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In the middle of a Cuban 8, the engine stalls. Suddenly, your P-51 Mustang is flying - downwards. Attempts to restart the engine cause the plane to pitch and yaw helplessly. You're pulling negative G's and begin to 'red-out'. This is it. Curtains. Unless, that is, the hours you put in on General Chuck Yeager's Flight Trainer have taught you how to survive such a potential disaster. Those who followed the tutorials will live. As for the hot dog pilots who didn't, shortly they will be no more than a hole in the ground.

Chuck Yeager's been there, done this, flown that, and as one would hope from a real life, top notch test pilot, the Advanced Flight Trainer he puts his name to is good. It requires just the right balance of technical understanding, progressive learning and seat-of-the-pants barnstorming to make flying your CPC more realistic, more fascinating, more enjoyable and more hair-raising than ever before.

There have been flight simulators before, and no doubt there are many more to come, but nothing is going to touch Chuck's AFT. For while there are many excellent simulators, their strength has always been in the completely accurate recreation of one vehicle. General Chuck (as he's known to his friends) gives you the chance to fly fourteen!

Yes indeedy, it's pick and choose time between some of the most famous aircraft ever built and a few that never made it past the concept stage (when you fly them, you'll see why). Start with the Sopwith Camel and Avion Spad XIII of the First World War, move up through Spitfires and Mustangs up to modern day classics such as the Piper Cherokee and the Lockheed SR-71 "blackbird'. Each vehicle varies enormously in handling and flying technique, as you can imagine with speed and weight differences of over 2,100 mph and 143,000 lbs. This is a lesson you learn the hard way... often at the cost of a plane!

One minute you're behind the 'go-stick' of a small Cessna 172 Skyhawk banking and turning with ease, any mistake easily rectified. Then, flicking through the plane menu, you feel the need for speed. So it's time to hop into the cockpit of the Bell X-l and discover what it's like to ride a bucking bronco at MACH 1 at 50,000 feet. Time to relive your breakfast, and find out why General Yeager is known as 'Chuck'. It could just as well have been Hughie or Ralph.

The Advanced Flight Trainer, it must be said, is not at its very best for joyrides - although the occasional power dive from a few thousand feet is good for the blood. No, as its name suggests, the emphasis is on the development of simulator piloting skills: not for any dull, purely academic reason, but so you can exploit the AFT to its full. For then it comes into its own, and allows crazy manoeuvres and stunts in wholly impractical aeroplanes.

After loading, you are offered a choice between a demo flight, flight instruction and aerobatics, plane racing, test piloting and formation flying. Each of these different schools requires different levels of skill within the discipline. Best of all for the complete beginner (or complete crash artist) is the flight instruction mode. This helps to guide you through an intensive course of basic flight techniques.

There are three styles of flying lessons: basic, advanced and aerobatic. Every level has an additional pull down menu which allows you to specify which manoeuvre you wish lo learn, such as take-off, descent, steep left turns, power off, stall or an Immelman turn (sort of turning your stomach inside out). The instructor (good old Chuck himself, I guess) flies the plane until you wish to take over and then prompts your actions, by way of a message board and head-up display cursor.

The rest of the controls, obviously tailored to achieve some kind of conformity for the ease of us would be pilots, all manage to achieve some individuality in speed of response, calibration of instruments etc. Analog displays are difficult to recreate on the screen, but they're clear and easy to read, employing colour for contrast to heighten readability (who needs 'em? I just find the ground and aim for it!)

The use of graphics outside the cockpit, is at once disappointing and refreshing, the weakness of one area balanced and almost explained by the strength and originality of others. The landscapes could be viewed as disappointing considering the length of time the conversion to CPC took to arrive. The blocks and pyramids that go to make up the buildings and obstacles, are perfectly crisp from a distance, yet as they are approached on occasion they sometimes tend to lose some definition and make ultra-close navigation impossible (but then again who wants to fly that close to a pyramid at 400 mph?). To give you some idea, the pyramids aren't quite as good as Total Eclipse's - but then again you're moving much faster.

The not-so-hot surrounding graphics can be forgiven instantly though when you take into account the variety of views from which you can watch your aircraft's progress. Yes, you can flick happily between no less than ten perspectives, to get the best view of yourself crashing (sorry, 'buying the farm' - forgetting my test pilot jargon there). There are three from outside - the tower, a satellite and a chase plane and seven from the plane itself: left, right, belly, up, full forward, rear and the cockpit. All have a zoom feature for a really good look. Since the emphasis of the AFT is on learning to fly aeroplanes, the balance appears to be just about right: there is, after all, only so much room on one disk.

