John Melley: 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, this is episode number eight. Today we’re going to be interviewing Sergio Costa, who is the owner of Helisimmer.com. He is very knowledgeable when it comes to flight sim specifically when it comes to flying a helicopter. I’m sure you guys are gonna get some great information from him, so stay tuned, we’re gonna be talking about VR, we’re gonna be talking about helicopters, and just flight sim in general, so here we go!

So hey Sergio! Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast! Glad to have you here.Sérgio Costa: Thank you, and thank you for having me here.Dan Caston: Yeah no worries, we are really excited to have you here. I know you have a ton of experience with helicopters and flight sim in general. So do you mind just giving the audience a quick overview on what got you into flight sim and helicopters?Sérgio Costa: Yeah, yeah, sure thing. Well, I think there’s this thing that all of us who are in flight simulation have which is a huge passion for aviation. Right, so, I don’t know anyone that’s about flight simulation that doesn’t have a huge passion for real [inaudible 00:01:23 ] aviation. And that’s something that obviously I share with the rest of the community. I started having contact with aviation as soon as my brother was in the Air Force.

I was kind of thinking about joining the Air Force as well, but then I got interested with other things, and I kind of side tracked and started working with computers, but back in, I don’t know, ’94 perhaps, I started looking at flight simulation as something that could be very exciting for me. And so I started playing with Microsoft Flight Simulation. And from there, my passion for the hobby just grew and grew.

And back in, I don’t know, perhaps 2000, 2002, something like that, I started looking at helicopters. So, everybody likes to fly airliners, everybody likes to fly the jet fighters, everybody likes that kind of stuff, but I was in flight simulation for so long, that I was looking for a new challenge. I was already flying airliners for quite some time. I was already flying general aviation for quite some time. Not exactly, I wasn’t exactly giving the best use to my flight sim, I was just flying around like crazy and doing, you know, funny stuff, and low flights, low passes, and what not. And back in 2000 or 2002 or something like that, I started looking at helicopters as another challenge.

And that was actually what kind of kicked in something in me that, you know, brought me to actually want to learn more about flight simulation, want to learn more about how actual flying works. How pilots use procedures to get from point A to point B. I started learning about navigation, about patterns, about everything that usually pilots start to learn, I started learning much later down my flight simulation experience. I found a website called OverControl.com, which still exists but it’s very, I wouldn’t say it’s bad but it’s pretty much stopped right now, and so I learned a lot with the community, and with everybody that was around OverControl and the helicopter flight simulation.

And back in 2006, 2007, I launched a PDF magazine called Rotorwash Magazine, which was an awful amount of work. Having to lay out everything, all the information, trying to get the articles and the reviews and a plethora of things from the guys that were helping me, and eventually the project ended up dying. But my passion for helicopters kept on going. And two years ago, I decided to start and launch HeliSimmer.com, which is my website, and basically give back to the community everything that the community has been giving me for the last twenty plus years.

So that’s pretty much my road down the flight sim.

Dan Caston: Yeah, wow, that’s quite impressive. You started in ’94? Is that where you got your aviation passion? That’s cool.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, well, in ’94 I was eighteen years old. But my passion for aviation has began much much earlier, with my brother.

Dan Caston: Oh okay, what was your first sim you were using?

Sérgio Costa: My first one? I think it was FS, Flight Simulator 4? Or something? And it was actually at my friend’s house, they didn’t have a computer back then. But I managed to get to purchase a copy of Flight Simulator, of FS4, from a guy that was abandoning flight simulation. He didn’t like it, it was just, you know, back then too much of a hassle for him. He wanted something simpler, and we look back, FS4 wasn’t actually that much complex, but he wanted something more simple and just shoot down stuff and so he was selling a copy of FS4.

I bought it, and brought it to a friend of mine, and told him that I had this amazingly cool game, and the guy fell asleep while I was trying a flight sim so, yeah. I don’t think he liked it that much, but I loved it. I was completely hooked. I was completely hooked.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure. So, what kind of system are you now running?

Sérgio Costa: I have an Intel i7 7700, not the K, the regular one that’s not overclocked, and NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX1060 which is the very bare minimum for you to be able to use VR, so I advise you guys to get a 1070 at least, but the 1060 allows you to get VR. Sixteen gigabytes of RAM, then I have 256 gigabyte SSD, and it’s terabyte hard drive. Oh, and the HTC Vive of course.

Dan Caston: Right. And what, is that the six gigabyte 1060, or the three, I think they made two.

Sérgio Costa: Yeah, they made two, they made the three and the six, it’s the six one, yeah.

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