Oh, I guess it had another airport in the middle of the grid that you could fly to. Such detail!

I sure remember playing Elite. However, for me it was Flight Simulator by Sublogic, who later got bought by Microsoft and the rest is history. I played this game for hours and hours and hours. It had one simple runway, one flat mountain range, and a smallish square grid that you flew around. That's it. Nothing else. But, it was fantastic to play in 1980.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvvfJ60gIf0

1984 was a great year for games with titles such as Excitebike, Boulder Dash and the mighty Tetris. But these 3D polygons moving through 2D space in a measly 2 colours totally captivated me. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. It was the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtH-ng9bff0

Elite

1984 was a year that things changed for me as a gamer. I felt smarter. I was gaining confidence to load up tapes of games I had no idea how to play and I was even beginning to program my own games in the wonderful language of BASIC. As a gamer I was starting to grow some digital hair on my chest. I got hold of a copy of this weird game called Elite, where you could basically smuggle drugs and slaves across the galaxy for money and then buy bigger cargo bays to smuggle more drugs and more slaves. At 7 years old I didn’t really know what that cargo even was but I knew it was bad and would get me shot at. I did know however that the reward was good. So I suppose it taught me risks vs rewards in a weird way.
I hated docking my ship in this game. I wonder if they fixed that in Elite Dangerous?