Announcer (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 Flight World Podcast. Today we’re gonna have a special guest on the show, Calum Martin. So Calum is one of the co-founders of FSElite. He’s very knowledgeable and I’m really excited to have him on the podcast today. So without holding you up any longer, here’s Calum Martin.

Hey Calum. Welcome to the VR Flight World Podcast. I’m really excited to have you here. Would you mind just going over quickly, give us a run-down of how you got into VR Flight. Sorry, into FlightSim?

Calum Martin: Sure. So, I got into FlightSim when I was probably about eight years old and my parents bought me a copy of FS2000 and, just FS2000 actually, because some of my family used to work on Concorde. So the big selling point of FS2000 was the ability to fly a Concorde. So my parents got me that and, yeah, I just remember booting it up on my PC back in those days and I didn’t have a joystick or anything like that, so I was trying to basically fly this Concorde with a mouse and keyboard which, as you can probably imagine, didn’t go down too well.

Dan Caston: Yeah, for sure.

Calum Martin: And a couple of years later after just not really being that involved in the Internet and stuff and eventually I discovered this website called Afsim and then discovered that actually you could expand your whole platform with [inaudible 00:01:46 ] ,aircraft, and then, from there, my world just grew and grew and grew to where it is today. And, yeah, I think ever since FS2000 I’ve doubled in and out of flight simulation and stuff, depending on what’s been going on in my life, but I think I’m firmly involved in that community now which is pretty awesome and I think it’s a really exciting time, and certainly that threw me back in a lot was this whole introduction of virtual reality and stuff, and that’s what drew me to your website as well.

Dan Caston: For sure. So what kind of system are you running right now?

Calum Martin: So I’m using a Gtx 1082 Ti, but my biggest challenge is I’m not using it to it’s best capacity. I’ve still got a 10ee monitor and, again, the reason I bought a graphics card that was probably way out speccing of my PC, was because of the RN, this whole kind of hype around this particular card was really suited for virtual reality and, like I said, I want to start delving more into that, into that eco system as it were. So I thought I’ll invest now and hopefully it’ll pay off in the future. And then my primary platform for flight simulation is Prepar3D v4 at the moment.

Dan Caston: Okay. For sure. Yeah Gtx 10 Ti is a nice card. I’m actually only running the 1060 with 6 gigabytes so, for me, I have to lower some settings and that kind of thing. But with the 10 ee you should be, yeah, you should be doing pretty well when you go into VR.

Calum Martin: Well what sim do you use, just to-

Dan Caston: I’m actually running, mostly I run X-Plane 11. That’s what I’ve been running.

Calum Martin: Yeah.

Dan Caston: I’ve looked, I haven’t actually went into PreparD yet, but just today I was actually looking at that and I’m probably gonna get into PreparD as well. What drives you to PreparD versus the other sims?

Calum Martin: I think just my … so FS2000 was an ESP platform and I’ve kind of grown up with those platforms and investment as well in terms of the aircraft and I’m sure it we’ll come onto this in a little bit, but I enjoy flying heavy aircraft and studying the systems and stuff and, for me, the only mark I really kind of saw that that level of aircraft at the time was all in FSX and PreparD v1.2. So I invested a lot of money in those aircraft and since then developed a [inaudible 00:04:42 ] ouverture. Version 4 which is 64 bit which, again, kind of kept me with that back [in