl, or if you go to my website, if you actually go to both websites you’ll probably get information, you can get complementary information from both websites.
Although, at helisimmer.com, my website, I have more advanced stuff like I told you. Sims got to get better, and they evolved, and they added new aerodynamical features, and we cover some of those aerodynamical features on our own program, if you can call it that, on our own articles. So you learn how to, what vortex ring is and how to prevent it, and other things as well.

Dan Caston: Right, yeah, I did actually, I was looking at your website there and I did see there’s a learn to fly section on there. So if anyone’s looking to get into helicopters, I recommend going to his website there. Helisimmer.com, right?

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, that’s right.

Dan Caston: So going on to… Like when you’re flying, at least, with the plane, I would assume with the helicopter as well, you have a checklist and all that. What are the things… it’s actually kind of a problem with VR that I’ve been trying to get around, is how do you manage to implement checklists into your VR flight? Is that something you do? Or do you just memorize what you have to do?

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, that’s kind of the million dollar question, right? We love VR, VR is awesome, we’re inside the cockpit, but yeah, you cannot see anything that you have on your hands, or, in front of you.
Well, I usually do one of two things. Let me put it this way. I have a very low amount of time for simming, and I don’t have the time to go through code and arc and do all the start up procedures.
You know, my simming is very limited, it’s something that you probably have found out as well. But I have found out that with helisimmer.com, which is, you have a passion for a hobby, you have a passion for something, you start to develop something for the community and all of the sudden you spend more time working for the community than you spend actually simming.
So my time in the flight simulator is very short. And usually, when I get some simming time, I’m either reviewing a helicopter, or a scenery, or just, you know, trying something that someone has sent me, so I have a very reduced amount of time for the hobby. Not for helisimmer, but for just flying for pleasure.
So what I usually do, if I want to do a code and arc, I usually start without VR. I use mainly X Plane. So I probably start without VR and going through the checklist, and you know, just looking around using the mouse and using the views that the X Plane allows you to use with the num pad keys, and then when everything is set up I just put on my Vive, I turn VR on, and I’ll do my flight.
Of course, if there’s an emergency, it’s going to be very hard for me to see the emergency procedures checklist. But there’s this mall application, mall plugin for VR, for X Plane, sorry, I forgot the name to be honest. It’s A View or something. It allows you to have windows inside X Plane so you can have a pdf or an image or something. You can pull them out and see them inside the sim.

Dan Caston: I think with the Oculus you can actually get a window through the menus there. I have a video tutorial on how to do it, but it does eat up CPU and it eats up your computer power when you’re operating it, so you have to watch if you’re kind of maxing out your computer already, and then you add that on, you may start to get some stutters and that kind of thing.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah that’s what happens when you start turning on things, turning on other pieces of software, but actually, this plugin, I can send you the link after the interview, this plugin allows you to have windows inside X Plane, and it’s not an external application that you run, it’s something that runs natively inside X Plane, which allows you to see checklists.
But yeah, I would like to see something. And I know, probably a couple of helicopter developers are working on this, with their own plugin so you can have the checklist and other things, like maps for example, or you know, charts, airport charts, inside the flight simulator. So you can see everything inside windows and manipulate them and zoom them and whatnot.
But yeah, I would like to see a good option for us to use checklists and other documents inside the sim, using VR.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure. I’m sure they’re working like mad to get that accomplished. A lot of my audience would probably love to have that, because a lot of my audience is people who are looking to go on to actually flying planes or helicopters or that kind of thing so, checklists would be an important one to implement.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, very important. Right.

Dan Caston: But emergency ones should be, I guess, done by memory anyway, I would assume, for the most part, so.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, true, that’s right, yeah. That’s right. At least the first items, and then you just have to try to pull them out somehow.

Dan Caston: Yeah, exactly. So what would be the first thing you would wanna learn if you were starting to fly a helicopter?

Sérgio Costa: You’ll want to learn to have a lot of patience, and to be… I’m not kidding! And you need to learn to be patient, and then you need to learn to be resilient. Helicopters are just not easy pieces of aircraft to fly. They are very hard to fly, they are very hard to learn, they are very hard to master, so you need to be very patient.
You need to have a good system that allows you to run at least thirty frames per second if you’re not using VR. If you’re using VR, of course, you need to have at least forty five frames per second on each eye. So you need to be running at ninety. But if you’re not using VR you need at least thirty frames per second, so that the helicopter and the flight sim engine performs all the correct calculations, and for the physics, and for the aerodynamics of the helicopter.
Then you have to practice. You have to practice a lot. If you ask me what the very first practical thing you need to learn when flying a helicopter, that’s probably, the first challenge is for you to hover. It’s for you to control the helicopter steady above the ground in order that it doesn’t fly around or go backwards or sideways or gain altitude or lose altitude. Just try to be steady, and pointing to the same direction.
Now this sounds easy, right? Because the notion that people have is that helicopters are kind of like an elevator, and you push a button and it goes up, and you push another button and it goes down. But the thing is that helicopters are very wild beasts. They are very unstable. And there are so many forces acting against you when you are flying a helicopter that you need to be on top of the game the whole time.
So when you are pulling the collective up, and the collective is the control that changes the pitch of the rotor blades, and when you pull up the collective you are adding pitch to the rotor blades, so you are, the rotors are biting more air and you are actually gaining lift. But as you do it, there’s this Newton’s Law, that screws it up for you. So the rotor is spinning on one direction, and as you are adding pitch, and you are adding drag to the rotors, the fuselage you want to rotate on the opposite direction. So if the rotor is turning to the left, as soon as you start raising the collective, the fuselage wants to roll to the right, so you need to give left pedal.
And there’s a whole bunch of other things that are going to happen next. You are going to give more left pedal, the left pedal will control your tail rotor, so the tail rotor will increase its power. It’s going to push you to the side, and you’ll have to use the side click to correct itself, so, it’s like a ballet. It’s like dancing.
It’s like trying to… One guy said that controlling a helicopter, I think it was an instructor pilot, controlling a helicopter is like you being sitting on the hood of a car, at high speed, and trying to control a bicycle that is in front of you, but you are holding the bicycle by the front wheel. So, you know, you’re trying to balance that and try not to get killed in the process.
So yeah, that’s why I told you, the first thing you need to learn is to have patience. It’s not easy, to fly helicopters. It’s very hard. And then, if you are a patient guy, you are a resilient guy, and you have the time to practice, the first thing would be to hover, and from then it starts. Take off. Land, and do all the other maneuvers.

Dan Caston: Right, that makes sense. So if things go wrong, have you done much for emergency landings and that kind of thing? In your sim?

Sérgio Costa: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Caston: How well does it simulate that in X Plane? Because it’s a different beast to simulate an emergency landing in a helicopter where your engine stops versus in a plane where you just glide and glide.

Sérgio Costa: Yes, it’s very different, and it depends on the sim that you are using. FSX and PREPAR3D for example are very bad at it.
Well, generally speaking, Flight Simulator and P3D so the ESP Engine from Microsoft is really bad at simulating helicopters. I’m not saying it’s a bad sim, and I know a lot of guys who use it and love it, so no, I usually say to each his own. I have nothing against people that use it, but I’m don’t like it. I don’t like to use those sims for helicopter flight simulation.
Now X Plane and DCS are much better when providing simulation for helicopters. And what happens when the engine stops, and most of the guys think that, you know, the engine stops in the helicopter and you are dead, you’re going to fall. What happens is that the gear box will decouple the rotor from the engine, so the rotor will start spinning on its own.
And instead of… When the engine is coupled to the rotor, and the rotor is spinning, you are actually using your rotor to, like I said before, bite the air, to actually provide you lift. When the engine is decoupled from the rotor, and you start to place the helicopter into position, the air flow, as you are moving forward, because you’ll still be moving forward, you’re not just gonna fall vertically… As you’re moving forward, the air passing through the blades will keep the blades spinning, and the rotor disc as a whole will provide you with lift.
So in essence, you will be gliding, just like in an aircraft. The thing is that you need to be, instead of just having to worry about your speed, as in a fixed wing aircraft, you also need to worry about RPM, so the speed of the rotor. Because if you lose RPM, if your RPM drops from a certain speed down, and that depends on the helicopter, you will eventually lose your wing. So you will eventually lose your lift, and you’ll actually die from the fall.
But if you keep the rotor spinning at a certain speed, and you keep everything within parameters, you can actually select the place you want to land at, and with a bit of training you can land on a very short very small area, which actually makes it safer than a fixed wing aircraft. Right? You have a lot of frontal of the horizontal speed to keep the aircraft flying, and as you are flying, as you are landing, if you are flying a Cessna you’d probably be approaching at like 80 to 100 knots? Something like that? On a helicopter, you usually, again, it depends on the helicopter, but on a helicopter an auto rotation, that’s what the maneuver is called, an auto rotation if usually performed at 60 knots.
And you can almost hover just before you touch down, so, the speed of… Your horizontal speed as you touch down, as you put the skids on the ground, is going to be very, very low. There’s a huge chance that you are going to surVive the auto rotation.
That’s pretty much it. So you were asking me how well does X Plane or DCS simulate these? Well, they do a pretty good job. They’re not perfect, but they do a pretty good job. DCS’s a bit better than X Plane, but you can perform these maneuvers on both sims very, very well and use them as training.

