In the late 80s and early 90s a few flight sim fanatics in the
Washington, DC area founded an organization called CPAA,
The Computer Pilots Association of America.    Jeff Bingham
(see this NASA site) soon assumed the duties of  Executive Director and 
sole staff member and tried to take the organization national.  
He had some real success, but eventually his duties working 
for a US Senator prevented him from keeping it going.  Click
here to see a photo of Jeff. That's him with the moustache.

In 1991, Jim Maas, a CPAA member and professor of psychology 
at Cornell organized a conference attended by flight sim enthusiasts 
from all over the US and one foreign country.  This meeting at
Cornell was well attended by industry representatives also.
The 1991 and 1992 meetings were officially sanctioned by CPAA,
but in truth, the meetings were the work of Jim and his secretary. 
In 93, it became apparent that CPAA was going defunct, but we
all wanted to continue the meetings.  Jim Maas needed help
with the work, so the fledgling organization MicroWings, (see
www.microwings.com) founded by Robert MacKay stepped up to
the plate and took over as the sanctioning body.  That 1993 conference
was the last one held at Cornell and Jim Maas turned it over to
Robert completely.  The 1994 MicroWings meeting was held in Dallas.
They happen less than once a year now, but the continuing MicroWings
conferences are in a way descended from those original CPAA meetings.

The following article was written after that first meeting:

Report from Ithaca!
First Annual CPAA/Cornell University
    Conference on Flight Simulation
May 23-June 1,1991,
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

Report by: Rick Lee, CPAA Member, Associate Sysop of the
Flight Simulations Forum, CompuServe Information Service
[GO FSFORUM] © 1991

DAY1
I had a very boring trip to Ithaca. I spent a lot of time
on the ground waiting to change planes and very little time
actually in the air. The last leg of my trip took me from
Elmira, NY to Ithaca over exactly the same path that I flew for
the FSFORUM Ithaca Fly-In using Flight Simulator. So the
scenery looked extremely familiar as we flew into Ithaca.
I was a little disturbed by this pilot's flight path though.
I thought that he should be going either a good bit farther
south or a lot farther north in order to give him some room
to turn and line up with the runway at Tompkins County Airport.
He seemed to be flying directly to the runway that I knew
was at right angles to us.  (Try flying from Elmira to Ithaca
with FS...you'll see what I mean).

As we approached the airport I had a wonderful view of it
out the left window. It looked very familiar from the
Fly-In. Our specially-created scenery version was extremely
accurate.   But we were coming down to it very close and

at right angles to the runway! I was getting scared. Sure
enough, the pilot took it down to a few hundred feet off the
ground and pulled a few G's in the DC-9 making that 90 degree
left turn.  He plopped it down right on runway 32. Whew! I
guess if you're piloting the Pittsburgh to Ithaca turnaround
every day you need to do something to make it interesting.

As I "deplaned" right on time at 3:40 pm EDT I started
to worry whether or not Robbie Fields would actually be
there. He told me that he would pick me up in his rental car
but I hadn't actually talked to him for a week so I assumed
that there was a good chance I'd end up finding other
transportation. Voila! There was this rather large man with
an equally large smile on his face as I came into the surprisingly
small terminal building.  That was my first glimpse of
Robbie's face although he was already one of my favorite
friends after years of online and phone contact. My mental
image was not too far off. The next couple of hours
consisted of a series of disorienting shocks though. Not
very many of my mental images of online friends proved
to be even remotely accurate. Most of them were wildly
off the mark. I just walked around reading nametags
and laughing hysterically. Laemming Wheeler must have
thought I was completely insane. I laughed every time
I looked at him all weekend. I had thought sure he was a
buttoned-down corporate type after receiving a letter from
him on his imposing company letterhead. But in reality he
sports one of those wild 4-day beards, longish unruly hair,
and seems to have a fairly serious collection of Hawaiian shirts.
I don't dare give a rundown of everyone's looks or I'll
lose all of my friends.

