Flight Control world champion Dan Pho visits Firemint and shares his tips

Dan Pho first came across Flight Control when a colleague showed it to him at work. At first he thought it didn’t look like that much fun, but fast forward a few months and he is now the reigning world champion with an incredible score of 30,039. And in an amazing coincidence, he works just a few miles from Firemint! Dan took the time to visit our studio and meet the team, and tell us about his adventures with Flight Control.

Firemint’s Rob Murray (right) congratulates Flight Control world record holder Dan Pho (left)

After seeing Flight Control and reading more about it on the Internet, Dan and a few of his work colleagues decided to try it out and a friendly rivalry developed. His best score on the first day playing was about 30. Scores would be compared every morning and records began to tumble. When Dan reached about 1,500 and had left his friends and colleagues far behind, he looked at the flightcontrol.cloudcell.com site to see the global high scores. At the time the record was 22,856 and Dan was sure that this was an impossible score… but nevertheless, the challenge was out there and he set himself the goal of beating the record. Dan is married with a young daughter (and another one on the way), and started to play in bed at night while waiting for his daughter to fall asleep. Once she was sleeping, Dan would move her to her cot and then continue playing for a little bit longer… just landing a few more planes… well, maybe a few more…  In his first attempt at breaking the world record, Dan reached about 15,600 landings before two planes collided. He says that was incredibly painful, but he had a taste for it so he started from the beginning again! In his second attempt, Dan successfully defeated the world record but decided to see how much further he could get. After about 30 hours of play over the space of a month, Dan had passed 30,000 and was playing Flight Control in the lunch room at work (breaking his usual rule of playing when there are minimal distractions) when two aircraft finally collided to set his record at 30,039. Dan says he felt a little disappointed, but mainly proud to have reached his goal and taken out the world record!
We asked Dan for some tips, here’s what he shared with us:

• Land your planes as quickly and efficiently as possible
• Don’t allow too many planes in the air at one time
• Constantly readjust your flight paths to allow for new planes
• Only make small adjustments if possible
• There is a pattern of optimal flight paths but they intersect, so sometimes you have to deviate from them.
• Find a quiet place to play with minimum interruptions!

What are your Flight Control tips? Do you remember where you were when you got your personal best score?