Dan Caston: Okay. And speaking of the sims there, what is your simulator of choice nowadays?

Sérgio Costa: I used mostly X Plane. Not just because the sim overall is a good sim, but also because DCS is a great sim, and it probably has the best helicopters out there, but the thing is that it’s very limited in terms of scenery. So, X Plane gives me this balance between having the whole world, so to say, so to speak, and having a good collection of helicopters and great flight dynamics. So yeah, I think that’s my sim of choice.

Dan Caston: Perfect, and in these sims, what helicopter do you normally fly, or what’s your favorite chopper to be in, or do you have a different one for each sim?

Sérgio Costa: Well, that’s a hard choice. On DCS, my favorite is the Huey. I just love that helicopter, it’s very stable, it’s very forgiving, the sound is amazing, right, so everybody loves the sound of the Huey, so that’s the one I use when I use DCS, when I’m flying DCS.
Although the Gazelle is also an amazing helicopter, since I use DCS, which, ironically, is a combat simulator, but I mostly use it as a civilian simulator, so I fly around the areas and do cargo loading and what not.
For X Plane, I would say it’s the DreamFoil, the AS350, so the A-Star, the AeroStar. It’s a great, nimble helicopter, very hard to fly, but it’s very, very fun!

Dan Caston: Okay. What about the… is there any free helicopters to kind of get someone started or get their feet wet in this? Or do you have to mainly go with payware to get a good experience.

Sérgio Costa: No, no, no, no, not really. Well, in DCS, all the modules are paid, so if you want to try DCS and fly helicopters in DCS, you have no other choice than actually purchase the products, purchase the Huey or the Gazelle or the Mi-8, or DKA50.
And in X Plane, you do have a default helicopter that I don’t usually… I wouldn’t recommend to start flying helicopters with it. The flight dynamics is very poor. The helicopter is fine for something default, it’s not brilliant, but you do have some freewares out there. And the one that I would probably recommend for you to start with would be the Bell429. It’s a very good platform, it’s very recent platform, it’s a very modern helicopter. It has a stability system, which allows you to… Everything that I told you before about helicopters being very hard to fly, and all these forces, when you pull up the collective… everything will be dampened by the SAS, the stabilization augmentation system of the 429.
Which, the helicopter sensors get what’s happening, and they will correct a lot of things for you. So the helicopter will be very stable, very easy to fly, very peaceful. It’s a very good helicopter for someone to start flying helicopters without spending a lot of money. Just, you know, purchase X Plane and get the 429er for free.

Dan Caston: Right, makes sense. You talk about the forces and all that. In VR, do you find that you actually feel those? Like, when I’m flying the plane, and I do something crazy, something I wouldn’t do in an actual plane, but, I do almost like a loop in a Cessna, or something like that, it actually makes your gut kind of drop a bit.
Do you find that helps you in the helicopter to kind of stabilize yourself, when you’re running VR?

Sérgio Costa: Well, it helps when it doesn’t make you sick.

Dan Caston: Yeah, fair enough.

Sérgio Costa: But yeah, it helps. It helps a lot. VR is a game changer in fight simulation. It’s something that, you know, it’s like night and day. It’s completely different, you have a lot more depth perception, you have a lot more of perfect vision.
The fact that you can just nudge your head a bit and get a better glance of the instruments, or look down to the bubble chin, and you know, see the ground, or put your head outside of the helicopters and see what’s coming, what’s coming beneath you. It’s a game changer, and it also gives you that physical sensation that you were saying.
When you are going a bit over the edge and just overdoing it, your body, your stomach kind of, yeah, you get a feeling of something that’s happening physically. And that’s a big red alert, that’s a red flag, so you have to be careful of when doing these maneuvers.
But yeah, it helps a lot. Actually, one of the guys who got me into VR, and I know this was going to be one of the questions that you were going to make, but I’m just getting down and I’m going to say it. One of the guys that got me into VR was your last guest Bel Geode, Drew Bolton, right, and you know, him and another guy that works with me for helisimmer.com called Joe Hudson, a real Apache instructor pilot. And you know, these guys were talking about VR all the time, and you know, “You gotta try VR, you gotta try VR.”
And I was not skeptical about VR, but I was kind of skeptical about VR in flight simulation. It’s like, I’m a technical guy, my work is with computers, so it’s not like I’m running away from technology. But the thing is, I thought that, I didn’t really think that it would make such a difference. Even if I have tried VR, regular VR, a demo, a few years ago with Aviator STK.
It was like, yeah okay, this is novelty, this is just something new. Yeah, maybe I was seeing it as kind of a glamorous track IR, you know, the device that allows you to- yeah. I was seeing VR as a glamorous track IR. And you know these guys were constantly, especially Drew, was constantly telling me that I need to get into VR. I needed to give it a try. And you know, VR being a game changer is almost like a trademark. And this trademark comes from Drew. You all say VR is a game changer and I kind of piggy back on this sentence of his, but that is the truth. And for those guys that are out there right now listening to the podcast, just because they are curious and never tried VR. Guys, seriously, this is absolutely insane, it is a game changer. Drew is right. It is a game changer. It’s something that if you guys are serious about flight simulation, if you guys really love flight simulation, if you really love how to fly, you’ve got to try it on VR. It’s that much of a different, it’s that good.
So yeah, I would say that yeah, for me, it’s been a big difference. I cannot imagine, you know, flying without VR anymore. I do it now and then, you know, to take some screenshots, or to look at some specifics or, sometimes even to record a video because I can get more area of the screen, but I don’t like to fly without VR anymore. That’s how much of a difference it made. Yeah.

Dan Caston: Yeah, same here. Yup. Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. Just going back to the nausea, have you had the nausea from flying the helicopter at all?

Sérgio Costa: I’ve had, yeah, I’ve had it. In the beginning it was far worse, but I think that we need to keep at it, and we need to… It’s not good for you if you are going to use your kit for the first time and, you know, spend an hour or two getting sick and throwing up and not feeling well, you are not going to have a good experience.
So I would say that, I don’t know of anyone that hasn’t had at least a bit of nausea, or a bit of a headache, for the first few times, so I would say that you probably need to do sessions of ten to fifteen minutes and go from there. But I still feel nausea now and then, for some reason, for example, if it’s too hot, and I’m just doing some crazy maneuvers, like you said. I feel a bit sick now and then. Not as much as I used to in the beginning, but that happens. And when that happens, the best thing you can do is just wait. Just stop it.

Dan Caston: Right. Yeah. And I found it a little bit more with the helicopter versus the the fixed wing. Maybe it’s because you’re constantly just kind of floating around. But maybe that’s because I have to keep my frame rate a little higher when I’m flying a helicopter vs flying a fixed wing. Have you noticed frame rate affects you, at all?

Sérgio Costa: It does, it does if it goes down, yeah. It’s a known issue with the low frame rates. If I notice that for some reason in a series that I use the frame rate goes below, let’s say, forty to forty five frames per second, I just quit. I don’t even try.
Because I know I’m going to get sick. And if you guys out there notice the same, just quit it, because you know, feeling sick out of motion sickness it’s one of the worst kinds of sick you can get. It’s awful. It’s really bad.

Dan Caston: So just to clarify, when you say to quit, just to give it up for that few minutes and let yourself kind of rest and then come back and try again another time?

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah.

Dan Caston: Don’t give up on VR altogether.

