Opinion

Condor Gliding Simulator

I would like to make a plea for at least gliding instructors to take a close look at this gliding sim — which would seem to offer a very good aid to training young pilots in cross-country techniques and, to some extent, planning. I was astonished, when talking to an official of my own club a few days ago, to discover that he had never heard of Condor!

I believe that it is already being used as a training aid by some clubs in Europe, and one or two have gone further and rigged up a full glider cockpit set-up with the controls linked in to the program. (Failing that, an ordinary gaming “joystick” will work fine.)

One of its merits is that it does not require a super-duper ultra-powerful computer to run it. Although the simulation of the aerodynamics and handling of the aircraft is very well done, the graphics have been left fairly simple. They look quite realistic at a glance, but are not “highly rendered” — which is what takes all the computer “grunt”. (A 1GHz PC with a reasonable amount of memory will be adequate to run it).

I haven’t been flying real gliders for about twenty years, so I was getting totally out of practice, but with Condor, I am re-discovering the delights of cross-country soaring. And one of the joys is that, if you do make a bad mistake and crash, it doesn’t hurt or cost anything! (And if you exceed VNE, the wings do come off — after a brief episode of jarring vibration!)

The program comes with one set of “scenery” when you buy it. This is set in Slovenia and in some ways it reminds me rather of some North Island soaring sites, although the Slovenian mountains are higher.

However, you can download other scenery sets. These are free but “donations are encouraged”. Each scenery set tends to be big, so plenty of hard disk space is needed if you decide to get several. The biggest one (which I have) is Pacific NW 2.0, which is 1.4 GB of download, don’t try this with a dial-up connection!

The area around Omarama has already been mapped and set up, so this is one of the sceneries you can download. I don’t think anyone has tried a North Island site yet.

On-line competitions are being set up all the time. You can fly these at the same time as other people, or “in your own time”. It would be great to have a local group here in NZ setting up contests, as the timing of these would probably suit people in our Time Zone better than those run from Europe, where it appears there are lots of real-life contest pilots who use this program to sharpen their skills “off-season”. I am not offering to do this however, I don’t have a PC with enough grunt for that, nor do I have enough skills for task-setting in this context.

There is an excellent online forum of users, where there are very knowledgeable people who will help answer any queries.

Tony Ryan, Gliding Hutt Valley

I found the latest issue of Soaring NZ, February March 2009, captivating reading and the supporting photographs beautifully produced. The standard of writing and photography in each article is of the highest quality and other countries, including Australia would do well to emulate your magazine’s afore mentioned qualities.

Henry Leschen, Australia