Enough of this stuff about the controls! Let's get down to some serious flying, because that's what Chuck Yeager's all about. The first few moments of overreaction are soon compensated for, and before long you're flying as free as a bird (a rather overweight bird, but never mind). The trick is not to get lulled into a false sense of security, and to think that after one guided manoeuvre that it's time to pilot an F-16 in for a hasty landing. Try the tricky stuff too soon and you could well end up with a medal. But awarded posthumously.

This is not to say that you can't get away with dangerous flights, or the occasional reckless landing (wreckfull?). Death is never fatal in the AFT world, and the worst that can happen is one of General Yeager's caustic comments, delivered by a screen portrait in glorious glowing red: "That's a sorry way to land an aeroplane!"

When the basics have been covered, and your ego and stomach have recovered from the embarrassment of totalling aircraft on even the simplest of manoeuvres, you feel the need to reach for the skies solo (so low you might survive the crash). Of the options available, test flying is by far the best for the first time pilot fresh from instruction school.

Unlimited flights can be made to the various airports, the aircraft race track, and the many aerobatic obstacle courses (these are all quickly reached via the main and pull down menus), but for the first few flights a bit of harmless sight seeing is a good way to get the feel of many planes.

On the test flight section, the aim is to take the plane of your choice and thrash it until you know how fast, how high, how much of everything it can do. With planes such as the Sopwith Camel, it's good fun to take them way beyond their service ceiling and then to loop and dive these delightfully lightweight planes. The real fun starts, however, when you choose to play with monsters like the X-l, F-16 or even one of the AFT experimental aircraft... Ridiculously fast, the modern age jets rip through the skies as you fight to control these most ferocious of beasts, which find the ground strangely fascinating, and simply obey the laws of gravity whatever the cost to you.

The limits of each aircraft are explained in the excellent manual, where the rather austere side of the game's emphasis on learning is offset nicely when the manual challenges you, the test pilot, to go higher (the SR-71 is claimed to have reached 164,900 ft!), climb quicker and dive faster than even the manufacturers claim - and they were the ones trying to sell it! Watch out though: go too far, too fast and you may blackout/red-out. Do so and the screen realistically blanks out in the appropriate colour until you recover consciousness. Flying in the dark ain't easy, and crashing is.

Other options are available. The formation flying and racing give you something completely different. The lonesome pilot no more; now it's time to mix it up with the big boys. Then there's aircraft racing, which takes you to a series of courses, all designed not only to give your competitors a better chance than you, but also to test the level your skills have reached. Finally the formation flying has you following a predetermined course, in and out of obstacles. this time on the tail of a lead plane. (Note: the option to record these flights for future enjoyment/embarrassment is available for 128K users. This is the only real minus point for a number of CPC users, as understandably but regrettably the AFT only has a very limited scope in its 64K guise. You are only able to enjoy the test flight missions.)

Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer will have you looping and rolling for hours on end, regardless of which version you buy. It features realism by the bucket load, and has such a variety of missions and vehicles that the casual pilot who just wants to break the sound barrier every now and again will be more than fascinated.

Finally, though, its greatest asset is its ability to entertain and at the same time remain constructive - that's if you don't count crashing a multi-million pound aircraft as anything but self-destructive. It's proof, if proof is needed, that not all computer games are mind-numbing excuses for slaughter and mayhem. To fly these planes properly you've got to understand how they behave and respond: when you do, the sky's - and in the SR-71's case beyond - is the limit.

So there's no combat. Some people will miss this, and I did at first. The goal of the program, though, is flying: to take each aircraft and get the best performance out of it without crashing. So it's more frustrating than other simulators, but with a lot more challenge than just blowing away squillions of dumb enemy pilots (yawn!). Shame about 64K owners - it's yet another reason to buy a memory expansion.

Not applicable: just have fun!

Can be seen.

Graphics 90%
P. The variety is astounding.
N. Landscape outlines sometimes rough.

Sonics 62%
N. No tunes but plenty of effects.

Grab Factor 82%
N. Almost overcomplex at first.
P. But you'll make a pilot yet.

Staying Power 100%
P. Fasten seatbelts for a long, long ride...

Overall 91%
P. Just like being a pilot, only safer!