Sérgio Costa: No, no, no, don’t give up. You can even get back at it the day after. Sometimes it just feel… the fact that you are feeling better after a few minutes doesn’t mean that the second you are going to get the kit on your head again and fly for thirty seconds, it doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen again.
And it has happened to me, that the second time was even worse than the first time. And I was feeling sick for hours after that. I’m not kidding, it was really bad. So if you are starting to feel sick, and if you are not 100% sure that it’s going to be okay in a few minutes, just drop it for the day, go do anything else. If you want to fly, fly without VR, but don’t overdo it or you’ll never want to use VR again. And that’s not worth risking not using VR again just because you are being stubborn.

Dan Caston: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Actually, I had one person say that they had some nausea issues and they were trying to learn to fly a helicopter. They said the frame rate was good but they had glasses on. They were wondering if that had any effect on the nausea?

Sérgio Costa: They had what, I’m sorry I didn’t… glasses?

Dan Caston: They were wearing glasses, like prescription lasses.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah. I use them as well. I think that might be an effect of some light that kind of spreads on the lens, and sometimes gives you a false sensation of what’s happening inside the sim. I’ve not… It never gave me nausea, that particular effect, but I have noticed that sometimes I get, my brain gets a little tricked by the… I wouldn’t say it’s a game of lights or dance of lights, but it’s different lights coming far from actually… I’m sorry, actually arriving to the eye from a different angle than it’s supposed to. So you are actually seeing the same thing twice, and that might actually trick your brain into getting to this motion sickness.

Dan Caston: Right. So, how do you deal with glasses? Because I see you wear glasses, so, there’s a couple of things coming to my mind is one, just getting the glasses underneath. But with the Oculus, it kind of presses on them. And there’s the contacts, or… even those, there are some kits you can put in your headset?
So what do you do to kind of, solve that? Or do you have any issues?

Sérgio Costa: No I have no issues, the only issue that I have is the one that I told you about which is sometimes the reflection of light, of the different light sources, coming to my eye. Physically, the physical part of glasses, the lenses and the frame and, I have zero problems with it.
I have tried the Oculus Rift, and I didn’t, I can’t say I had any issues with it. I have a very low, if you see my photo of me, I have a very low profile frame that my lenses have no frame around it, so it’s just the lenses, and some very small titanium things, but… The HTC almost seems to have been developed for people with glasses. Because on the sides where the frame goes to your ear, there’s actually, the sponge is a little cut out, so my glasses just go through it. And I have no pressure, no anything from the kit, onto my glasses.
So it feels pretty comfortable. The only thing that I really notice is like I told you before already, it’s the light thing. But other than that, no physical issues.

Dan Caston: Right, okay. Well that’s good to know. Because some people I guess have issues with the pressure on there, but maybe they need to look at getting low profile glasses.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, that’s probably it, or just try to get something for… I’ve seen a guy, with a Rift, actually getting a thicker sponge, so that the distance between the kit and his face was a bit higher. We’re talking about two or three millimeters.

Dan Caston: What was this, sorry? It’s a-

Sérgio Costa: A thicker sponge, around the, you know the sponge you place on your face? The guy got a thicker sponge like one or three millimeters more, and he said that for him it was enough for his glasses not to… to actually the frame of the Rift. And that might be a solution.

Dan Caston: Okay I could see that. Okay sounds good. And I see they sell those online lots, so, for pretty cheap.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah but usually people want to get, you know, the thinner ones, because they want to have less space between the face and the kit. This guy was actually found out thicker ones with more space.

Dan Caston: Okay so that’s something to watch out for if you’re looking to get a thicker sponge for around the eyes there.

Sérgio Costa: Yup.

Dan Caston: Okay, so just going back to, if you were first starting out in flight sim or VR flight sim, what would be kind of the first set up you would get? Like what would you want for controls, what would you want for headset, just kind of… even if you’re a little bit limited in money, you wanna just start getting started in this, you’re brand new. What would you kind of suggest?

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, well, you’re going to have to compromise, and right off the bat between the Vive and the Rift, get the Rift, it’s cheaper. I have the Vive, I have tried the Vive and the Rift, you know, there are a lot of guys out there preaching for both. The Rift rules and the Vive rules, and honestly, yeah you probably notice some differences on the image, you are going to notice some differences on the image, but I have tried both kits and it’s not that much of a difference. And the Rift, it’s cheaper than the Vive. So for the kit itself, right off the bat, get the Rift.
Then try to get the best computer you can get. At least an i5, sixteen gigabytes of RAM, if you can afford it, and at least the SIM card that we have, the GTX 1060 or the equivalent from AMD, and try to get a flight sim a holder system, from Thrustmaster, from Logitech, something that allows you to have control over your engines, using the throttle, and of course the joystick and if possible, some way for you even if you need a joystick with a twist stick or something to control your rotor pedals or your anti-torque pedals, considering using helicopters.
But yeah that would be probably the bare minimum for you to start and enjoy your simming. Having an SSD’s great, but guys, really, if you are on a tight budget, try to get a better card instead of the SSD. If you can choose between a 1060 and an SSD or you know the 1070 and no SSD right now, I would probably go with the 1070. I would probably go with the better card. You’re going to have better results, and it’s an investment that’s going to allow you to take much more out of VR with better frame rates that reduce risk of nausea and really enhance your experience for sure.
Other than that, you’ll eventually start to get better gear in the future. That’s the bare minimum for me.

Dan Caston: Okay. And now, going to the opposite here. If you had to get your dream setup, what would you get for sort of the dream setup, for a helicopter I guess, in this case?

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, well, I would get a 1080 TI, right? It’s the mother lode of all graphics cards, or the next generation, the 1180s, or the other ones that NVIDIA are getting. Thirty two gigabytes of RAM, probably a i8 or an i9, you know, those Intel CPUs they have released recently with lots of cores, not that we are going to get a lot of those cores right now until Vulcan comes out. But yeah, I’d probably get an i8 or an i9.
An HTC Vive, just because, you know, since we are talking about something that can be more expensive, the Vive not only has a better space for my glasses, right, we have talked about it before, but also because it can use better with other games, because of their room scales. So you have, you can play games standing on your room or running around or something. So that’s a big plus if you are into VR and not just flight simulation.
About the controls? I haven’t tried any of the other controls that I have mentioned before from Max Flight Stick, or Ryan Aerospace or something, you know, being a professional system, but we’re talking about tens of thousands of euros, or dollars here. I would probably get a Ryan Aerospace system, for helicopter flight simulation. Those guys sell those systems for flight schools and what not. But, you know, speaking on gaming, or not on gaming but on more reasonable amount of money, I would definitely get Pro Flight Training Puma, the kit that I have right now and I mentioned in the beginning.
I just love that kit. It’s a small kit, a single unit so you don’t have to assemble it or anything, or attach it to the floor, it’s a full set. I just love it! If that kit for some reason breaks, I’m gonna cry. I’m gonna be so sad I’m gonna cry and I probably will never touch a flight simulator again.
I’m joking of course, but yeah. I’m gonna be very depressed if that thing breaks.

Dan Caston: Yeah, exactly. You’ll probably have the next one on order as soon as it breaks.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, or even before, I start to be looking to break… well. They do have, you know, parts for you to repair so it’s not something that haunts me, but yeah, if it stops working for some reason imagine that, for example, the electronics go, you know, they just burn out or something, yeah. I’m gonna be depressed for some time before I get it sorted out.

Dan Caston: For sure. And I recently saw that you have this controller essentially, it’s like a glove? Is this something we can talk about on here? If not, I can cut it out.

Sérgio Costa: Oh yeah, no no it’s okay!

Dan Caston: I think it’s Sensor… Sensory X?

Sérgio Costa: Sensory X, yeah.

Dan Caston: Yeah.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, I don’t have it. I don’t have it. I have the, I don’t know, I don’t have it, yet.

Dan Caston: Have you tried anything like that? Or, I guess you.

Sérgio Costa: Ah, no. No, I haven’t tried it.

Dan Caston: I saw that video of it working, but, I was wondering how well it works.

Sérgio Costa: Well I’ve been in touch with Sensory X, and I’ve been very interested in this because it’s, I’m not going to say it’s a game changer, it’s not a game changer. But it’s something that I can see as very, no pun intended here, it’s going to be very handy for those that want to control… and I’m not talking about actually controlling the cyclic or the stick or the yoke or anything. I see it more as something you can use besides the physical control, you know.
Imagine that you are flying a helicopter, you have the cyclic and the collective. You have, for example, Pro Flight Trainer Puma or any other control or just you know, plane joystick, plane [inaudible 00:54:14] and the fact that you can reach out to the panel and push buttons, and rotate knobs, and stuff like that, it’s something that, you know, I’m very, very eager to be able to do sometime.
And I’m hoping, and I have a lot of faith in these guys, that they will eventually achieve it. Because from what I’ve seen from their videos, and from what I’ve learned from a few emails that I have exchanged with them, they are working very hard to make it very precise and very controllable.
Now, one of the things that I have… I have not seen this in action, live, right now, but one of the cool things that I have seen in Switzerland a few months ago… I was brought to Switzerland by this company called Ibex, and I’m not sure if you are aware of a flight simulator called Aerofly FS2?

