In 1969 I had the privilege of meeting the working types in simulation at McDonnell Aircraft. At the time McDonnell had the contract for the flight simulators for the C-5A and the a-7E. They were unhappy with how things were progressing and had decided to get out of the business and only do engineering simulation from then on. I had worked with the USAF Navigation Training people at Mather AFB who had made some procedures training mockups, mostly for celestial where the B-52 had an MB-1 astrotracker that prequired precomputation as well as LORAN A. I got chastised severely, in 1968, for trusting the instructor grading standards and sent over to bean count the pipeline on A-4 Skyhawk overhaul. I was told in no uncertain terms that LTV, the A-7 contractor, had the preferred learning curves in a recent study.

I worked for a man with a Phi Beta Kappa key, R.C.P. Jackson in Operations analysis. He also was in charge of Military Plans at Douglas Long Beach facility. He got me the appointment with Bill Murden, his friend and equivalent at McDonnell. Bill Murden was Mr. F-4 Phantom. His current assignment was to capture the FX program for McDonnell. One of the tools that McDonnell had developed through the years was a computer simulation of Pursuer-Evader they called Air Battle Simulation-I. For FX they had upgraded this program to being able to let both simulated aircraft attack and evade the other. This benefitted from some USAF flight test in Combat Hassle and Combat Atlas with coplanar fights that used fuel load to achieve stepped wing loading and thrust loading asymmetries. Dissimilar aircraft at that time was considered an unwanted confusion. The new tool ABS-II could accommodate data for dissimilar aircraft and also allow maneuver in three dimensions. I was introduced to two analysts, Mike Mateyka and John Sinnet who were using the tool on the FX proposal. I was also told that the tool had been provided to what was to become McDonnell-Douglas Astronautics- West to use on a Navy study of a Quickturn missile. When I got back in California I went to MCAC-West and met James Beckwith, a manager, and his analyst Norman Ko as they were getting the software running on their Control-Data CDC 6400. At Long Beach a student-engineer was working part time on getting a copy of the card decks to run on an IBM 360-85. IBM used 32 bit words and CDC used 60 bit so it was nearly a year before all the COMMON expression in FORTRAN was consistent.

Last year Microsoft ceased to support my DELL ALIENWARE Windows 10 with Flight Simulator 10. As I worked it out, I am not going to be able to upgrade to Windows 11.