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It's quite a change from Concorde, sitting in the cockpit of a jet fighter. Before you go anywhere though, there seems to be as much to do.

To start with, you're given a choice of five game modes: Dogfight, Target Strike, Free Flight, Demo and Scenery (you'll need to shell out on one of the optional scenery disks for the latter). Then you select the degree of difficulty, ranging from Practice through Easy to Difficult.

The next stage is to choose the particular aircraft type: either an F16 Fighting Falcon based on an airfield, or an F18 Horney on a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. Finally, you must arm your plane with appropriate weapons from the huge arsenal at hand.

At last, we're ready to takeoff and confront heavily armed M21 or M23 fighters in Dogfight mode, or strongly defended surface targets if you've opted for a Ground Attack sortie.

But before you start revving up, you'd better make sure you know all the controls available to you - and there's lots of them. Aircraft pitch and roll control, as well as missile and cannon fire, can be controlled by both keyboard and joystick. All the other functions are keyboard controlled.

These include: eject sequence, altitude indicator, left/right/front/back view select, zoom and control tower or flightdeck view of runway. There's also throttle and afterburn control, landing gear, airbrakes and radar on/off. So there's a lot to get to grips with if you're going to complete a successful mission. The problem is remembering what does what in the heat of the dogfight.

Let's get airborne. I did a couple of Free Flights before going for a dogfight mission in an F-16. I'll be honest, I found it all pretty difficult. The main problem was the lag between making a command and the aircraft responding to it. So I tended to overcontrol. Certainly nothing like my Concorde - that gives an immediate response.

With experience, though, you develop the knack of anticipating what's required to get the desired result. Having said that, I never succeeded in landing on the runway with the F-16 or on the carrier with the F-18. Again, it was that timelag problem.

The simulator doesn't allow you to fly a true circuit before final approach and landing. So it's no good keeping a mental picture of where you think you are in relation to base. Instead, the technique seems to involve following an arbitrary set of instructions culminating in a turn into 080 degrees for the final approach.

Since landing was beyond me, the only way I could live to fight another day was to eject from the plane - an extreme measure, but it worked.

Still, I found no problems with takeoff, and the dogfight and Target Strike games proved to be so entertaining and absorbing, I nearly missed a scheduled flight to Bahrain.

I had some success in hitting my targets and avoiding missiles fired at me thanks to the highly manoeuvrable qualities of the Fighting Falcon and the Hornet. The instrumentation available to you in a dogfight is more than adequate and perfectly clear and easy to read.

From a pilot's point of view, it would have been better if the flying control responses had more closely approximated those of a real aircraft. As it stands, it's a game which cannot pretend to teach the real skills of flying.

But don't let that discourage you. It's great fun and as good as any combat flight sim I've ever seen.