It's a beautiful day today, so I decided to schedule my first introductory flight lesson for $50.00 just north of Toronto this evening.
After this, it's either take the courses for $395 + $395 materials + some expensive flight time, or just go out and get a flight sim & some controls and do it couch potato style & save some cash... or do both.
For $50 US, you get over 60GB for X-Plane scenery on Dual-Layer DVDs... Guess I should go out and buy a D/L DVD player.
This is X-Plane + NEW WORLD-WIDE global scenery (seven dual-layer DVD's covering all of Earth between +/- 60 degrees latitude) for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
The disk requirement to install the entire planet is 60 GIG!
Source: X-Plane, by Austin Meyer Products > X-Plane Software
Then there's Microsoft Flight Simulator X for $79.99 CDN at Futureshop. Only $40 per expansion pack!
Here's a good site with a ton of Flight SIm downloads, an Orbital Space flight sim and news.
For those that want to learn about gliding...
Here's a site to share your images of planes and other photos - max 1MB.
http://classicbritishfiles.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=101
Finally, Flightgear is one of the best open source flight sims out there.
http://www.flightgear.org/links.html
Plus you'll need some gear... like Pedals
http://www.amazon.com/CH-Products-Pedals-Simulator-300-111/dp/B0000512IE
and maybe a USB Yoke...
So getting FSX, X-Plane, the Yoke and the Pedals, a Dual-Layer DVD burner, a video card upgrade, a new hard drive, X-Plane, a comfy chair, and some scenery add-ons, I'm looking at around $700-$800.
Yes, flying is expensive...
