Training Movies from the "Classic" era

Many of the innovations that made multi-player, computer-based, Internet-connected combat flight simulation practical originated with "Air Warrior". Air Warrior became popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s on Macintosh, Atari, and IBM PC personal computers. Prior to Air Warrior, flight simulator enthusiasts struggled with the thorny problem of pretending that the flat CRT directly in front of their eyes was supposed to represent the vast 3-dimensional airspace surrounding an airplane cockpit in all directions. Other flight sims of that era depended on bizarre, awkward, cryptic "Function Keys" to switch the view from forward-looking to backward-looking, etc. Because these systems were never standardized and were all cumbersome, most flight sim pilots of those days rarely used any view except the main, forward-looking one, and the "feeling" of flight was generally "periscopic", as pilots were restricted to peering through the end of a long pipe.

Air Warrior changed all of that, revolutionizing the "View Systems" of the day with the simple revelation that almost every computer keyboard had a "Numeric Keypad" with keys in logical positions to indicate directions forward, backward, left, and right. They added the notion of a logical "UP" view centered between these, and the possibility of combining 2 or more keys for intermediate views. The "Air Warrior" view system was immediately adopted by almost every successful computer-based flight simulator thereafter.