Dan Caston: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yup.

Sérgio Costa: It’s, yeah? You know Aerofly? So Ibex develops Aerofly, and Ibex invited me to go to Switzerland to try the helicopter. So it’s going to be their first helicopter [inaudible 00:55:29], which they started developing after I nagged them to death.

Dan Caston: Yeah, yeah.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, yeah, they hate me now, because I got them into helicopters. Just kidding, I’m actually going to do a review on the R22 in a few days.
So they invited me to Switzerland to check out the helicopter, and they wanted me to check out the helicopter with this motion platform. And one of the things they had next to the motion platform, they had actually three motion platforms. Instead of one, they had like three, and you entered the room and go, “Okay, I want to live here.”
And one of the motion platforms had this 3D printed panel of Cessna 172. Okay? But we’re talking about just plastic with no actual instruments, nothing, just you know, the bevel of the instruments, in every position of an instrument that was available. The instrument was there but it wasn’t, it was just something so that you would be able to touch.
And they had some [inaudible 00:56:35] or some buttons so that you can actually feel them.

Dan Caston: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sérgio Costa: But there were no electronics, nothing attached. So the thing is, they were working with IBEX, the guys that developed Aerofly FS2, are working with VR motion, which are the guys that developed this platform, this motion platform. And they are working together, these two companies are working together with Sensory X.
So the idea behind the concept that they were showing me was to have someone sitting on the platform using, of course, VR, and using a Sensory X glove. And actually flying using a yoke, they have a yoke, you know, the yoke and the pedals and the throttle were the things that were actually connected to the computer, so you could actually, of course, control the aircraft. And the landing gear lever I think was there as well.
So those controls were working, right? But, you know, the altitude indicator, all the other controls, all the other gadgets were not there. You could actually feel them, because they were printed in 3D, in the sheet of plastic, they were there, but the idea for them was for you to be sitting there on that platform.
You would be looking at, you know, for example, you would be looking at the altimeter, right? And then you would stretch your hand, using the Sensory X glove, and you would actually feel the potentiometer and the gadget because it was printed in 3D, on the same position that you were looking for. But you were using the glove for actually performing the action, for example, setting the altimeter.
So if you start to grasp the concept, this concept, you start to imagine, okay. Now imagine you are at home, okay, you buy a Pro Flight Trainer Puma, you get some schematics for let’s say a Bell 206 or a Bell 407, you don’t need the control, you just need a little bit of plastic that you put together with the bevels, with all the positions, and you get the Sensory X glove. And you are sitting on the chair, using VR, so you are basically inside the cockpit, and when you stretch your hand, you actually feel the controls that you are looking at.

Dan Caston: Wow, that’s incredible.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah. That’s the kind of thing, that’s the next step in my opinion for VR and for VR training. It’s not just… one of the things that people complain about VR, and they are right, is that you don’t have any physical sensation. Right? You don’t have, even with Sensory X, with these gloves, we are seeing guys interacting with a virtual cockpit and they are just interacting with at 3D model. You need to actually feel the buttons.
The thing is that the buttons don’t have to do anything, because the glove will tell the sim what is it that you are doing. So we have something that can be much cheaper than a real panel, with no lag, with no indication, with no gadgets, with no buttons with electronics behind. You just have the button that you push but it doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t even have any wires on it?
And you can just, you know, take that one and put another one just like it was a sheet of paper. And you have a whole new helicopter, a whole new aircraft.
That’s… how incredible this thing can be.

Dan Caston: That’s impressive, yeah. That’ll be pretty neat. ‘Cause, even when you get those full flight sims that sit around you and… Outside VR, where you actually have the knobs and you actually turn the knobs and all that, you still don’t get that sense of 3D beyond that though.
Whereas, if you have, now, the headset on and this, where you can touch it, you’ll still get that 3D sense beyond, like when you’re coming into land or you’re looking around at the trees, you’ll still get that 3D sense.
That’s pretty cool, pretty neat.

Sérgio Costa: Exactly. Yeah, it is.

Dan Caston: I was gonna ask you where the flight sim, where do you think flight sims will go in the future, but I think this has probably answered the question, I think that’s, at least, I think that’s where it’s gonna go, by the looks of it.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, I think it’s the next step, you know. The example that I gave you, people know I have access to 3D printers, or you know, even if you don’t have a 3D printer, someone else will have, or you probably just purchase, just buy online the little piece of plastic panel, with no gadgets, that will obviously be much cheaper than buying a full set of gadgets and controls. And in my opinion, that’s where things are going, that’s where we are heading.
And with companies like Sensory X, and other doing these gloves, and you know, guys like IBEX and Laminar Research, and hopefully Eagle Dynamics, and hopefully Lockheed Martin as well, ’cause these guys need to get on the bandwagon and start doing other things. And they have already implemented native VR for Prepar3d, which I was very surprised actually, to be honest with you. I wasn’t expecting Lockheed Martin to jump on the VR bandwagon so soon. I’m glad they did. I’m glad they did.
So these guys need to start looking at- and I’m sure they are looking at these solutions. And I’m sure that, you know, we’re talking about this, very excited about this, this thing with, you know, 3D models of panels so that you can touch it and I’m sure that, you know, these guys on these companies with a huge amount of money and almost unlimited budges are already ten or twenty years ahead of us, and far, far… For them, this is something they have done already, and we eventually get it in the market.
And they are already developing holo vacs, and haptic suits, and that kind of thing.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that’s pretty neat. Alright, so, I think we’re running out of time here, so, I will…
So where can people find you? Like where can, I know you have the website, we mentioned that, but do you wanna just go over all the places that people can find you and find out what you’re doing?

Sérgio Costa: Yeah well it’s mostly the website, and the helicopter flight simulation group, which you can reach by visiting the website, there’s a link there for the Facebook group. Which is where I usually spent more time at, talking with the folks from the community.
You can find us at youtube.com/helisimmer and you can find us also on twitter, twitter.com/helisimmer. But yeah, basically you can find me mostly, or easier, at the helicopter flight simulation group. Or you can just shoot me an email, it’s sergio@helisimmer.com and just say hello, send me some hate mail, ask me stuff about helicopters and VR, and flight simulation and I’ll be more than happy to help you or whoever wants to get up and start flying helicopters.

Dan Caston: Perfect, and his website again is helisimmer.com, that’s helisimmer.com. Alright, perfect. Well, thanks for coming on our podcast.

Sérgio Costa: My pleasure, it was really fun being able to talk a bit more about what is it that I do.

Dan Caston: Yeah, it’s great to have someone that has so much knowledge about helicopters. Alright, thanks again, we’ll talk to you later.

Sérgio Costa: Okay, thank you very much, bye-bye, see you guys and don’t forget to visit helisimmer.com guys!

Dan Caston: Alright, so there you have it. A great interview with Sergio. Thanks again, Sergio, for coming on our podcast. I have a few different places you can go, so helisimmer.com as he mentioned there, that’s hotel echo lima India sierra India mike mike echo romeo, dot com. And there’s youtube dot com slash helisimmer, twitter dot com, slash helisimmer.
Or, he even gave his email there for anyone that wants to contact him by his email, which is sergio at helisimmer dot com.
So make sure you guys subscribe to the podcast, that way you get notified when the new episode comes out. I’m also gonna leave a link to any of the items mentioned in the podcast, this would be the equipment that he uses, the equipment that I use, or any other items that are mentioned, or websites that are mentioned, I’ll try to go through and note them all down.
That way it’ll be quick and easy for you, just go down the show notes or you can go to my episode show notes which would be at Vrflightworld.com/8, that VR flight world dot com slash eight.
And you can get the show notes there, links there.
Also, if you’re interested in being on the Flight World Podcast, make sure you go to our page VRFlightWorld.com/interview, that’s VR Flight World dot com forward slash interview, to fill out the form there. We’ll see if you’re a great fit for the podcast and we’ll try to get you on here.
Thanks again guys for being on our podcast! I hope you guys have an awesome day and I will see you in the next one!

