I have a dream!

[Stuart_M]

Ok, kind of dramatic title, but I thought it would be interesting to have flight sim centers at local malls to spark an interest in aviation. Let's take the (virtual) airport to the kids since we can't get kids to the airport like we could in the good old days. Remember when there were not any fences around the perimeter?

I can't think of a better place to promote General & Experimental Aviation.

Your wife drags you to the Mall, what do you do? I dread watching my wife rummage trough racks of clothes. If only there was a flight sim center near by.

I'm interested in your thoughts!

[David Pavlich]

Of course, virtually all of us would love it. However, what would have to be charged just to break even with the thought that the sponsor, I would assume a flight school, will generate enough interest for enough potential students to spend between 5 and 10K, depending on which certificate is sought, to make the investment worth while?

David

[Stuart_M]

Nothing that complicated. Just Flight Sim X using yoke & rudder pedals, and a navigational map flying VFR. Nothing that can be logged for training.

[martymayes]

I'm interested in your thoughts!

Back in the '80's, I knew someone in Louisiana who wrote a business plan for almost exactly the same thing. He wanted to open a flight training/simulator center at a mall. He pushed his idea around to a few investors to get it financed and they all laughed. I learned about it because I knew one of the potential investors - he was interested in the general concept but wanted no part of the shopping mall aspect - and he was an investor in shopping malls, lol. Since I was doing a lot of flight training at the time, he asked if I would be interested in setting up something like that minus the shopping mall. I don't know what it would be like today but then it's was hard to make the numbers work, which is why investors turned this guy down.

On the rare occasion I go to a mall these days, all I see are old people "mall walkers" and hoodlums. Not sure if that is the audience you want to target.

Another thing I have observed since computerized simulators have proliferated is "simulation" is as far as many potential customers want to go. Lots of kids play flight simulator games on computers but have no interest in flying a real plane. So basically a sim center at the mall wouldn't be much different from an arcade. A simulator with guns and rocket pods would see more activity than a C-172 sim.

Good luck tho......if I'm in your neighborhood, I'd drop in for .5 of steep turns or something.

[Joe Delene]

But you would have to compete with 'HALO' & 'GEARS of WAR', no easy feat.

[Stuart_M]

This is true. My son loves to fly sims but you can't beat the adrenalin rush of Call of Duty.

[Matt Gonitzke]

Something more or less along those lines is already being done.

[Stuart_M]

Interesting article. Thanks!

[Hal Bryan]

But you would have to compete with 'HALO' & 'GEARS of WAR', no easy feat.

I don't know how I missed this post earlier...Anyway, I got a chuckle out of it, because when I was at Microsoft we (the flight simulator team) used to dream of getting even a tiny fraction of the marketing budget spent on "HALO" and "Gears", so I know what that's like. Not to mention the fact that, for about 4 years, my wife was on the "Halo" and "Gears " team.

Granted, when a product like "Halo" sets records (as have "Call of Duty" and others) for the biggest product launch of any kind in all of human history...it's not easy for something as "boring" as Flight Simulator to compete. Sigh - old wounds...

[Stuart_M]

Frank,

ROF and IL2 are will be on the sims. There will be a separate night for each of the following categories; General Aviation, WWI, WWII, Fighter Jets (F-16 Falcon) during the week and then I'll rotate each Saturday for each one previously mentioned. I figured that would work best since I'd have to reload a simulation and reconfigure the controls each time somebody wants to fly a different type of aircraft.

It's true what Hal says. It's hard to compete with Halo, but I figure almost everybody already has that game at home. It would be nice to have something different to do every once in a while.