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On an icy October night in 1984, a young, overworked pilot took off from Edmonton, Alberta, in a small commuter plane with nine passengers aboard, including a politician, a cop and his prisoner. Battling thick cloud cover and the accumulation of ice on the aircraft, the pilot misjudged his descent. Moments later, the plane collided with a hillside in the remote Canadian wilderness.

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Flight simulators boomed in 2020 and have barely slowed down since, but many pilots don’t use all the available tools for flight training. Kevin from PilotEdge has watched it all unfold over the last decade and he explains what flight sims are good for (and what they aren't). He talks about how Microsoft changed the game, whether you can log simulator time, and how virtual ATC plug-ins can make training more realistic. Kevin also created SimVenture, and he describes how pilots can prepare to fly to the world’s busiest airport by talking to real AirVenture controllers during this live online event. In the Ready to Copy segment, he tells us his favorite flight sim airplane, what upgrade he wants to see from sim developers, and whether AI will ever replace human controllers.

SHOW LINKS:

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Director James Hawes discusses his new film, The Amateur, with fellow Director Sarah Pirozek in a Q&A at the DGA theater in New York. In the conversation, he discusses insisting on the protagonist being geeky, clumsy, charming and smart to reflect his novice, utilizing his camera to capture the main character’s degrading perspective as the story unfolds, and how previously working on the show Black Mirror informed aspects of this film.

The film tells the story of Charlie Heller, a brilliant CIA decoder whose world comes crashing down after his wife dies in a London terrorist attack. When his supervisors refuse to act due to conflicting internal priorities, he utilizes his intelligence as the ultimate weapon and travels across the globe to hunt down those responsible.

See photos and a summary of this event below:

https://dga.org/Events/2025/May2025/The-Amateur_QnA_0425

Episode 89: Gear-Up Landing