User:Johan G

Johan G

Location	Sweden
Interest(s)	FlightGear, Aircraft, Surveying, Photography
MP callsign(s)	SE-JG
Favourite aircraft	Dassault Mirage F.1 Pilatus PC-9M Rallye-MS893E De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter

I'm Johan G on the official forum and wiki, enjoys seeing how FlightGear and its users develop, have a keen interest in (slowly) learning new stuff, and tend to have a weakness for Petar Jedvajs's Pilatus PC-9M.

About me

I have a long interest in aircraft and flight and for a few years in the 1990's I used Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.1 (the first MSFS on CD) together with a CH Products FlightStick Pro.

FlightGear, the simulator

As for FlightGear I have had a few looks on FlightGear through the years from as early as 1997 or 1998. Unfortunately, if I recall correctly, no computer I privately had access to could handle OpenGL, so I couldn't run it.

In april 2010 I had a look at it again and realised my latest laptop, and probably the one before that, could handle FlightGear. Wednesday Apr 21, 2010 I downloaded and installed FlightGear 2.0.0 and a few aircraft from the official download page. Only one of them was flyable with keyboard and mice, but at the other hand it flew really well.

I got really hooked really fast. As I had not touched a flight simulator for many years, the first thing on the agenda was repeatedly flying the good old traffic pattern, many times enough that my room mate thought I wasn't mentally well (at the other hand he spend a lot of his spare time to sleep, even in broad daylight...). Many things came back, like primary and secondary effects of throttle and rudder, to not hunt the altimeter and airspeed needles etc.

FlightGear, the community

The nice thing with open source is the "tinkerability" of everything. It's a really good route to learning new stuff, specially for someone with my curiosity. After just a short time I started to look at the forum and Friday Aug 06, 2010 I went on to join the official forum.

Even though there can be some brawls, almost trolling, the forum is very rewarding to follow. There is a lot of progress, in so many different areas.

Interesting enough I often tend to spend twice the time on the Forum every day compared to the time I spend in FlightGear during the entire week.

Real flight experience, or rather lack of it

As for real life flying, actually being in an airborne aircraft, I have only five memories three during my teens and two remaining even from before that. In other words: I'm no pilot.

What I intend to do on this Wiki

Well, sometimes it's just a good thing to be able to contribute. I'll see if I can also get away from my Wikipedia is not a manual attitude when writing. ;-)

I did a lot more than I first expected or intended, see my contribution history. I unintentionally become an admin in November 2013. That is, I didn't intended to become one. :-)

Essays

• Essay:The FlightGear Wiki — Its structure, content and ease of use (WIP)

In the sandbox

Some things I feel I need to play with.

• Messagebox style sanbox. Trying to find reasonable styles for a messagebox meta template.
• Table style sanbox. Trying to find reasonable styles for checklists, key combinations and OS prompt variations.

In the pipeline

Things I am working on, though most are currently stalled. These are subpages on to my user page.

Related to the wiki in general

• Wiki improvement (Subpage)
• Unification and improvement of maintenance templates (Subpage)

Individual pages

• Adding page on how to have parallel versions installed on Windows. See this post by clrCoda on the forum Re: Installing more than one version of Flightgear from Jan 2013.
• Adding XML part of Howto: Edit a livery
• Introduction to Low level VFR navigation (Work in progress)
• Flight computer (Work in progress) I just can not believe there wasn't an article on this yet. Will restart this when I come across my E-6B again.
• Spacecraft (WIP)
• ICAO flight plans and flight plan messages (WIP)
• Hardware Review: CH Products controls (Combatstick, throttle and pedals)
• Adding information to the table of models

Done

Some of the things I have done on this wiki.

Pages

• TerraMaster
• Aircraft interception
• Pilotage and dead reckoning

Larger edits

• Replaced the text in Howto: Edit a livery (original text) with my own draft (Final draft).
• Rewritten Help:Templates more or less completely (diff)

Templates

• {{key press}} to illustrate key presses and combinations
• {{alds}} for use on the Airliner Development Status page
• {{issue}} for referencing bug tracker issues (be that bugs or feature requests).
• {{rule of thumb}} for rules of thumb, like 2 kt is about 1 m/s.
• {{yes}}, {{no}} and {{n/a}} for use in various tables.
• {{LangSwitch}}

Fun things to do in FlightGear

• "Canyoning" in multiplayer.
• Loose formation in multiplayer.
• Closed circuits, flown as planned, to the second (or at least almost).