John Melley: Thanks for listening to the VR Flight World Podcast! Online at VRFlightWorld.com

John Melley: Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast, the place where flight training and your home office collide. Get tips, tricks and in depth interviews about flight training, virtual reality and flight simulation. With your host Dan Caston.

Dan Caston: Hey guys, and welcome to episode number seven of the VR Flight World Podcast. Today on our show, we have a very experienced guest that has been involved in flight simulation for a very long time. He is now flying in VR and is always showing off his flights on YouTube. His online name is Bel Geode. Please welcome Drew Bolton. Hey Drew. Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast. I’m glad to have you hear. Some of the audience may know who you are. However, for the people that don’t really know you, can you just introduce yourself and let us know a little bit about you?

Drew Bolton: Absolutely. Probably the best way that I can do that, the most recognizable way would be to say good evening everybody. This is Bel Geode.

Dan Caston: How long have you been in VR flight or actually flight sim in general?

Drew Bolton: Well VR flight is, I guess you would say, relatively new. I only really got into it last year, July, shortly after I came back from FlightSimCon in Connecticut. Flight siming itself I’ve been doing since, believe it or not, about 1986 when I was in high school.

Dan Caston: Oh wow, nice.

Drew Bolton: I’m one of those guys, yeah.

Dan Caston: You’ve been doing it a while. That’s awesome.

Drew Bolton: Yes.

Dan Caston: I mentioned before that you actually did some real world flying. You did some hours as a real world pilot or a student pilot I guess?

Drew Bolton: Yes.

Dan Caston: Was that before or after you were in flight sim?

Drew Bolton: It was technically after. When I was in high school, part of the things that I did there, I was part of the ROTC. The Air Force ROTC in my high school, that was one of the first things they had us do was they introduced us to flight simulation back at a time when it was just vector graphics. It really didn’t take until many, many years after that, I would say when I was in my mid 30s. I’m currently 47. I got into my mid 30s, the job that I was working at the time allowed me to take flight sim lessons, but unfortunately, since life has a way of throwing curve balls, I ended up losing that job and thus losing the income to take the flight lessons.

Dan Caston: Oh no.

Drew Bolton: I’ve got about four and a half hours total including the half hour that I count at the last convention when a friend of mine had me fly his Cessna around Connecticut.

Dan Caston: Yeah, exactly. You’ve had a little bit of experience in the real plane as well.

Drew Bolton: Oh yes.

Dan Caston: Now that you have some experience in the real plane, you have some experience in VR, do you really have that connection, like it’s very similar or is it completely different to you?

Drew Bolton: Absolutely. It is, as I’ve been telling everybody who will listen, a game changer. Before when you’re flying on a monitor, of course you can get the procedures down, which honestly that’s really what flight simulation is best at is learning all the various procedures. It really doesn’t help as much learning how to actually control the aircraft. Anybody can teach you that, any CFI or flight instructor can actually put you in the cockpit and teach you how to do that in a couple of hours basically. The actual procedures and everything is where flight simulation shines.
Now VR has really blown that out because of the fact that not only do you have the procedure trainer, but you can couple that with the feeling of flying, the fact that you’ve got your depth perception, and that’s probably the biggest thing that VR adds to flight simulation. You can now judge your distances when you’re coming in to land, if you’re flying patterns and so on. It’s just amazing to see the world unfold. You can judge your heights from the ground and so on. It’s just incredible. It’s really, really opened up flight simulation for both the student pilot and the one that’s never even planning on getting into an actual real cockpit.

Dan Caston: Yeah, that’s what I found as well. I have a few hours as a student pilot, but I don’t have too, too many and I don’t have my pilot’s license, but really I found it was really realistic once I threw that headset on. I did some flying before, being in VR, but once I threw that headset on and was flying in VR, it was a whole different world, and I could move my head around to look beside me. I just found it was pretty amazing.

Drew Bolton: Yeah, that’s probably the major thing is the fact that you can move your head around and actually take in the world. Of course, it still feels right now, with the state of VR, like having a scuba mask on your face, which is probably the perfect analogy for me since I used to do scuba diving. Even with that limitation that VR currently has, you still can’t replace that feeling of depth being in there. When I see new people get into the flight sims and of course they might get a little bit nauseous or motion sick, I tell them this is part of the “initiation.” It has to feel like that. You do get used to it after a little while, but VR just basically pays for itself once you get past that stage.

Dan Caston: Yeah, exactly. Did you have some of the nausea when you started?

Drew Bolton: Believe it or not, it only happened to me twice, and that was at both of the conventions. FlightSimCon was an annual convention that they had in Connecticut. I went to the one in 2016 and the one in 2017. It’s since split into two separate conventions, and I think that the last one that we had was in Vegas and there was another one in Dallas. When I was at the two Connecticut conventions, I had the opportunity to try this thing called Fly Inside, which was basically the precursor to the whole native VR that a lot of sims have started doing. It was an add-on program that you purchase, and you would use it with things like flight simulation, X, FSX or prepared or in recent cases X-Plane as well.
The first time that I tried it, they had me go up and basically do a circuit around Boston Logan. I miscalculated my turn to final from base leg, and of course I had to adjust because I could see from the VASI lights, the PAPI lights that I was basically off my glide slope. I overcompensated a little bit, and I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. I got everything down safely. I got out of the VR headset, I stood there and my buddy Tristan, Novawing24 is his name on YouTube, was looking at me and was like, “Dude, you look like you saw a ghost.” It was just crazy.

Dan Caston: Yeah, because the feeling is so real, isn’t it?

Drew Bolton: Yeah, but once I actually got my own, the first thing that I did, I hoped into DCS, Digital Combat Simulator world, hopped into the Huey and basically just flew it around, just for the sake of flying it around. The story that I tell people is once I actually took the headset off after landing my Huey, it felt like I was having flashbacks of Vietnam.

Dan Caston: Oh yeah?

Drew Bolton: Bear in mind, I’m born in 1970, around the time, the height of the Vietnam War. There’s no way I could have been in that war, but it was just that real to me.

Dan Caston: No doubt. That’s pretty cool. What sim would actually be your favorite? You’ve mentioned a few now, the DCS and X-Plane. I know your recent video you actually started using Prepar3D, a new version of that.

Drew Bolton: Yeah.

Dan Caston: Right now, what’s your go-to or your favorite sim?

Drew Bolton: It varies depending on the day. I’ll be honest with you, it does vary depending on what I feel I need to record for YouTube. If I’m just getting in there and putzing around, believe it or not, the one that I enjoy the most is actually Aerofly FS2. Now yeah, I do have a series on that as well, but I haven’t been keeping up with it lately until recently when they implemented Vulcan which is the API that a lot of the other sims are looking to implement because it completely optimizes how the CPU and the GPU are both accessed when you’re using the sim. As far as a pure flying experience, just get in the plane and fly, don’t have to worry about any of the other things that come with that, no flight planning or anything like that, that is the one that I have the most fun in.
DCS of course, I will always have a great time in because it’s a combat sim, and I was that kid who always wanted to be Maverick, always wanted to be the Top Gun. I’m still waiting for them to come out with the F14 Tomcat so that I can fly that around in there and make things go boom flower, which is one of my little trademark phrases.

Dan Caston: Yeah, I’ve heard that a few times.

Drew Bolton: X-Plane is definitely another favorite simply because it’s got a lot of my favorite types of aircraft, mainly helicopters. The physics is more real, so if I were to treat flight simulation as a training tool for getting back into the cockpit, more than likely would be X-Plane that I would use more than anything else. I don’t also want to discount Prepar because since the latest update the version 4.3 update that they recently came out with, it’s actually optimized VR and made the experience a lot smoother and a lot better, and of course it’s got some of my favorite planes. For example, the aforementioned Tomcat in there. That right now is my go-to whenever I want to fly around as Maverick.

Dan Caston: You mentioned a Vulcan? What’s the Vulcan?

Drew Bolton: Vulcan is an APR program. Basically it will be integrated into the sim, and the idea behind it is really quite simple. The whole objective is to allow the simulator to make better use of your CPU, especially multi-core CPUs and of course a lot of the newer graphics cards out there that happen to have a lot of memory, VRAM onboard, and optimized chips included. Right now the state of most of the flight sims, Aerofly FS2 being the obvious exception, they’re really not taking advantage of what your computer can really do. One of the prime examples, X-Plane. As beautiful as X-Plane can be once you get everything set up correctly, it’s still running on one core and it’s not optimized as far as your graphics card.
You have little bottlenecks here and there. The idea behind the whole Vulcan programming, or the Vulcan API as they call it, is to help eliminate all of that. It streamlines that whole process so the computer can more intelligently use the parts for your simulator. Sims are probably the most demanding game genre out there. Really, this is something that we’ve all been waiting for.