The registration table provided our first glimpse of how well
this program was to be run. We were all quite impressed
with our beautiful conference documents: A schedule, a list
of attendees complete with bios (very handy!), lots of hand-
outs and promo sheets, a high quality legal pad and holder
emblazoned with the Cornell seal and lots more. All of this
was enclosed in a red plastic briefcase on which was printed
a copy of the ITH ILS RWY 32 instrument approach plate
and the title "CPAA/CORNELL CONFERENCE ON
FLIGHT SIMULATION".

The evening's dinner was wonderful as you might expect
from a hotel that doubles as a school of hotel management.
I think it was the nicest hotel and conference facility
I've ever seen. Not big... just quality.

At 8 pm we got underway with opening remarks from our
conference organizer and host, Jim Maas (Prof. Of Psychology,
Cornell) and a keynote speech from Paul Schweizer of Schweizer
Aircraft in nearby Elmira. The company is well known for
their sailplanes (which by the way are represented in
the standard FS4/ASD stable of available aircraft) but
Paul let us know that the market for sailplanes is quite
saturated and since Schweizer sailplanes don't wear
out the company can't very well compete with their own
used planes. Fortunately, the family-owned company has
diversified heavily and now gets 99% of it's income from
other sources such as aircraft subcontracting. They make
such devices as ejection seats and centrifuges, as well as
specialty aircraft such as crop dusting planes, trainer
aircraft and simulators for the military. One of their more
interesting projects now is in the area of silent recon planes
which use the sailplane technology along with silent engines.
In one of his main points Schweizer noted that he sees
the personal computer based simulators improving to the
point where he can foresee some major changes coming in
their manufacture of training simulators particularly for
shipping to smaller governments. He feels there will be a
market for training devices costing much less than the
multi-million dollar sims now specified by the US military.
Jon Solon, Microsoft's FS Program Manager, asked
Schweizer if they still operated a soaring school. Paul said that
since they were a family owned business they did indeed
still operate this school even though it didn't make much
business sense to do so. Jon and a few others made arran-
gements to go take a lesson on Sunday afternoon after the
conference. (Rats, I had to catch a plane)

The next portion of the program consisted of two
video-tapes of high end simulation graphics from the
Evans & Sutherland Corporation and the Rediffusion
Corporation. I'll have to confess that I was shocked. I
expected them to be good but what we saw looked like true
photo-realism in completely computer-generated
landscapes. The room erupted in laughter and applause
when the tape showed side-by-side images of real-world
airport scenes next to the computer generated ones. I
thought the computer-generated scenes looked better.
Around 9:30 we all raced back to the Exhibit Hall to
line up for turns on BAO- ZERO. In case you've never
heard of BAO-ZERO, it's a special version of Microsoft
Flight Simulator version 4.0 (FS4) which has three screens
giving a nearly 180 degree view coupled with the Wagner
Microflight control panel. The Wagner is the Rolls-
Royce of PC flight input devices. Instead of the usual VGA
monitors, Hugo had rigged up three of these new color
LCD flat panels designed to be laid on common overhead
projectors. The three overhead projectors were arranged
to cast an image approximately 5 feet by 15 feet wrapping
around the pilot. The images were stunningly sharp com-
pared to what you might expect from large screen video
images. The sound was apparently coming from a Sound-
Blaster card (the SoundBlaster box was in evidence) and
it was good. It sounded like a Cessna and jets, period. The
touchdown wheel chirps were particularly nice. Hugo said
that BAO-ZERO is now programmed to provide a full 360-
degree view. All one would need would be the extra
projection hardware.

When it came time to shut down that room, Jon Solon
and I moved the scene into to the bar and a small crowd
of compatriots soon joined us. I spent quite a bit
of time there demonstrating how well FS runs on my Zeos
Notebook 386. By the time I made it back to the room I
was in no shape to figure out how to log onto CompuServe
from the hotel room.

DAY 2

At 8:30 Saturday morning we walked the short distance
to the new supercomputing facility at Cornell known
as the Theory Center. There, Professor Donald Greenberg
and Peter Pruyn, a graduate student, gave us an amazingly
lucid explanation of the various ways of generating images
of computer models. The results were truly remarkable.
The images combined highly reflective specular objects
along with the more mundane matt surface textures. The
images were more than just realistic. A tape was shown of a
computerized tour of the same building we were in at the time.
The tape was made before the building was built but one
might mistake it for a regular videotape had the "camera
operator" not done some really odd things like jump off of
the third floor balcony. The question and answer session
quickly moved on to some pretty deep discussion of how this
technology may change society in the near future. One could
feel society changing in the room it seemed to me.

