Doyle Nickless moved to Beaverton,Oregon in 1995 and started work at ThrustMaster working for Frank Bouton (Founder and VP of Engineering and current GoFlight CEO) as a EE/software engineer. He started off designing test fixtures for the game card and some internal assemblies for some of their joystick products. In 1997, when USB technology was just starting to be developed, he spent a few weeks working with a group of engineers at Intel who helped them create one of the very first USB devices -- a ThrustMaster USB joystick. They sold about a hundred of this first-prototype joystick to Intel and Microsoft to use as "reference devices". These were needed because there were no other USB devices in existence at the time. They were used to help refine the device drivers for Windows 98 and Windows CE. Intel used them for demonstration purposes and for chipset and host PC testing. The first-prototype unit was never sold to the public. However, a second-generation unit was produced later and was called the "ThrustMaster Top Gun USB Rev 2" joystick. That version was officially supported by Microsoft beginning with Windows 98 and ThrustMaster sold tons of them.

Near the end of 1999 Doyle and Frank started to toil with the idea of a fully encompassing Flight Sim division that sold an expanded product line other than Joyticks. Doyle's original idea was to produce a family of simulated radio boxes rather than an "all in one" unit.....like the GF-45. A COMM radio, NAV radio, ADF, and transponder, all in separate boxes. Frank liked the idea and bounced the idea off of Buzz Hoffman, a former fighter pilot in the armed forces and resident "flight" expert at Thrustmaster before retirement in the Midwest, USA. Buzz recommended that we consider building a multi-function unit that could do all of these functions--in one enclosure. So ultimately that's what we decided to build. Buzz passed away during the time that we were developing the GF-45, and sadly he never got to try it out. We code-named the GF-45 "Buzzbox" and referred to it as the Buzzbox for quite a while afterwards.

Then one evening, while watching the movie Apollo 13, Doyle thought of the name "GoFlight" and the idea of an entirely new company began to surface. There is a part during the final countdown when all of the NASA controllers are sitting at their consoles, and O.K.'ing their systems for launch and they respond to the flight controller by saying "Go Flight". They both thought that was cool and exciting.

At this point Doyle and Frank figured GoFlight had at least a 2 year lead on any competition with their knowledge of low-level USB and the PC-side driver and interface programming. No one else seemed to have the ability (or maybe just the desire) to build products with this technology. The closest thing that even resembled what we had done was a radio stack that cost several thousand dollars and connected to the computer using RS-232.

GoFlight introduced the GF-45 at the MicroWINGS flight sim conference in Bellevue, WA, in the spring of 2000. It was the first time anyone had seen a piece of flight sim hardware with a real digital display that sold for less than $1000 - in fact, MUCH less. The original price for the GF-45 was $99.95.

In November of 2000 Doyle went to the UK and demonstrated the unit at a flight simulation show in Birmingham. There were several thousand attendees at this show who were enthusiastic about flight simming, and eager to buy. We had a small stock of units available to sell (about 80 I think) and we sold them all. We could tell that people were really jazzed about the possibilities of this sort of thing & the market seemed strong. After that GoFlight started working on the rack systems, P8, T8, LGT, 166, MCP Advanced, etc … Now GoFlight has a total of 17different modules including the NEW MESM (Multi Engine Start Module). GoFlight's customer base grows every year and is currently at around 10,000. With your continued support we look forward to another 10 years and more. Who knows how far our "flight plans" will take us?