Introduction to Thunderbolt
Thunderbolt was a journey into two arcane worlds for me: flight trainers and the Pentagon.
When I was learning to fly in the early 1980s, a flight trainer was called an airplane—you got in with an instructor and you flew. Five years later I sat with a friend of mine in one of the first simulators for small planes. It was a stick, half a dozen instruments screwed into a piece of plywood, and a small television screen that showed almost nothing. Its main advantage was that it was much cheaper per hour than actually flying. How much it really taught was a different question.
December 1987, I purchased a computer game called Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer. For thirty-six straight hours I tinkered with the fourteen different aircraft—especially the SR-71 B