On the way back to the conference center we stopped at
a nice location where I shot the official group photo.

Next, Jon Solon demonstrated the new Mac version of
FS that is nearly in finished form. It looks extremely
similar to FS4 hut the menu system is VERY nice, conforming
to the standard Mac interface conventions. The version
includes an aircraft designer very similar to the current DOS
version but unfortunately it does not have a scenery designer
in this version. The special features of the Mac System 7 are
in evidence. The Mac FS could be controlled by a special
set of commands coming from Excel. This sort of
inter-application communication is a major feature of the
new operating system. The sound coming from the Mac FS
was very nice but it changed in a noticeable t step-wise fashion
which was a little disconcerting but is still great compared to
the current FS4's PC speaker sound. Also missing from this
release will be modem support. Jon apologized profusely
for the lack of these important features but he felt that
getting a new version out the door was very important now.
As usual he couldn't comment on the features of the next
release but he did say in a round-about way that he was sure
the Mac users would demand a scenery designer and
modem support.

Hugo Feugen of BAO gave a rather broad sweep overview
of where BAO is now and where they are headed. He
said that BAO has voluntarily limited itself to marketing
simulators capable of running on the mainstream
consumer PC's available in the present although they certainly
had the capability to produce the kind of images we
had seen in the previous evening's videos. He said that while
they are still a small company, they are not struggling. They
are financially sound and growing, adding new personnel
after recently doubling their office space. In an apparent dig
at one of their rivals he mentioned that one of their new
employees recently wrote a SoundBlaster driver for FS4 in
only 2 days.

NOTICE: Hugo issued a plea for ASD scenery desig-
ners to send him their best scenery if they are interested in
having this scenery distributed through some unspecified
channel by BAO in the near future.

Laemming Wheeler of Kikiware, (shareware producer of
add-on products for FS4 and ASD) next put on one of the
funniest programs I've ever seen/heard anywhere. After he
took us on a computerized trip to the Kikiware world head-
quarters in his new Concorde aircraft, he proceeded with a
slide show of the headquarters and development team. A
slide of a naked little girl in playing in a small waterfall was
described as the founder, Kiki herself. Another naked
infant holding a telephone was simply described as "our
tech support department". A rather menacing lady with a
rolling pin was introduced as "the comptroller". Laem-
ming with both kids on his lap in front of the computer
desk jammed with several thousand pieces of paper con-
stituted the "development team". He went on to actually
impart some real information about how he designs his
goodies. Most of his objects seem to begin as 2-D ASD
drawings on the ground at 16x scale. Little ASD cars
and other things provide point references to such places
as the center of gravity. After drawing them like this he
can then dissect the images in FS code and make objects
out of them.

Jim Ross attempted to give us a demonstration on how
to use SEE and SEEPLUS but serious time constraints
prevented him from getting very far into it. I'm sure his
talk provided a good introduction to these products to
those people who were not CompuServe members and
were not familiar with these great add-on programs.

Joe Lincoln talked for a short while about FS-Pro and
SEEPLUS. It was great to meet such a pioneer in computer
flight. Joe told me that his FS-Pro is now selling very
well overseas.

Scott Edmunds, a true FS nut from Troy, Michigan gave a
demonstration on using ASD to design a large scenery
area. He had a big file of the Ithaca area there to
demonstrate with and all conference attendees were
presented with a copy. Scott had photos on hand of his
home FS system. This was, I suppose, the most complete
home FS simulator I've ever seen. He had a powerful
computer of course but he also had a giant monitor and a
Wagner Microflight control system. It was all fine tuned
to Scott's specs. He even had a piece of frosted Mylar to
flip down over the monitor thus effectively simulating fog
conditions. The monitor sported a sort of "dashboard
visor" which extended out over the control panel portion
of the screen to separate it from the external 3d view. Scott
also showed me photos of his earlier, pre-Wagner, system
that had a Maxx Yoke and a very nice set of rudder pedals
he designed himself. I asked him to write up his pedal
design for us. Scott said his wife and friends kid him about
his addiction (really?) but he points out that this is his
hobby and his friends easily spend more on golf greens
fees than he has on his ultra-sim.

