Most people in university party. They go out, or to another dorm room, they literally poison themselves with crappy tasting poison (at least use the good stuff), and have massive hangovers. And other consequences that are even less glorious. That's not how I party, that's for sure. So what do I do?
I stay up until 1AM staring at the computer screen for hours, doing two things: talking to my best friend on Skype, and designing airports. Yup, designing airports. What could be better. Nothing. Nothing in this world. Except maybe playing piano.
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| CZBB, Boundary Bay Airport |
This obsession took off with my love for aviation (no pun intended). I got into X-Plane flight simulator in late grade 9, during version 9.10 if I recall correctly. Details aside, I quickly fell in love with flying, seeing the world, and so on. I've never gotten into the aspect of flying by regulation in X-Plane as so many have, I'm into visual realism, and X-Plane 10 (the latest version) is simply shouting out, "I have potential! Use me for graphics!" Alas, not many do. A people do, including me.
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| KBLI, Bellingham International Airport |
One of the first things I discovered when firing up this new fangled flight simulator, which was pretty young and small in amongst the FSX fanatics, was how barren it felt. Back then, the whole world looked the same. Since then, add-ons have been released to improve realism to huge extents, now putting default X-Plane 10 at about ten times the reality level of Flight Simulator X. So where do I fit in?
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| Blaine Airport (semifictional) |
I make airports. I'm no good at aircraft design, so I jumped that boat and headed for the welcoming arms of making the environment realistic. It seemed so easy. Boy was I wrong. Although it's simple, like any straightforward task, it takes a lot of practice and a lot of hours put into it to get good. I had about seven failed scenery project before I released my first (and startlingly, still my best) scenery, KBLI Bellingham International Airport. Soon thereafter, I started work on what is still my dream: PHNL Honolulu International.
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| PHNL Honolulu International Airport |
I started this project on Boxing Day, 2012. I put over 300 hours and sacrificed over 115GB of hard drive space for all the imagery modification and all the airport layout. Then my computer crashed. I lost all the work. All of it. All that remains is a ghost; a beta-demo release I put out that included only one runway and twelve orthophotos (satellite images). I cried on that day, and threw my dream away. For a few months, I did nothing. Then, in March, I travelled to Hawaii (see my journal entries from then, they are probably my best writing) and was inspired once again to take on scenery. I started work on the pleasant little airport called Kamloops Airport near my university. That went well, I'm more proud of it than I am of KBLI, but barely anyone flies there in real life, and consequently neither do they do so in X-Plane. I needed a new plan of action, a business plan, if you will.
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| CYKA Kamloops Airport |
I proceeded to make a beautiful discovery: American Samoa is not a country. What does this have to do with flight simulation? It is a dependency, or pseudo-territory of the United States of America. Therefore, like Puerto Rico, the entire country is available in the form of aerial photography with few clouds, for free and for public use. I was ecstatic. I did a quick experiment.
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| Aunu'u |
You would have to pay me a lot to completely leave this project behind. American Samoa is beautiful. It has a nice variety of airports, from one large international airport to a bush strip, and some helipads here and there. But, that would take a very long time. I needed something to do in the meantime. I started fixing up CZBB, Boundary Bay (see photo at top) and decided I wanted something smaller for the meantime to get my work out there to prove I hadn't simply vanished. Thus, I discovered a small recently closed airport south of the border: Blaine. It was closed in 2008, but the imagery for the open and functional airport was still available. So, I brought a dead airport back to life. It received very positive reviews and I was once again motivated to shoot for the moon.
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| Blaine Municipal Airport |
I then published CZBB, and shifted my focus back to American Samoa. To this day, it takes up all my hobby time other than piano playing. Today American Samoa isn't even close to 1% complete, mostly because I haven't even opened WED 1.2r4 (the scenery editing utility available from Laminar Research for free) in about a month. Today I am hoping to get a crap tonne done on my demo release of the island Tau, American Samoa, and the two small airports it hosts.
Unlike my PHNL project, this project has been and will be very hard to market. Honolulu International Airports is arguably the most important airport in the entire Pacific Ocean, acting as the halfway-point for millions of flights. Most people flying from the USA to Asia (in X-Plane, not real-life any more) stop in Honolulu. I just don't think I have the drive to start that project up again... yet. In the meantime, I'm going to go pour some fresh concrete on a short runway!
