Simon Hradecky

And how he got involved with Flight Simulation

Simon Hradecky (born 1962), is a self employed software developer since 1983, when he founded his company NOMISSOFT. Simon was concentrating on flexible manufacturing systems (on the system software side, doing the whole communications, control circuits, drivers for machinery etc.). Due to the requirements in communications on these systems, Simon also got involved with Novell Networks and became Certified Netware Engineer (CNE).

He detected his love for aviation during his military times, when he had to assist radar operators to identify aircraft flying overhead Austria and monitoring aviation radio traffic for the same purpose. His interest mainly is the organisation of aviation behind, air traffic control, but also flying.

Simon became involved in development for ATP by accident. Simon got outraged, when he did several career flights with very low fuel consumption, but got a bad efficiency score. subLOGIC being no help to this, Simon went into ATP and spotted the problem. This led to the first ATPPATCH program.

Later in 1992 he had to check out a new user interface for his company (Flexible Manufacturing System FMS), so he decided to do a test project. ATPUTIL 1.0 was the consequence of that project. Originally that test project was thought to be thrown away after enough experience was gained. But looking onto the result Simon's heart would have broken throwing away the "baby", so he uploaded it as ATPUTIL to Compuserve instead. User reaction forced him to continue development over the years. In the meantime ATPUTIL 5.02 is the current version. More free- and shareware followed over the years.

Another project was triggered by the FMS/CAD part and finally led to 3DAGS. The customers were exploring 3-dimensional CAD systems. Problem was animation and construction in 3D. Simon wanted to prove, that 3D was possible in real time with PCs. As test object he chose, what else, ATP! 3DAGS was born.

In the meantime Simon has finished a complete new flight dynamics (called AAL) for Airline Simulator (the successor of ATP), which is based on a revolutionary modular concept, on true airflow calculations, a full inertia system. It is written in 32 bit technology, but fully integrates with AS and ATP. First checks of the aerodynamics by experts and pilots have already provoked enthusiastic responses. The new flightmodel is being used in released Airline Simulator 2 (AS2).

Besides hanging around in front of his ten (!) computers and hacking like mad into the keyboards, Simon loves to listen to classic music (Beethoven and Verdi being his favourite composers), being referee in soccer games, plays with model trains, enjoys simulating an ATC on TRACON, and most important talking to people on the virtual market places. Simon can be found daily on Compuserve's SimPilot forum. Simply post a message in SimPilot and follow subsequent discussions in SimPilot's AS/ATP message section.