Bruce Nicholson of Medford, OR gave a talk entitled
simply "Scenery Research". I wasn't sure what to expect
but I was surprised at what Bruce ended up presenting.
Everyone was surprised. You could feel the scales falling
from our eyes as Bruce very clearly explained why there
are so many "holes" and anomalies in the Western Scenery
Disks. He had a beautiful chart that showed it all quite
clearly. I hope we can get a GIF copy of this chart and a
text copy of his talk up in Library 6 soon.

Ed Wagner is already famous for his Microflight
control systems. He recently suspended production of
these units but now he says that he is going back into
production since he has some big orders to fill. The main
thrust of his talk was that he has succeeded in using
Laemming'.s SEE technology to produce an interactive
Air Traffic Control system for his version of FS4 which
ships with the Microflight. He was asked if it might be
possible to get a version of this system that works with
regular FS4 but Ed just said no. According to him the
system will give you vectors and advise you if you are
deviating from them.

After an incredible buffet lunch, Tim Freriks of Pro-
Sim demonstrated their cassette tape ATC practice sys-
tem. It is similar to the Winging-Il system that has been
around for a while but it is clearly designed for serious
practical use by pilots and student pilots to learn to listen
to and speak with ATC. According to Tim it's designed to
be used with or without a computer simulator. A student
pilot might simply use the system to practice talking to
ATC while driving. You could use it anywhere you have a
cassette player but the flights are designed to he used with
Microsoft Flight Simulator also.

Danny Maas, Jim's 10-year-old son gave a short talk on
what he'd like to see in future flight sims. You could see
the jaws dropping as Danny launched into a very clear, well
thought out speech complete with beautiful text slides. His
vocabulary was roughly on the order of a smart college
student. I thought he was going to get a standing ovation
when he requested the ability to just type in the name of a
mode you want in FS4. I'd tell you the rest of the
graphics-oriented suggestions that he made, but most of it
was over my head. [note Jan 2004, Dan Maas created
the beautiful computer generated animations of the Mars
Rover missions which we here in the US have seen
over and over on the news and other television shows]

Ken Lagace of Microprose talked next. Ken is in
charge of sound engineering at Microprose. Unfortunate-
ly we were using IBM PS/2's for demoing purposes and
therefore didn't have any sound cards available in a
machine in the main meeting room. Microprose is a
pioneer in the PC flight gaming industry with such hits as
the early Solo Flight and the ground breaking F19 pro-
gram. Ken spent a good bit of time showing us the
company's latest entry, Knights of the Sky, which is a WWI
combat simulation.

Roy Minier, founder of Flight Deck Software demonstrated
his well-known Instrument Flight Trainer software.
This software has been around a long time but I'd never
actually seen it in action. I learned a lot about it
during the First part of Roy's talk and I came to respect it.
Supposedly its database is very accurate and it has many
more instruments (for instance you can have a true HSI)
and training features than FS4. The main drawback to IFT
has always been the really crude looking CGA graphics.
Roy seemed to be drawing his talk to a close when he
dropped a bombshell. He announced that he was almost
ready to release a new version of IFT that would have
improved graphics. When he pulled the new version up on
the screen there were audible gasps from the crowd. It was
a stunning full VGA screen with 3d looking instruments.
If you have seen the Elite system then you know what the
new IFT looks like. It is very, very similar in appearance
but it will retail for $400 and have more features than Elite.
I tried out the simulator and I was very impressed with it.
The flight equations were very crudely simplified but
Roy said that was just the early version. The instruments
worked very well and are supposed to be user configurable
to match whatever aircraft you might have. The runway
graphics consisted of simple runways on plain green ground.