Dan Caston: That’s pretty exciting, because whenever they talk about getting CPUs and GPUs, you always want to have essentially the fastest CPU but not necessarily the most amount of cores because, like you say, it doesn’t really help you in any way.

Drew Bolton: Right.

Dan Caston: Having that fast single core, or not single core, but less cores with faster speed probably helps you more than multiple cores with slower speeds.

Drew Bolton: Yeah, up to now that has been the case. Once Vulcan gets implemented for both X-Plane and DCS, I don’t know which one of the two of them is going to come first, you’re going to see a marked improvement in how everything gets utilized.

Dan Caston: That’ll be exciting. What kind of system are you running?

Drew Bolton: Currently, the system that I have is a hexa core i7. I’m trying to remember the speed. I want to say it’s within the 6,000 range. I know it’s not one of the incredibly fast ones like an 8,800 or anything like that, but I had to also consider my budget. I kind of skimped a little bit on that, but I got something that I thought was going to be fast enough. Currently I’ve got 32 gigs of RAM, but to be honest with you, I’m still on Windows 7 Home Premium, which means it’s only using 16. Eventually I’m going to upgrade to Windows 10 once I get an SSD, and when that happens, it’ll take all 32 gigs basically. As far as hard drive, basically this computer is like a Frankenstein. I’ve got about four hard drives in this thing currently.

Dan Caston: Oh wow.

Drew Bolton: The biggest of which is the two terabyte main drive that I’m currently using for things like P3D and X-Plane, but there are other external drives that I’ll have my ortho photos for X-Plane and so on just so that they’re not interfering with what’s going on with the sim. Of course, couple that with the actual flight controls that I use, I only use the Saitek X52. It’s really all I’ve needed. I have not really had much of a need to get into the whole Thrustmaster Warthog or any of the other fancy stuff that is really good. I have used it; it’s just not what I feel I need.

Dan Caston: Right.

Drew Bolton: Then of course VR. As far as the graphics card that I’m using, I tend to be a bit of a rebel from what most people would suggest. Ideally most people say that you should go with the Nvidia cards, and honestly I can’t really argue with that. I’ve used Nvidia for years. I went with the Radeon RX480 primarily because of my budget, but I found that it’s performed just as well as, say for example, a 1080 or 1070. In fact, it also has eight gigs of VRAM onboard, so pretty much it’s the equivalent to that without getting bogged down in the price and whatnot. Really I don’t have a reason to change it. Not just yet anyway.

Dan Caston: Okay. It runs pretty well with that?

Drew Bolton: Oh yeah.

Dan Caston: What framer do you normally run at, or do you even watch that at all?

Drew Bolton: It depends greatly on the flight sim. A lot of it is dependent on what I was talking about before, the fact that it’s not utilizing everything to its fullest potential. For something like X-Plane, I would say it probably performs the worst in, but that is also partly my fault because of the way that I have this thing set up. Because I do the videos, what I’ve done is I choose to set my monitor resolution to double its possible resolution. Normally your monitor’s set to like 1080p. I have it set to twice that, so it’s basically a 2k monitor. The reason for that is so that I can actually get the proper aspect ratio in the final video. That has a tendency of dropping your FPS down to crap.
In something like X-Plane, I average anywhere from about 22 1/2, which is really low end to about 45 frames per second, and ideally with VR, you probably want to be closer to the 45 range, per I. In something like P3D, I get better experience because they just optimized it with a 4.3 update. That’s a solid 45. If I wanted to, I could probably push that up to 90, but I’m trying to keep the overhead down on the computer, so I try to keep it at 45. Aerofly FS2, on the other hand, easily 90. If I wanted to, I could get way more than 90, but I deliberately have it throttled at that FPS. Then of course DCS is somewhere in the middle because right now DCS is one of the better optimized ones for VR. They’ve actually been working on it a lot longer than most others, except it still doesn’t have Vulcan in there.
There’s areas of improvement. Usually with DCS I’ll get anywhere from 30 to 60 frames per second, depending on where I am, what map I’m on.

Dan Caston: Okay. That’s pretty good. From the looks of it, you have your settings actually pretty high.

Drew Bolton: Yes. Again, that’s a deliberate thing because of the way that VR normally looks, whenever you see videos on YouTube, a lot of the time it’ll have that vertical aspect ratio. I can’t stand that. I have to have that wide screen view. In a way, I’m kind of gimping myself and gimping my computer by making it go larger than it should, but the end result doesn’t seem to be affected too badly, except of course when YouTube tries to dumb everything down once you upload it.

Dan Caston: Right. You use a lot of freeware, payware, different scenery. We were talking about one earlier that you’re actually testing in your newest video there. Where do you find all these different sceneries and what are your favorites?

Drew Bolton: Well again, depending on the individual sim, I mean right now sims like FSX, P3D, you’re going to find the most scenery for either of those sims basically because it’s been around the longest. I mean we’re talking about a program that’s been around for, what, 12 years or so. A lot of the times, a lot of the freeware sites, places like Fly Away Simulation or Flightsim.com or Sim Outhouse, just rattling off names, you can find a lot of interesting things that you can import into the sim world for that. X-Plane is starting to get the same way. There are a lot of developers that are starting to look more at X-Plane. In particular one of the biggest names in flight sim, ORBIX, they have started bringing their stuff into X-Plane.
Really with X-Plane, the go-to site is X-Plane.org, or X dash Plane.org. That’s where you’re going to find a lot of the freeware stuff. In the case of the scenery that we were talking about earlier, that my current P3D series is about, it’s the Hawaii folder real scenery, and believe it or not, I found those guys on Facebook. Of all places, Facebook. I stumbled across some of the screenshots that they had. I started talking with a developer, and they were like, “Well give it a shot, see what you think.” I told them that I wanted to do a miniseries on it, just to give folks a teaser. As soon as they told me that they had introduced the auto gen, which was the missing piece of the puzzle, they wanted the trees to be perfectly color matched with their scenery itself, that’s when I decided, okay, I really want to get this video or this series of videos done.
A lot of the times, the other way that I’ll find out about sceneries, people will simply IM me or email me. It’s gotten to the point now where the Bel Geode name is I guess known enough, it’ll still never be as big as Frugal or anything, but it’s known enough to the point where I will actually have developers contacting me and say, “Hey, I have this scenery. Why don’t you check it out for me, see what you think. If you do like it, maybe you can do a video or something and a lot of the times, I will say yes especially if it’s some place that I really want to fly.
I ran through that recently with I believe it’s called Koh Poda Island. It’s for X-Plane. It’s completely free of charge, and the gentleman who made it, a gentleman by the name of Stefan Schroen also made Bamboo Island. Now the claim to fame with those, it’s just off the coast of Thailand, where he used to live for many years, and it’s kind of his homage, if you will, to that entire area. There’s all these little areas, these little islands that you can explore, and of course he throws all kinds of little goodies for you to find. It’s ideally generated for helicopter flyers, because there’s helipads everywhere on a little island so you can explore everything. I love stuff like that.
I love finding little off the wall places to just showcase to people that they wouldn’t normally think of.

Dan Caston: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. With the scenery, you have lots of choice there, but what about weather? I feel like with people that are learning to fly as part of flight training, weather’s probably one of those important ones to have. Where would you send people if they were looking to get into a weather app of some sort?

Drew Bolton: If you’re going to be sticking with the ESP platform, that being FSX or P3D, your main go-to is going to be Active Sky by HiFi Simulations. They have Active Sky Next and the successor to that, Active Sky 16 and Active Sky 17, which is specifically geared towards P3D Version 4. They also have Active Sky Cloud Art. One of the reasons why I like that one is it’s easy on the frames, even if you’ve got some absolutely horrendous weather. To give you an example, a couple of years ago my good buddy Novawing and I, we decided to make a video for his channel where we actually flew into a hurricane. I kid you not, we get to the eye of this hurricane, and you could see a well defined wall exactly as it would appear in real life.

Dan Caston: That’s cool.

