They believe they can fly

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff

It's Monday night, and the air over Boston is crowded. There are dozens of Beechcraft Bonanzas and Boeing 737s flitting through the dark skies. Far below, Dan Mastropietro sits hunched over a glowing video display, trying to keep them all sorted out. Mastropietro runs air traffic control for the Boston area, heading a team of controllers who keep tabs on flight plans and manage takeoffs and landings.

Mastropietro takes his duties quite seriously, toiling for six or seven hours at a stretch before collapsing into bed at 1 a.m. He's got to get some sleep before tackling his real job -- as a paramedic.

Mastropietro does his air traffic control duties from a room in his Southington, Conn., home. And none of the planes he oversees is real. They're just three-dimensional images generated by Microsoft Corp.'s popular Flight Simulator 98 program.

"I got a degree in aviation years ago and I actually never used it," says Mastropietro, "so I always flew after that with a flight simulator of some kind." Most nights he "flies" his own virtual airplane for a couple of hours, but on Monday, he stands guard over others who fly.

Mastropietro is a member of SATCO -- the Simulated Air Traffic Control Organization, an international group of aviation hobbyists who've created a world all their own. Using personal computers linked to the Internet, and some modifications to Microsoft Flight Simulator, SATCO members run their own virtual airlines, with scheduled flights, formal flight plans, even weather delays.

"I get a bead of sweat on my forehead when the weather's bad," Mastropietro says. No wonder. With his $350 3D video card hooked to dual computer monitors, and a $200 sound card linked to a 300-watt stereo system, Mastropietro's system can deliver a realistic flight experience to rival the professional simulators used to train airline pilots.

Think of it as the electronic equivalent of the extreme sports craze. Around the world, legions of computer users spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars on simulating as perfectly as possible the experiences of civilian and military aviation. People like Mastropietro seem light-years removed from the daredevils who bungee-jump from bridges or leap from crag to crag on mountain bikes. But the athletic extremists and the flight-sim buffs seek the same thing -- rich, intense, totally immersive experiences.

Some flight-simmers find their bliss in the safe, secure world of commercial aviation. They plan out long, tedious air passages from, say, New York to Cape Town, then sit back and watch the virtual scenery flow past. Others desire the sting of aerial combat, and run software that lets them reenact the Battle of Britain or the US Linebacker air raids over North Vietnam. But in either case, these extreme hobbyists are in no danger of breaking their bones -- just their bank accounts.

You could see it was heading this way from the beginning of the personal computer era. Flight simulator software began to appear almost at once. The earliest programs were laughably crude, due to the primitive state of computer graphics at the time. But even with these simple programs, it was possible to emulate the functions of real aircraft with surprising accuracy.

The watershed moment came in 1983, when Microsoft introduced its Flight Simulator. With superior graphics and realism, it became the dominant product in the field. To this day, most serious civilian flight-simmers rely on the Microsoft program. Meanwhile, devout sim buffs developed software to enhance the capabilities of the Microsoft program. There are detailed simulations of the airspace over practically every region of the world, featuring accurate depictions of mountain ranges, highways, and skyscrapers. Other products enable pilots to simulate the performance of a favorite aircraft -- a Stearman biplane, say, or the Concorde. For true flight-simmers, realism is everything, and these are people who know what's real. "About 50 percent of us are actually real pilots," says Mastropietro of his SATCO buddies.

But with the rise of the Internet, flight-simming is no longer a lonely hobby. By linking their computers to centralized flight-sim server computers, thousands of hobbyists can create their own virtual airspaces. They can see each other flying past, even talk to each other over simulated radio frequencies. Already a popular hobby, the Internet has turned flight simulation into a worldwide obsession. There are hundreds of Web sites devoted to the hobby, run by flight buffs from every continent and every walk of life.

Former student pilot Guy Daugherty, 44, works as a dispatcher for the Calfornia Highway Patrol, but whiles away his spare hours planning virtual air trips. He tried combat flight simulation, but just kept getting "killed" by younger players with better reflexes. But Daugherty discovered commercial flight simulation, and never looked back. "This kind of `flying,' like flying in the real world, isn't really meant to be exciting," he says. "It's more a pleasing activity, trying to get the movements just right, or keeping on a schedule, or making a tricky landing in foul weather."