Lisa Miller demonstrated the Cross Country Instrument Flight
Trainer from T-34 Microsystems which runs on Macintosh
computers. Even though this system has no external views
at all, it seems to be a very good instrument trainer for the
Mac platform. While most of the features were in line with
all the other trainers I've seen, it was set apart by having
digital voice communications from air traffic control. After
the pilot has practiced saying the correct response he
could then hit a key to hear the correct response from the
computer.

Professor Dave Lombardo of Bowling Green State
University of Ohio actually "delivered a paper". Dave is
Assistant Professor and Aerotechnology Program Leader
at his school and his talk was based on the premise that a
full motion simulator is simply not necessary for students
to gain great benefit from using computer simulators in
their training. He cited a study conducted at Embry-Riddle
that showed that students using the Roy Minier's IFT
program scored higher than other groups using the
school's more traditional simulators. The least expensive
of the other sims cost $70,000. This was no boring college
lecture though. Dave is a very funny guy and his talk was
hilarious as well as serious.

Our own Capt. Don Simmons (Canadian Airlines 737) was
to talk next on the correlation of real-world aviation to PC
flight simulation but he cut his talk short since he
said that his entire talk had already been covered by the
other speakers. The main thing I recall Don saying was that
what we needed now was a way to get the smell of burning
oil, gasoline and new-mown grass Into the room with us as
we fly.

Valerie Collins of the FAA came to talk about her role
in fostering aviation related studies in the nation's school
systems. She said if we didn't get anything else from her
talk she wanted us to get these phone numbers which are
available to help educators get information they need. The
Federal Educational Information Exchange is ... 1-301-
258-0953. If my notes are correct this is a BBS system.
Voice support is available on 1-301-975-0103.

Yours truly, Rick Lee, talked about (what else) the
Flight Simulations Forum here on CompuServe. I'm afraid
my talk wandered into the philosophical realms a few times
as I pondered how computers and modems are changing
the way we work and play. I fully intended to get into the
nuts and bolts of how to get more out of the forum but I
ran out of time just like all the other speakers. Just about
all the conference attendees who did not have Compu-
Serve accounts expressed a desire to sign up. I hope we see
a lot of new names around here soon.

Jeff Bingham talked about future plans for CPAA. He
said that he and Microsoft were making plans for a nation-
wide scenery design contest. Felix Boronat of Barcelona,
Spain indicated a strong desire to start a cousin-organization
to CPAA in his country. I have no doubt that he will
succeed since he was motivated enough to hop a Concorde
from Europe just to attend our get- together! A civil
engineer, Felix was a very popular guy at the event. We all
wanted to get to know this tall rather shy individual who
obviously took the prize for coming the farthest.

Speaking of prizes, Felix won as a door prize a "Weapons Control
System" from Thrustmaster. We all wanted to be there
when he tried to get that through airport security.

At the banquet we had another wonderful meal and
Jim had collected so many door prizes from generous
vendors that only about 3 or 4 really unlucky people failed
to win anything.

The exhibit hall was crowded until they ran us out very
late. Quite a few of us hung out in the lounge until.... errr...
uuhh... well let's just say it was really late.

DAY 3
Most people left early Sunday but I didn't fly out until
3:40 pm. Robbie had a car and no particular plans so we
set out to see the countryside. We ended up eating some
truly grand hamburgers at a little roadhouse overlooking
Lake Cayuga, one of the Finger Lakes. The weather was
perfect. It was good to get out of doors after 2 days inside.

My flight took off on schedule from Tompkins County
Runway 32 and arced out to the northwest across the
shimmering lake where 1 could see hundreds of boats
enjoying the perfect Sunday. Looking down I could see the
same little roadhouse where we had eaten lunch and
talked about everything under the sun except for flight
simulators. As the plane crossed Elmira I was trying to
catch a nap but something in me nudged me to take one
more look out the window. Below the DC-9 I could see a
small while airplane towing a white Schweizer sailplane
over the green, green landscape. Below was a small glider
port on top of a hill with numerous sailplanes scattered
about. So long Jon Solon... see you next year.

(I have photos of this event which I will try to dig out and 
add to this page)

Web www.rickleephoto.com

Rick Lee - Photographer

311 Washington St., W. 
Charleston, WV 25302 USA

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