Drew Bolton: That’s the kind of thing that I look for. X-Plane is a whole different Animal. Honestly with X-Plane, there’s not that many choices. There’s SkyMaxx Pro and XEnviro, both of which are payware. If we’re talking for VR, I don’t recommend either right now. I do know that XEnviro in particular is updating to the 1.10 version, but until that comes, we can’t really say how it’s going to play out in VR, but the other versions that are out there do have a problem where you’ll only see it in one eye. That’s just no good for any kind of flight in weather. Honestly with X-Plane, I would say just go with the default clouds for now.
I do know that Laminar Research is going to be updating their particle systems, so I’m hoping eventually that will lead to improved clouds, but I haven’t heard anything concrete just yet.

Dan Caston: Okay. I’ve actually heard a rumor that Active Sky, I don’t know if the rumor is true, but I’ve heard that there’s a rumor that Active Sky might be coming to X-Plane.

Drew Bolton: It is true. It is true. I spoke with them 2017, at the convention about it and they offered me a spot on their beta testing team once it was ready. The problem is it’s not ready.

Dan Caston: Right, so it might be a while.

Drew Bolton: It might be a while, yeah. It’s a completely different animal that they’re having to code for. Plus they really don’t know what Laminar Research plans on doing. A lot of the times whenever Laminar comes out with something, it throws everybody ten steps backwards. They’re doing the cautious right now. They’re proceeding as slowly as possible to ensure that once they actually are able to step on the scene, it will be a product that people would actually want to get.

Dan Caston: Right, that makes sense. If you were brand new to flight sim, whether it’s VR or just flying on a monitor, what would be the first things you’d want to get, even before you have a system? What would be the first things you’d look at?

Drew Bolton: One of the key things that I enjoy is just the ability to hop in and fly, no matter where in the world it is. Automatically that would put stuff like Aerofly out because it’s not the whole world. You only get portions in very high quality and then th rest of it is all pixelated. They’re working on that. I need to know that at any moment’s notice I can decide tomorrow I want to fly in Papua, New Guinea, and I can do that. I can hop in there and fly around. Weather of course is another consideration for me because there are some times when I actually want to hop in there and try an approach where I probably should know better, and if it were real life, I’d probably be grounded, but just to see if I can do it, like to challenge myself.
Graphics are a big thing for me. It’s a running joke with me that I really get into trees. I guess I’m like a virtual tree hugger. You got to have really good trees in your flight simulator, so that’s something that I look for. Especially since most of the time I’m flying around in the helicopter. Helicopter pilots have the unique perspective of being low and slow. A lot of stuff matters more to us than to the guys that fly at 35,000 feet.

Dan Caston: Yeah, true.

Drew Bolton: The objects, the scenery, all of that stuff really matters the most to me. Failing that, just versatility. I want to know that at any given day I could fly anything I want. If I decide one day I want to fly an F14 Tomcat, I can. If I want to fly a tilt rotor the next day, I can. If the strange itch should take me over and I want to fly a Boeing 717, I want to know that I have those kinds of options. Luckily the state of simulation the way it is right now, we do have those options in a lot of the sims, and there’s just better things coming down the pike.

Dan Caston: Sure. What about controls? If they’re just starting out, what would you recommend they get first?

Drew Bolton: Definitely a joystick. If you can afford it, if it’s within your budget, go with either a HOTAS system, if you know you’re going to be doing a lot more fighter jet type flying or even in the case of helicopters. A HOTAS does help with a helicopter, except of course you’ve got to set your throttle to the opposite throw, otherwise, its just going to mess with your head. Failing that, investing in a Yoke and rudder pedals would also be a pretty good idea if you believe that you’re going to stay mostly with airliners or with GA. In my case, the reason why I’ve stuck with the Saitek X52 is because I consider it to be the jack of all trades. I can do all of those things just with this HOTAS setup.

Dan Caston: What was that one again?

Drew Bolton: The HOTAS setup that I use is called the Saitek X52. Saitek has been taken over by Logitech recently, so you may find it actually under the Logitech websites or the Logitech pages, but Saitek is the original company that came up with that.

Dan Caston: Right. Okay. I got a Saitek Yoke as well. I would think it’s slightly different than the one you have, but yours is actually Yoke and rudder pedals or it’s the joystick?

Drew Bolton: Well because it’s the HOTAS it’s hands on throttle and stick.

Dan Caston: Right, yeah.

Drew Bolton: For me, that works because I’m doing the military aircraft, so pretty much that’s what you’re in when you’re in a military aircraft. You’ve got a stick, you’ve got a throttle, but I find that it also works great for helicopters because with the helicopter, instead of stick and throttle, you’re talking about cyclic and collective. Cyclic being the stick, collective being analogous to the throttle but not quite. It’s a completely different animal with the helicopter, but it still works.

Dan Caston: I found that to be a little awkward with the Yoke.

Drew Bolton: Yeah. It’s kind of difficult to do that with that, and because of the fact that I’m always flying so many different types of aircraft, I had to go with something that was going to be like a one stop shop basically.

Dan Caston: That makes sense. Just going back to VR a little bit. Do you have any problems when you’re using VR other than of course it being a little bit hard on the computer, bogs down a little bit, but with gauge clarity and any stutters or anything like that?

Drew Bolton: Initially yes, and I do see that come up a lot in particular on Facebook or occasionally people might comment on videos and ask for advice and so on. One of the things that I’ve done to address that, I use the Oculus Rift first off. We’ll get that out of the way. I don’t know much about the HTC Vive. I’ve only ever used it at the convention. With the Oculus Rift, there is a free program you can download called Oculus Tray Tool. Matter of fact, I believe you can get it from the Oculus site, even though it’s not actually created by the people who create Oculus. It’s actually created by just a random guy who wanted something more convenient.
The idea behind it, it will allow you to adjust your pixel density or super sampling. The terms are interchangeable, so you can increase the clarity inside the flight simulator. In the case of something like, say for example, DCS World. DCS World already has that built in, but if you’re utilizing something like Oculus Tray Tool, you can minimize the resources that DCS itself is using by turning the built-in slider in DCS down to say one, 1.0. Then you would adjust that in Oculus Tray Tool to increase your clarity in there, and it really doesn’t affect how much energy DCS is using or so on and so forth. It works the same for all the other sims too. You can adjust everything on the fly, it’s got its own profiles, and you can set it up for each individual sim. It will even tell you when it’s loading a profile for a given sim.
You can set it up based on how much you’re going to need for that particular sim or in the case of something like Aerofly FS2, you really don’t have to set anything because that is just naturally already a high performing sim. One thing that I would definitely recommend people do which might seem a little counterintuitive, turn your anti-aliasing down for two reasons. Number one, it’s an incredible FPS hog. It will eat your frames alive, the more anti-aliasing you’ve got. If possible, use your graphics cards built in anti-aliasing and override whatever the simulator’s trying to do, but even so don’t set it very high because that’s one of the number causes of blurry cockpits basically. If you don’t mind look at a little bit of jaggedness inside the sim, then set it down to the bare minimum that it can go.
You’re going to find that you’ll have an increased clarity in the cockpit. The jaggedness probably won’t even bother you after a while of actually using it, but it’ll still translate to a smooth experience, which is of course ultimately the most important thing.

Dan Caston: Yeah, I’ve noticed that as well. I’m always playing with my settings to see what I can do, see if I can get more out of my sim. One thing I found is that the smaller gauges are a little bit difficult to see. You have that zoom button, but even the zoom button sometimes it just doesn’t bring you any closer.

Drew Bolton: Right.

Dan Caston: Maybe I have to bring my anti-aliasing down even more and get some more clarity with it that way.

Drew Bolton: Yeah. Something like X-Plane, generally I don’t run anti-aliasing at all. I just keep it totally off. Like I said, I’ve got the graphics card in the background doing minimal anti-aliasing, so it kind of balances out and whenever the finished video comes out it does look a little bit smoother. It’s not nearly as jagged. Something like P3D, I might have to have a little bit of anti-aliasing in there because let’s face it, it’s still that old technology even though its been brought into the current age. It’ll get jagged on you really quick.

Dan Caston: Yeah, no doubt. You do a lot of military flying, right?

Drew Bolton: That is correct. If I had to give a ratio to it, I’d say probably 60/40 in favor of military flying, which of course includes helicopters versus GA flying, which of course also includes helicopters.

Dan Caston: Right. Do you do most of your military flight training, or not flight training, but flying on DCS?

