Get me back to the hats
If there is still time in the day, I fly simulated aircraft through heavily populated virtual airspace. The lack of time to fly in the real world made it necessary to build a full-blown office flight simulator, that allows me to train my IFR skills and to fly aircraft that otherwise would be way out of reach. How many of us really get the chance to fly a CRJ-200 from KPHL to KBOS?
Building your own cockpit is much easier than it sounds these days, and it's definitely not cost prohibitive anymore. Note for the uninhibited: A flight simulator is nothing you buy from the store. You build this thing from the ground up with hardware and software from different vendors, until your flight deck is what you want it to be.
The core of my system is based on X-Plane 10 from Laminar Research (yep, still haven't made it to 11), a lot of GoFlight components, lots and lots of self-made components, and, of course, all the great apps from FS Widgets.
Real purists would probably not like my flight deck, because it's a little bit of everything. I never intended to build for a specific use case. I simply have too many interests and wanna try a lot of different things with my flight simulator. Also, this is still my office we're talking about here. I need to get a lot of work done.
