Welcome Aboard

Welcome to the virtual airline pages of Southwest of Sanity.

We began life under another questionable banner: The Other FedEx. That made sense at the time because freight is honest. Freight does not ask why the Wi-Fi is slow. Freight does not complain that the coffee tastes like it was strained through an old headset. Freight simply gets loaded, hauled, and unloaded.

Passengers, on the other hand, are passengers. And if you have ever worked in the service industry, you already understand that sentence without needing a diagram, flowchart, or therapist.

But here we are. New paint, new name, same healthy disregard for taking ourselves too seriously.

How the Sickness Started

My own descent into this hobby began in the early 1980s at a little place called ComputerLand. I managed to get a job there, and then managed to lose it soon enough because I could not leave the flight simulator on display alone for more than a few seconds.

It was green screen. It was wireframe. By modern standards, it moved with all the grace and urgency of a slideshow being projected through pudding. Maybe ten frames per second on a good day, assuming nobody nearby sneezed.

It was also enough.

That was the hook. I have been messing around with flight simulation ever since.

The Long Pause and the Return

There was a long stretch between the old Microsoft Flight Simulator X days and the modern era where the sim community felt like it had gone a little stale. I stepped away for at least a decade. Life moved on, machines changed, and somewhere along the line flight simulation quietly went from “cute hobby for people with very patient spouses” to “astonishingly detailed aviation rabbit hole with weather, live traffic, career systems, hardware panels, and grown adults arguing about taxiway signage.”

Then Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and X-Plane 11 helped pull me back in. The landscape had changed. The tools were better. The aircraft were better. The community was alive again. And apparently, I was still very susceptible to the disease.

The Other Bug

During those same years, the computer bug got its claws in me as well. That one never let go either.

I became a programmer, server administrator, systems builder, fixer of broken things, interpreter of error logs, and professional finder of the one cable nobody admits they unplugged. Today, I am still the IT head of a Gulf Coast chemical company, which means I spend my days keeping real systems alive and my evenings flying pretend airplanes into pretend thunderstorms while pretending this is relaxing.

A Completely Necessary Legal-ish Note

We have chosen to be affable about the whole thing. We will not mention it to them if they do not mention it to us. We also do not mind if they attempt to copy our look, tone, or operational excellence, though we recommend they start slowly. There are levels to this kind of instability.

What This Place Is

Southwest of Sanity exists because flight simulation is fun, and fun should not require a committee, a laminated procedure binder, and three people named Brad arguing about whether your virtual uniform meets policy.

We fly pretend planes in a pretend world. We carry pretend passengers and pretend cargo to pretend destinations for pretend money. Sometimes we do it well. Sometimes the landing report reads like the black box was recovered from a vending machine.

That is part of the charm.

If you want solemn dignity, flawless professionalism, and the respect of polite society, you may have chosen the wrong hobby. Honestly, you might have been better off with model trains. People seem to understand that obsession more readily. Put a man in a basement with 400 feet of HO track and nobody blinks. Put a man in a spare room with a yoke, throttle quadrant, rudder pedals, three monitors, and a spreadsheet of fuel burn calculations, and suddenly everyone acts like he needs supervision.

What Comes Next

This project has room to grow. Flight logs, reviews, dispatch tools, scenery notes, aircraft writeups, pilot stories, Discord chaos, screenshots, bad decisions, better ideas, and whatever else we can bolt onto the fuselage without the FAA noticing.

Anyone who wants to contribute is invited to speak up. There is plenty to do, plenty to explore, and plenty of runway left before somebody asks why the baggage cart is on fire.

Welcome aboard.