About me
I see you have found my blog (and even the about section of the blog). I hope you enjoy the things I am writing about. But let me give you a little introduction about myself as well.
You will probably have arrived at my blog, through some sort of scenery design activity for Microsoft Flight Simulator. And luckily for you that is also the subject of most of the things I write about, as scenery design is my big hobby. Or maybe I should even say that at the moment designing for scenery designers is my big hobby.
Let me start with a little FS history. The first version of Flight Simulator I played with was Fs3. My father had it installed on the computer, but at that moment I couldn't do much more then take-off. I had no idea how the navigation part worked. A few years later I got Fs5 with a magazine subscription. By that time I had also learned how the navigate using the NDB and VOR beacons, so I could start with some real (virtual) flying.
But after a year I got a bit bored with only the flying. After I had received FlightShop as a birthday present, I tried to build a few addon aircraft. But I never really finished them, as I was not pleased with the results (I can be a bit perfectionistic).
In Fs5 the airport closest to where I lived, Hoogeveen, was not included at all. So I decided that I wanted to build that and after a while I released my first scenery on the internet. From then on the making of more and better addon scenery have been my main interest for FS.
Besides the interest in FS, I do also have an interest in aviation in general. That all started when my parents took me in a plane for the first time to go on vacation. I was 8 years old at the moment and since then I have been crazy of aircraft. So when I had to decide what I was going to study, the choice was not that hard to make. I was going to do Aerospace Engineering. During the study my interest in simulation grew stronger and in the end I graduated on the “force feedback” of the control column (which was a powerful hydraulic system in that simulator).
Shortly after my graduation, now almost a year ago, I started to work at the National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR), which is the Dutch aviation research laboratory. I do work at the simulation department and part of my job become to design the visual databases (that is how scenery is called in that world) for those simulators. Slightly to my surprise I found out that there are quite a few similarities the MSFS scenery and these visual databases.
So in now have work that is very close to being a hobby. What more do you want. And about this interesting area of hobby and work, I try to write interesting or fascinating posts on this blog. I hope you enjoy them!