CozyNet Blog

Having a hoot with the old Flight Simulator!

As a kid I was fascinated with the Wright Brothers Flyer, the Titanic, the Hindenburg, Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses, and the Saturn V rocket and lunar lander. I even assembled model kits of some them just to play with out in the yard and would draw out my own childish inventions as if to fortify and improve them.

With that being said, around every December to January it's been a tradition of mine to load up Flight Simulator to replay the Wright brothers historic moment of flight at Kill Devil Hills which took place on December 17, 1903. The flight lasted for 12 seconds reaching 120 feet at a top speed of 6.8 miles per hour, so this is usually my goal to reach in Flight Simulator while on the hardest difficulty.

Suffice it to say, I've only ever managed to pull it off a few times over the years and will eventually knock the difficulty settings down a little until I make it. It ain't easy!

On my 13'th birthday I got the legendary "Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 A Century of Flight" with a joystick, which was back in December of '05. It was a big wish list item of mine all year long after reading about it in a magazine because you could re-fly historic flights such as the Wright Brothers, which was absolutely up my ally! At that time we didn't have a computer capable of running the game so I would take it with me to my grandparents to play on their computer which was a brand new e-machine PC. Back home ours was some old Gateway junk from the mid 90's that would get thrown out sometime the following year, which was right around when I got heavily involved in gaming and the internet.

I still have the original joystick and copy of the game to this day, which came with four discs and a manual in color print. You can see me with it in the following pictures.

And here it is today in all its glory!

I've always been a bit of an archivist and could never part with my old games and stuff despite not needing them or really ever playing them, so I still have everything that wasn't lost by pesky siblings.

I use to be able to load this game up in WineHQ no problem, but I've noticed modern versions of Wine don't seem to play so nice with older games these days. After beating my brains over error logs, I gave up perusing that route and booted up my old Windows 8 install where it works without a hitch.

So here's me 21 years later playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, A Century of Flight.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Date: 2026-01-25