Nearly 4 years ago...

I had just gone for a flight with a friend in his 2 seater. It was a beautiful day as we flew over the forested hills of Northern California and out to the Pacific Ocean. On the way back he let me take the control stick....I was instantly hooked. If I were rich....

The next morning I was sitting on the couch with my youngest son "Sky" who was 9 at the time. He was asking about the mechanics of flying. I picked up my Kindle Fire and said "Lets see if we can find a flight simulator". I searched in the Amazon store and found a few but the "WW1 combat flight simulator" description caught my interest. We downloaded it and tried the practice missions. At first I thought the dang thing was broken. Sky asked if he could try it and he went through the control settings and made some adjustments and off he went. He flew around randomly until the timer ran out in the first practice mission, then handed it over to me. Just finding and trying to fly through the rings was tough at first. I gave up for a bit and let Sky have it for a while. An hour or so later I came back to find him trying to shoot the zep in the practice missions. It took a little while for us to figure out how to hit the engines first.

Sky wanted to try the multiplayer missions so we signed in an account. What name to use? Hmm... We tried a couple of names that were already taken and I thought about the Dr. Seuss story "Too many Daves"

"Did I ever tell you about Mrs McCave? She had 23 sons and she named them all Dave.." It goes on to list all the different names she could have used like "Hoosfus, and one Weepy Weed, one Paris Garters and one Harris Tweed... and one of them Zanzabar Buck Buck McFate, but she didn't do it and now it's too late"

Sky wanted to use "Soggy Muff" (yes, that was one of the Dr Seuss names!) until I told him the gist of what that meant. We agreed on "McFate". So up he went. He hopped into a BTC game and got spawn killed 3-4 times. He handed it to me and I spent the next half hour just trying to get a kill. I put it down in frustration and forgot about it for a few days. One day when I got home from work Sky was excited to show me that he was now rank 5 and was getting even kills/deaths. He wanted us to be able to play at the same time so he signed on with a galaxy tablet on his own account. (Dragon Hunter) Soon after his older brother "Cat of Doom" got the bug and we were a flying family!

We've had a lot of fun here. Sky eventually got interested in other games (assassins creed, etc) but Cat and I played together for over a year until he got trolled and lost the love for the game.

I'm still enjoying it and the kids still check in and go up for a flight now and then. I think they would stick around more if the lag would settle out. I'll keep them posted.