Hello, and welcome. I’m Jonathan Beckett: software and web developer by day, aviation enthusiast and virtual pilot whenever I can be. I’m not a real pilot; I simply enjoy learning about aircraft and sharing what I discover in flight simulation.
From an 8-bit cockpit to the virtual skies
My interest in flight simulation goes back to the mid-1980s, when I tried Flight Sim 737 on an 8-bit computer. A few years later, I was flying Sublogic Flight Simulator II on an Atari ST. I kept coming back to simulators on the PC over the years, although there was a long pause while my daughters were young and I didn’t have a computer capable of running one.
The journey really took off again when I inherited a computer from my Dad. He and his friends in a virtual airline were learning to fly the ZiboMod 737 in X-Plane, so I made a few tutorial videos to help them. I had no idea that those first videos would lead to so many more.
Sharing what I learn
In the years since, I’ve made more than a thousand videos and built a community of nearly 50,000 fellow virtual aviators on YouTube. I make tutorials, share aircraft and simulator discoveries, write guides and flight plans, and livestream flights with the community. The subjects range from learning a cockpit’s systems to planning a route and seeing where a flight takes us.
I still work as a software and web developer for a Microsoft partner, building large systems whose details I can’t usually share. Flight simulation is a very different kind of problem-solving: there’s always another aircraft to learn, another procedure to understand, or another corner of the world to explore.
What you’ll find here
This blog is another place to share those adventures. I’ll write about flights, aircraft, simulator updates, and the practical things I’ve learned along the way. Whether you’re new to flight simulation or have been flying virtual skies for years, I hope you’ll find something useful, interesting, or at least entertaining.
You can read the blog posts, watch my videos on YouTube, or follow my writing on Substack. I also share guides and procedures through my Ko-fi shop, and you can join the conversation on Discord.
Thanks for stopping by. I hope to see you in the virtual skies.