Drew Bolton: It really varies a lot. I would say that yeah, with DCS hands down, that’s going to be the most militaristic of all of the sims, so I do tend to gravitate towards that when it comes to getting that military itch scratched. With X-Plane, I do have a number of military aircraft. Of course, tilt rotor and so on, that I like to use there, and P3D, well F14 Tomcat’s my all time favorite and I love doing carrier ops in P3D, even though it’s not nearly as realistic as DCS or whatnot.
When I’m not doing that, nine times out of ten I will go to either P3D or more notably X-Plane for my GA flying, especially if I actually just want to take some time and run over what my CFI used to teach me. I’ll hope in the original Cessna, the default Cessna that comes with X-Plane, and I’ll just do some patterns, run through the procedures and so on.

Dan Caston: With this, you said you practice some of what your flight instructor went over, but for flying in these military jets and different planes like that, where do you learn about the procedures? Do you do it trial and error or is it training? Do you find this stuff on YouTube? How are you finding your information?

Drew Bolton: Hands down, I would say YouTube is my biggest learning tool. I guess it would make sense since I spend a lot of time on YouTube. Especially with, like say for example, in DCS they have the Hornet that just came out, the FA18. There have been a couple of gentlemen that have posted videos. Lex Talionis is the name of the one guy. I think the other guy goes by AEW, so Alpha Echo Whiskey. Both of those guys are real life Hornet drivers. That’s what they did for a living for the U.S. Navy. They’ve been creating videos for the benefit of those of us who utilize DCS World so that we would actually learn how to do it right. I found it absolutely illuminating. I’m riveted to every single episode, because I want to get this right.
Even though there’s no pop quiz at the end of the day, I still want to make sure if I’m doing it, like Maverick, I’m going to do it like Maverick.

Dan Caston: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I was wondering, where do you find this information, especially on military because you’re not going to go to your average flight trainer and say, “Hey, can you teach me how to fly a military jet?” They’re going to hop into a Cessna 172 and say, “This is what we got.”

Drew Bolton: Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. One of my dreams …

Dan Caston: That’s kind of cool.

Drew Bolton: … is to actually fly an L39 Albatros, which is a check made aircraft. It used to be the Russian trainer. I don’t believe it is now, but there was a point in time were everyone in the Soviet Union who were training to be pilots in the middle of the Cold War, that was what they used. I found especially in VR, because it’s available for DCS as well as P3D, they don’t have it yet for X-Plane, it is quite frankly one of the most realistic experiences that I’ve had. It’s got all the quirks of the real aircraft as verified by a couple of guys that I know that actually fly this thing in real life. Whenever it comes to stuff like that, I rely on some of the people that I know to learn more about the aircraft, and then I try to put into practice everything that they’ve taught me.
I still want to fly one in real life though, so I’m trying to get one of my buddies to at least bring their aircraft here to Pennsylvania so that I can fly it.

Dan Caston: Yeah, that’d be a great experience, that’s for sure. What would be your number one tip for anyone that’s looking to get into flight training or VR flight for that matter?

Drew Bolton: For VR in particular, do the tutorial, make sure you set everything up right. It might seem like it’s a pain in the butt initially. It might take you, I don’t know, half hour, anywhere up to two hours. In my case, I had my son helping me to set it up so it actually went a little bit quicker. It probably would have taken me six hours to get the stupid thing set up, but as long as you run through the tutorials and make sure that everything works fine with your system, that’s the most important thing. Now when it comes to the actual VR siming, especially when you’re dealing with aircraft that you might not have ever experienced before in VR, read the manual. It’s as simple as that.
If you’re not the kind of person who likes to do a lot of reading, guess what, YouTube exists for a reason. There are a number of us who have done tutorials on just about any other kind of plane. One of the things that I like to do, especially with DCS, is sometimes I’ll do startup tutorials. With X-Plane, I almost always start my videos with a full cold and dark startup. People have told me that it really helps them. I actually ran into a guy at the convention a couple of years ago who said that he has bookmarked a lot of the helicopter videos that I have done in X-Plane because of the fact that I always go through the startup procedure, so he knows what to do now. Basically he’s taught himself through me.
I just pay it forward that way. Yeah, definitely read the manual, definitely make sure your equipment is set up properly and above all else, just have fun. You don’t have to take it seriously. The FAA is not going to go come knocking on your door if you bring your Cessna or your helicopter or your fighter jet down in flames. Just have fun with it. That’s the most important part. If it wasn’t fun, I really would not do it.

Dan Caston: Yeah, totally. I remember one of your videos there recently where you’re flying through I think it was Chicago or somewhere. You were flying through the town, between buildings. It looked like a lot of fun.

Drew Bolton: Yeah, that’s one of my typical shenanigans type things that I’ve got to throw in there because I really don’t want people to think that I take this thing as seriously. There’s a time to be serious and there’s a time not to be. If I’m doing a startup tutorial, of course I’m going to teach you what to do. If I’m just showing off scenery or whatnot, then I’ll get into what I call tour guide mode. Then there’s just things where, with the case of the video you’re talking about, Aerofly FS2, I basically wanted to show off my performance that this thing is giving me. Yeah, I did something that would be highly illegal if you try to do it in real life. I’m weaving through the skyscrapers in the Chicago skyline. Don’t recommend you try it at home, but hey, it’s a simulator, you can get away with it.

Dan Caston: Exactly. It’s cool. I think you’ve given us a ton of information to work with. Where can people find you or where can people watch your videos and all that? Do you have the address on hand?

Drew Bolton: Everything I do is under the name Bel Geode, which is spelled B-E-L, G-E-O-D-E. It’s actually two words. It’s supposed to be a first name and a last name. It came about as a stage name back when I was a musician in the late 90s/early 2000s. It just kind of stuck as my internet net. Pretty much everything I do is under Bel Geode, whether it be two words or one together. In the case of YouTube, it’s always one word together, B-E-L-G-E-O-D-E and you can find me there. You can find me on Twitter. You can find me on Facebook, Google Plus. It’s all going to be the same thing. It’s all under Bel Geode.
Facebook of course I have my own personal account where you’ll find me as Drew, but nine times out of ten, if it’s something related to the actual videos that I’m doing, you can just check out Bel Geode 2015 on Facebook and that’s the best way to find me. I’m always on it, unless I’m asleep.

Dan Caston: Sounds good. Last question here, just because I’m curious. Your hat has become, it’s on like every photo of you, you have this hat on. I was curious how that came about? What’s the story behind that?

Drew Bolton: Believe it or not, that hat was a gift. When I first decided that I wanted to do Twitch and YouTube, which I haven’t done Twitch for a while now, I was playing a game called Guild Wars 2, and I was playing with a really good friend of mine at the time, Amy. When we created our characters, I decided my character was always going to run around in purple. That was his thing. He always had to have a long purple coat, a fancy coat no less, and of course a fedora, which just happened to have a little green feather in it. Amy thought it would be absolutely hilarious if she just out of the blue ordered a full purple suit and hat to match and had it FedEx to my house.
Bear in mind that time, she had no clue what my suit size was. She just guessed and got it right, by the way.

Dan Caston: Nice.

Drew Bolton: I wake up this one morning and I’ve got FedEx knocking at my door. I’m like, “What is going on here?” I open up this package and there’s this suit and this hat. It just kind of stuck since then. It’s been the official Bel Geode suit.

Dan Caston: That’s funny.

Drew Bolton: The hat eventually just became a logo for all of my YouTube videos and I was like, “Well you know what, might as well run with it.”

Dan Caston: Yeah, it’s like your trademark.

Drew Bolton: Yeah, basically.

Dan Caston: That’s funny.

Drew Bolton: I’ve actually had people ask me all the time where to get the hat and so on and so forth. I actually told people where Amy had initially gotten it, but I haven’t seen anybody else wear it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s still my trademark.

Dan Caston: For sure. That’s awesome. Cool. Thanks for being on our podcast.

Drew Bolton: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Dan Caston: All right, well there you have it. An interview with the famous Bel Geode. I’ll leave links to Bel’s Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook and YouTube accounts in the show notes as well as any links mentioned in the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please hit the subscribe button to ensure that you don’t miss any of the future episodes. Also, if you’re interested in being interviewed on our podcast, please check out our interview page at Vrflightworld.com/interview. That’s Vrflightworld.com/interview. To see the show notes and links for this episode, either check out the iTunes subscription or go to Vrflightworld.com/seven. That’s Vrflightworld.com/seven. Thanks again for listening, and I hope you guys have a great day.

John Melley: Thanks for listening to the VR Flight World Podcast, online at Vrflightworld.com.