Speaker 1: Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast, the place where flight training and your home office collide. Get tips, tricks and in depth interviews about flight training, virtual reality and flight simulation, with your host, Dan Caston.

Dan Caston: Hey everyone and welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast. Today we have our very first guest on the show, B.J. Slater. Very excited to have him on here and I know he’s gonna share a lot of great information with you. He is a flight instructor from the Chicago area. I won’t hold you up any longer. Here’s our first interview with B.J. Slater.

Dan Caston: So, welcome to the podcast, B.J.. Glad to have you here.

B.J. Slater: Yeah, thanks for having.

Dan Caston: Yeah, excited to have a flight instructor on the podcast and I’m sure the audience is gonna be really excited to hear what you have to say.

B.J. Slater: Very cool.

Dan Caston: All right, so if you don’t mind, if we could just kind of dig into your story first, I’m sure everyone would be interested to hear how you got started in aviation and just hear your story and introduce yourself, if you don’t mind.

B.J. Slater: Sure. Yeah, my name is B.J. Slater. I am a flight instructor out in the Chicago area. I’ve been instructing since 2001 and actively instructing off and on and had a few other flying gigs in between there as well. I started out in aviation back in college. I went to a university that had a collegiate flight training program. I didn’t go there for that purpose. I went to study engineering and then after a couple years, decided that wasn’t for me, and so I jumped ship and went to the aviation program and basically learned to fly, got all my certificates and ratings and became a flight instructor while I was in college.

B.J. Slater: Before that, even, I’d always wanted to be a pilot ever since I was a kid and was playing with Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 back in like the late or early ’90s on my dad’s office computer. All it had was a keyboard as my flight controls. I didn’t have a joystick or a yoke or anything, so that’s kind of where I started to get interested with it, was when I was a kid. I’ve always wanted to learn how to fly, and then through middle school, high school, I would take a couple airplane rides or sort of introductory flight lessons, not really realizing that they could’ve been counted as flight lessons. I would just go sign up to do a quick half hour flight around the area, and enjoyed that and then didn’t really get serious about the flight training until I got to college.

Dan Caston: Okay, nice. So, you were flying a flight sim back in the day?

B.J. Slater: Oh yeah, way back when. I was pretty active with it too, although up until … Well, pretty much all through my childhood years as new flight sims would come out, I’d get the latest version and eventually added a yoke and other stuff to it, but yeah.

That was a big part of growing up for me.

Dan Caston: Okay. So you’re flying quite a bit nowadays?

B.J. Slater: Not as much nowadays. After college I went and I did some flying in Alaska and then flew for a Part 135 cargo operator out on the West Coast, flying Cessna Caravans all over the place, which was a great opportunity, a great job. The peak of my flying was back then. Around 2013 or so, I think, is when I left that gig, and actually moved back to Chicago. This is where I grew up, and I joined my family business. So now the family business is my day job and it has nothing to do with aviation, so right now I instruct basically on the side, mostly on the weekends and whatnot, and then I’ve got my blog and website as well, but it’s a side gig for me.

Dan Caston: Nice. All right, sounds good. What would say your favorite plane would be if you were to choose over your flight career so far?

B.J. Slater: Oh, I’ve been really, really fortunate to have a couple of amazing airplanes I’ve gotten to fly. Like most people, small airplanes, I probably have more time in a Cessna 172 than just about anything else, but when I was in Alaska I started flying the Cessna Caravan, the Cessna 208, which is the single engine turbo prop, and had a bunch of time in that. Loved that airplane. It’s a fantastic airplane. It does everything you want it to do but it’s so easy to fly, and then while I was in Alaska also, I had the chance to fly in the right seat of a DC-3. I had one summer where I got to fly around in a DC-3 carrying passengers out to fishing lodges and things.

B.J. Slater: That was something I’d always wanted to do but I didn’t realize that I would, you know … I ended up doing it in my late ’20s and I didn’t think I’d get there that fast, but it was a great opportunity. It’s some great memories, so those two and probably tied for my favorites.

Dan Caston: That’s kind of a cool experience.

B.J. Slater: Oh yeah, it was awesome. I wish I could take credit for having decided that’s what I was gonna go do, but it was really just kind of being in the right place at the right time and taking a chance, which paid off.

Dan Caston: Do you think there’d be any time that you would’ve … If you had a flight sim, it would’ve helped you in your flight training at all?

B.J. Slater: Yeah. I remember when I was working on my instrument rating, we did a lot of stuff with what at the time was called a personal computer aviation training device, a PCAT, we called it. They’ve changed the names of the different types of computer based sims quite a bit, but at the time it was basically like a fancy set of flight controls and some switches and things that you could manipulate that … but it was basically … It was something like X-Plane or similar to X-Plane, where you were basically just flying around in a flight sim, but it had the yoke and the rudder pedals and it was fairly heavy duty and whatnot.

B.J. Slater: So, that was something I used in training. My flight school had one, and then there were times where at home I have my little home yoke, my laptop and whatnot, and I’d set it up. I did practice, especially with instrument flying. I did a lot of instrument practice with a flight sim and even the ones at home, even though the time wasn’t loggable, it was something that definitely helped me. It definitely helped me practice the procedures and practice the approaches and get my instrument scan down a