Daring to Fly

UP, UP, AND AWAY!

A Review of Daring to Fly

For anyone who’s ever been interested in the early days of aviation history or perhaps the mythology of flight as it applied to early civilization might want to take a peek at a new software title on the shelves. “Daring To Fly!”, is a windows based CD-ROM offering wide multimedia coverage of the roots of aviation.

After installation, the program starts at a main menu giving the user choices to different areas of aviation. These choices range from learning about what the Greeks beliefs of flying were, to the role women played in the days of barnstorming and record setting. After making a choice, the program takes the user to that part of aviation history for a full multimedia experience. For example, choosing the barnstorming option lead me to full motion videos or that era’s pilots performing their profession, while a narrator detailed the scenes. Several pictures are also available on each subject to view. Many text excerpts are also able to be read. One of them was a story from a young pilot being taught acrobatics in the early 1900’s. This was an actual letter written from that time, complete with the obsolete names and descriptions of the maneuvers they performed that day.

In other areas, a person can learn the principles of flight and the common misconceptions of the early aircraft designs. A complete story is given explaining exactly how and why an airplane flies. As with several other “stories”, as the program calls them, this story has narration from start to finish. Pictures of various aircraft are found in the “Aircraft Gallery”. Here, users can view the aircraft that the rest of the program talks about. Specifications are given for many of the aircraft, including World War One’s most popular warplane, the Sopwith Camel.

One nice aspect of the program is it’s link feature. Almost anything selectable has a link button. When pressed, this button shows all related subjects to that object, and offers a path to view those subjects. Along with this feature, are the Jump and Find commands. Jump allows access to any part of the program directly, and Find will locate a subject the user wishes to find.

“Daring To Fly” was created by Arnowitz Studios and distributed by Maxis (the creators of all the “Sim” games). Installation went well and with few options to pick. One choice on installation is the size of buffer, or cache, that I wanted. The bigger the buffer, the faster the program is supposed to run. I was offered from no buffer to a 12 megabyte buffer. The downside to a large buffer is that it requires more hard disk space. I chose 4 megabytes for a buffer. After completing it’s installation and making a program group and icon, I ran the program. The main menu popped up in a reasonable amount of time, but after making a choice from the menu, the program really slowed down. I strongly recommend running at least a quad speed CD-ROM drive, unless waiting isn’t a problem. Once the program starts playing any video segments though, drive speed didn’t seem to be any problem. Only when accessing menu choices did the long delays appear. I then increased the size of my buffer, but really didn’t notice a large decrease in access time.

Factually, I’d say that the information included is complete and presented in an intelligent manner. Being a major aviation buff myself, I only saw a couple very minor errors in the entire product, and these errors were statistical in nature, not factual. The timeline of history covered starts at 600 BC at stops at 1925 AD. I’m happy to see a product cover this era of aviation as I believe it is overlooked now-a-days, although, I wish that Arnowitz Studios would have extended this timeline through the 1930’s to cover the “Golden Age” of flight as well.

I’d recommend this product to anyone with an interest in early aviation. Kids as well, would enjoy this and probably could write a report from the contents. All in all, a solid product, if a bit slow running.

Copyright © 1995 Michael Wincek for infoMedia. All rights reserved worldwide.