About
I'm inspired by flight & its history, growing up in an international Kaiser engineering family on multi-year projects (India, Africa…), circumnavigating the globe twice by my teens mostly on Pan Am, currently a retired San Francisco Bay area resident & fan of Pan Am's museum at SFO, Clipper Harbor at Treasure Island, picking up China Clipper models at Hiller Aviation Museum on Pan Am day (where Pearl Harbor Clipper pilots related gripping accounts of the bombing-enforced 1st circumnavigation), the event accompanied by a surprise Grumman Albatross fly in (boarded), followed by a visit to Oakland Aviation Museum's Short Soylent (later learning my oil-catter uncle regularly plied the Amazon in a Catalina flying boat, while in 1929 Hawaii's Inter-Island Airways (now Hawaiian Airlines) began inter-island service with Sikorsky 3-38 flying boats). I followed with basic exploration of powered paragliders & ultralights (including test flight) at Florida air shows & attendance at a unique ultralight-led bird migration.
A highlight of these adventures, & presently the main reason I want to get into MSFS is, on one engineering post to Ghana, West Africa, where there were then no schools for Western teens, the company paid for kids to continue education at a European boarding school, so I ended up in Fribourg, Switzerland through graduation at Villa St. Jean École Internationale (VSJ), whose promoted cultural philosophy was strongly influenced by one of its famous students, French aristocrat, famed European pioneer aviator & flight adventure novelist (4th world's most published author for his novella "The Little Prince") Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who joined the fledgling French airline Compagnie Latécoère (later Aéropostale, now Air France) as an airmail test pilot in 1926 (a year before Pan Am was founded), which still survives today as the flight museum L'Envol des Pionniers, exhibiting a number of planes Exupéry flew, including Latécoère's 1st built Salmson 2A2 & a Breguet XIV (flight simulator), standouts on Exupery's list of aircraft flown (click top/side orange bars to scroll).
VSJ alumni maintain a closed Facebook Group (FB VSJ). Exupéry's sojourn in Fribourg is described in Yearbook photo & book, while Fribourg recently celebrated his Centennial. FB VSJ offers additional reports on L'Envol des Pionniers & Latécoère. Exupéry is further honored in an annual "Raid Latécoère...air rally of 35 planes connecting Toulouse to Dakar, Sénégal" according to Latécoère. The event recently celebrated RAID Latécoère Aéropostale 100 Ans (view Desktop site on computer [EN (pages (may) require reload/refresh to display]), which included participant pilots Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s great-granddaughter and great-grandson Hervé and Albane de Saint-Exupéry (FR, EN); interviewed at the RAID event link above at menu item "Film...Afrique Movie...Africa", starting at timecode 1:57), & which event featured a special patch which looks good on an Aéropostale flight jacket (attached). Around this time arrived a multi-volume graphic novel which offered stunning artwork of planes & routes & scenes such as Exupéry piloting a BREGUET XIV passing Aït Benhaddou, Atlas Mountains, Morocco.