Page 60 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 2 Winter 2013

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SPOTLIGHT
by Jana F. Brown
As a 16-year-old student at St. Paul’s,
Austin Meyer ’88 could often be found
on weekends flying airplanes at Con-
cord Airport.
Meyer, a South Carolina native who has
always loved science, earned his pilot’s
license prior to his arrival at the School
as a Fourth Former. Two-and-a-half
decades later, Meyer not only has 3,000
flying hours to his credit, but he also
has built a thriving career by combining
two of his lifelong passions: aviation and
computer programming.
the flight-simulation business.”
“I have four subcontractors, we don’t
have an office, we work when we want,
how we want, nobody has to leave the
house,” says Meyer from his home base
in Columbia, S.C. “We are a zero-carbon,
zero-commute, zero-office-overhead
company.”
Meyer “absolutely loved” his time at
St. Paul’s, where the people, campus,
crew program, and astronomy program
were among the highlights. He earned
an aerospace engineering degree from
Iowa State University in 1994, founded
X-Plane in 1995, and wrote all the code
Flight Simulator Guru Austin Meyer ’88
As he nears the 25th anniversary of his
SPS graduation, Meyer is flying high –
literally. His flight simulator program –
X-Plane – has vaulted into position as
the industry standard for pilots flying
everything from single-engine Cessnas
to Boeing 737s.
“The real benefits are not measurable,”
he says of the product. “We can’t really
know how much benefit pilots have from
more flight time in a simulator.”
In the process of converting more than
half a million users, Meyer and the multi-
platform X-Plane software have, he says,
“nudged software giant Microsoft out of