aboutus

About Us

For all those who are curious who the guys behind the scene of FlightSim Commander are here is a short biography of us:

Neither one of us is a professional computer scientist or programmer, although Volker did some commercial DBase programming in the old days of DOS. Sascha works as a university teacher in psycholinguistics, while Volker is a photographer by trade. So basically we are just two little after-work-at-night hobby programmers who simply enjoy what they are doing.

Volker Heine (left) and Sascha Felix (right) working on the next version of FlightSim Commander

Sascha lives in Bendestorf, a little village near Hamburg; Volker lives in Lohmar near Cologne. So EDDH and EDDK are our respective home airports. Volker has some personal aviation experience having been a private pilot and parachutists for a number of years. Sascha has no such background and is more interested in the mathematical computer stuff.

We met for the first time in the days of FS5 some time in the early 90s and have been working together ever since. As far as we know, Volker was the first to ever write a moving map program for Flight Simulator, the first version being for FS5. At that time you still needed two computers connected via a serial interface. Therefore not too many people used that program.

Sascha (left) and Volker (right) in a real MD80 simulator

We were both born in April 1945; so presumably we belong to the senior league of the flightsimming community. We are German by nationality, though Sascha was raised in Denver, Colorado and has furthermore strong connections with Japan where he regularly spends some time every year.

We are both married; Volker has one daughter. Our wives look upon our hobby with a mixture of awe, incomprehension, and despair having, however, learned that there are times when it is absolutely hopeless to expect any type of response from us.