Lets have another thread on this, us oldies and what we used and what we thought was best.
For me it was the engine spooling up sound effects on airbus (airbus US as well) for the amiga.
For me it's my dads fault, I have pictures of him laid out on the wings of jet fighters in Cyprus in the 50's, not that I wanted to sunbath, I wanted to fly.
For me it has always been the realism of the experience. Not that I was all that great, in fact I learned to learn only with F-117 Stealth Fighter under Amiga... my landings before that game only produced smoking craters.
Once learned to land under that game, there it came FS... the version I do not remember, but it had to be the 3 or maybe the 4... the only thing I remember of that FS (
that was "given" to me as a "gift" by the one putting together the 386 33Mhz it worked upon... don't look at me like that, it was legal back then in Italy) is that it had only the US and the ILS screen aid sky floating red squares were ALWAY on, for ALL airports.
Then it came a looooooooong time away from flight simulation as a whole (
Real Life demanded total attention from me in the maybe richer than today, yet for a lot of familial and personal reasons accursed second half of the 90ies) and beside small reprieves with the little used Strike Commander, Falcon 3 and FS98, I restarted full blast only with FS2002.
And it was my dad's fault too. in the 70ies we didn't have a lot of money, so when we asked him to bring us to the amusement park, to avoid having to pay for some rides he instead brought us all on the 06 of LIRN, where once upon a time it was possible to stay and look at planes landing and taking off without having the military police fall upon you in full combat gear in less than five minutes like today and command you to get lost or else...
It was then, looking at those mostly DC9, 727 and 737 that it really started for me.