Greetings!

Hello, and welcome to the Pretend Flyer! My name is Chris. Let me take a few moments to introduce myself. I'm not a pilot, nor do I play one on TV. In fact, I've never even had a flying lesson in my life, although I have flown commercially probably more times than I can count. I have, however, developed a severe addiction to Microsoft Flight Simulator over the last few years or so. I figured it would be fun to blog about flight simming and aviation topics in general, so here we are.

My first exposure to flight simulation was around 25 years ago with subLOGIC's Flight Simulator game on the Commodore 64. That game really frustrated the heck out of me, and I sort of gave up on flight simming for many years because of it. Nonetheless, I vividly recall the game. By default, it started you out in a Cessna or Piper prop plane at (the now defunct) Meigs Field on the Chicago lakefront.

Fast-forward to a couple of years ago, when somebody gave me a copy of Microsoft's Flight Simulator. My wife suggested I give it to my brother-in-law, as she didn't think I would really be into it. But just for fun, I loaded it onto my PC. After going through the first few training missions, I was hooked. The rest, as they say, is history. Needless to say, my poor brother-in-law wound up having to get his own copy of Flight Simulator elsewhere!

Here I will cover almost anything involving virtual or real-life aviation. Sometimes I may do mini-reviews of new flight-sim related products. Sometimes I may just post interesting screenshots of my virtual travels. Sometimes I may comment about something interesting going on in aviation news. I am definitely open to reader input as to interesting topics for discussion.

In real life, I live in Portland, Oregon with my beautiful wife and three wonderful kids. I work for a tech company here, providing engineering support for the technical marketing organization. I like to cook and garden in addition to my flight sim hobby. As a relatively new resident of Oregon, I am also looking forward to spending more time in the great outdoors in this beautiful state. I used to play a lot of other computer games -- mostly role-playing and strategy games -- but I sort of lost interest as those genres have largely dwindled.

Welcome, and enjoy!