My flying time was mostly long ago, before there were multiplayer air-combat sims. I had dreamed about flying (especially about WWII fighter combat) for a long time. When I was 15, I was very lucky, and my parents gave me the gift of a goodly number of flying lessons in Cessna 150's and 152's. I got to the point of doing my cross-country work (past soloing and being able to fly solo into the practice area), but didn't finish.
I liked flying over my neighborhood, doing circles over my friends' houses. One time, I took up with me a GI Joe with a parachute on. I told my friends I'd fly over and drop out Joe. I got over the neighborhood and did a few circles, getting all my pals out into the open area behind the houses and got ready to throw Joe out the window. I had rigged up a length of string around Joe and the chute with a slip knot, so that I could throw Joe out and down from the window. That way, he could get a little distance from the plane before the string would go taught and open the chute.
Once I was ready and lined up, I opened the window and threw Joe as hard as I could downward. However, the window was at a bit of an awkward angle for throwing, I didn't get much downward velocity on Joe, and I had totally misjudged how Joe would travel once entering the airstream. Instead of going down and then having the chute open, the wind whipped Joe almost straight back, then the chute opened -- and Joe and the chute immediately stuck on the horizontal stabilizer, with the chute on top and Joe on the bottom.
I sat there looking at the situation. My first thought was about how stupid I was going to look landing back at the strip and taxiing back with Joe stuck on my plane. My second thought was about how there was a hard-plastic GI Joe doll stuck on my horizontal stabilizer near the joint of the stabilizer and the elevator, and that if Joe got stuck inbetween the two, it could be very, very bad.
I sat there, looking back as I flew along, thinking about what to do when I noticed that the chute on top of the stabilizer (which started out being plastered flat against the stabilizer) was slowly, slowly starting to peel back and to open. In another second or two, it opened completely and whipped backward from the plane. Joe, who was on the underside of the stabilizer, rocketed forward, around the stabilizer, and then back -- his arms and legs flying off from the centrifugal force.
The resulting armless, legless Joe then drifted down toward my pals, who retrieved him.
In my flying days, I especially liked landing on a nearby grass strips where you had to keep the nose up during roll, and the plane would do jumps after hitting the crossing runway that ran across the grass strip; flying in very turbulent and gusty air, which would throw the plane all over the sky; and landing in gusty, turbulent, crosswind conditions (at one point with the instructor and I practicing touch and goes in what we learned later were crosswinds above the rating for the 152).
In the end, though, flying 152's just wasn't what I was after. It was more like driving the family car to the store instead of driving in an off-road rally. I got my taste of real flying, which was great, but that was enough for me.
Many years later, Air Warrior was invented, and that was what I really wanted: air combat in WWII fighters against many other pilots. I was hooked.
After that, I once went to Air Combat USA, flying a Marchetti SF-260 (a two-place aerobatic prop plane) in mock combat against other Marchettis. This was after having gotten proficient in Air Warrior. I went with another Air Warrior buddy (JWolff of the Muskateers) who was very kind and treated me to it while I was still in school. JWolff and I proceeded handily to beat a commercial-rated pilot who was with us and who had much, much more real flying time than we did, pointing out that the techniques of Air Warrior translated over to real life just fine. The Marchetti handled (in terms of feel) much like a P-51 in Air Warrior (although of course of less performance -- I'm just talking about feel).
These days, what I fly for is WWII-era air combat, especially in scenarios, as those seem the closest to the WWII action I've only otherwise read about.