That might be good enough for Daugherty or Mastropietro, but for many flight hobbyists, there's no substitute for war. There are dozens of computer games designed to provide ultra-realistic combat scenarios, based on the performance of actual warplanes.

Legions of hobbyists gather on the Internet to refight the great air battles of World War II. Many can be found at iMagic Online's Warbirds Internet site. There they can fly any of 55 types of World War II aircraft in free-for-all shootouts, or meticulously planned military campaigns lasting several weeks.

Warbirds project manager Doug Balmos says that the company conducts intensive research into vintage aircraft to achieve absolute accuracy. "We used declassified test data from various branches of the government, captured test data from other countries," he says.

It seems to be working. While Balmos wouldn't reveal the total number of Warbirds players, he says that several hundred are logged on at any given time, waging total war for $2 an hour.

Tony Lovell is one such warrior. By day, he works at the company he co-founded, Wildfire Communications Inc., a telecom firm in Lexington. "But during the evenings, I become `Tone,' the skill-impoverished captain of a virtual fighter squadron named The Dweebs of Death."

Tone started simming back in 1980 on a crude Apple II computer. He discovered Warbirds three years ago, and now he plays 10 to 12 hours a week. "This is a connoisseur's game," Lovell says, because the virtual aircraft really do behave like their real-world counterparts. For instance, during takeoff if you advance the throttle on a British Spitfire too quickly, the tremendous torque from the engine will flip the plane over. So players must learn how to fly their aircraft before they can shoot it out with the enemy. Says Lovell, "It's sort of like having a pillow fight on a tightrope."

Lovell says his 20-person squadron often goes down in flames, but survival isn't the point. It's the fun and challenge of realistic combat, with none of the unpleasant funeral services afterwards. It's a thrill that appeals to Warbirds fans worldwide. When iMagic Online held a Warbirds convention at its headquarters in Grapevine, Texas, players flew in from as far away as Australia and Finland. These weren't virtual visits either, but real players flying in on real aircraft, to meet "allies" and "enemies" from dozens of mock battles gone by.

And after exchanging handshakes and war stories, the visitors repaired to a special room with 120 computers networked together, and began blowing each other away all over again.

"As a child, I built cockpits out of cardboard, Christmas tree lights, and anything electronic I could dig out of local industry dumpsters," he says. These days he's building cockpits out of real airplane parts, and wiring them up to a personal computer to create a personal flight simulator that Chuck Yeager might envy.

He began work two years ago, starting with a discarded ejection seat from an obsolete fighter plane. Today, his cockpit sports joystick, throttles, dials, and displays are all culled from old warplanes. "No plastic over-the-counter consumer toy joystick can come close to the feel of real jet fighter cast-aluminum flight and throttle grips," Wietlispach says. The search for parts has cost him thousands of hours and dollars, but he considers it a small price for absolute realism.

Some virtual throttle jockeys will settle for considerably less. For them there are cut-rate kits like the JoyRider from Accutone Services in Medford, Oregon. Ken Hill designed the JoyRider for his own use, then decided to peddle the plans to others over the Internet for $29.95. Hill figures anybody should be able to cobble one together for about $350 in a couple of days.

And the JoyRider has a major advantage over Wietlispach's cockpit -- its seat swings the pilot from side to side as he's yanking and banking in a dogfight. "With a decent quality head mounted display, projection system, or even a big screen TV, one can fool the brain into thinking that the continuous motion you see is actually occurring." Not quite Space Mountain at Disney World, but good enough for someone's living room.

Not good enough, however, for those seeking absolute realism. Wietlispach is already planning a major overhaul of his cockpit. He wants to have a twin-engine fighter, which means adding new throttles and engine controls, all from real aircraft. "Maybe I've never grown up," says Wietlispach, "or maybe technology just grew up to meet me. In any case, I wouldn't have it any other way."