simFlight.COM Flight Simulation News Source

The title says it, although the theme this month merely requires that entries include the moon to be visible somewhere in the picture. There have been some interesting entries already and it seems that we have found a challenge that really has our forum members thinking very hard this month. Please visit the screenshot competition forum here and see for yourself how inventive our entrants are this month. Maybe you’ll be inspired to enter too?

As for the teaser shot here – of course it isn’t an entry that would be giving an entry “unfair advantage”. No, it’s something I cooked up once upon a time…

In the right hand column you can find our new poll; Do you use Facebook? Why are we curious? Because WE are using it and already have a few ‘groups’ running there (such as the Emma Field group and the Support FS group). We’re planning on expanding that presence, but are curious to know how many of our readers would find us. Facebook is a ’social networking’  application, something between chat, email and blog. More info here.

…. from US Homeland Security paranoia, no less! Mr. Hendrickson, a US citizen and son of  Ret. USN Captain C.F. Hendrickson acquired one of the last flying Douglas AD-4N Skyraiders (in France, no less) and brought it home with the intention to keep the history of this aircraft alive and flying! Through increasing paranoia and bureaucracy the aircraft was confiscated by the Homeland Security Dept….. If you’re a US citizen and (military) aviation lover, you can help the Hendrickson’s to get their plane back and prepare it for sharing it with the public!!! Please check out his website here and support them !

If you maybe do not see your press release published on simFlight, it may have to do with spammers. We were using Google Groups to filter messages sent to news@simFlight, and Google has now declared US spammer…… just because of all the spam messages that were sent to us. Great! So now we do NOT get most of the e-mail sent to us. Which makes for a nice change, and a few quiet mornings for your editor. But if you REALLY have news, you may want to send it temporarily to francois at simFlight dot com, until we fix things with new spam filters.

Tom Allensworth of AVSIM wrote us “…..We have set up a temporary forum in order that we can provide status reports on our efforts to bring AVSIM back online. I would very much appreciate it if you could post the link to our temporary home and help us get the word out. You can find the forum here….”.

Tom Allensworth, CEO and Publisher of AVSIM, today issued the following announcement; “We regret to inform the flight simulation community that on Tuesday, May 12, AVSIM was hacked and effectively destroyed. The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from. Both servers, that is the library / email and web site / forum servers were attacked. AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. We will post more news as we are able to in the coming days and weeks….”.

François, our Managing Editor, started building a Google Calendar on his website with flightsim and (real) aviation events. If you have any input, please send us a message (to news@simflight.com) and we’ll forward it for inclusion. The calendar can now also be found on simFlight; check out the tabs above the message area, click on ‘calendar ‘. The calendar will grow quickly in the next few weeks, with flight show season upon us !

With the sale of Piper Aircraft to the investment company Imprimis, the ownership of this 72 year old, famous aircraft company moves to Singapore. For old-fashioned people (like me, admittedly) this is a ‘loss’ in a historic sense. Piper, like Cessna, has been one of the icons of American aircraft design and development almost since man discovered flight. Let’s just hope the company will continue to be what it has always been, one of the major players of GA aircraft developers in the world. More news here.

DIY, or Do-It-Yourself, is a regular thing for home owners, although the richer variety usually just has ‘a guy’ fix things if broken. But how about add-on developers, notably the freeware kind? Are you one? Or, rather, would you LIKE to be one?

We’re curious to know how many of our readers would like to develop ‘their own stuff’ for Flight Simulator, be that scenery, their own house, a little or large aircraft or anything else. Show your deeper inner feelings on the topic by replying to the poll on the right!

In a meeting today in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, a new organization was formed to be an advocate of flight simulation, the community and organizations in support of our hobby – The International Flight Simulation Consortium. Attended by some 25 developers, community members and publishers, the nascent organization has created an interim board of directors. The IFSC has been launched with the intent to represent and promote our hobby world-wide. We will be publishing more news in the coming weeks on the goals and membership requirements of IFSC.

Arnie Lee of Abacus Software in the US has managed to arrange a meeting in Amsterdam next Monday. Attending are the creme-de-la-creme of Flight Simulator add-on publishers like Aerosoft, Flight1 and Just Flight, some smaller development and publishing companies like FlightSimLabs, CaptainSim and FSAddon Publishing, a couple of individual developers and some retailers.
The scope of the meeting is to see how the add-on industry can possibly work together in extending the life of our beloved ’sim hobby’ now that MS has pulled out. Stay tuned for more news.

Social networks like ‘Facebook’ are gaining popularity by the day. Already 200 million people (!) use Facebook nowadays. Yes, I myself am on it too, daily ! And ‘Twitter’ is another popular way to ‘waste one’s time’ on the internet and mobile phones. simFlight.com is on Twitter (see bottom right column), and now so is SSM2007 (read below).

Read the rest of this entry »

Since Microsoft abandoned Flight Simulator many people ‘declared’ they would no longer support the Redmond giant. FS was the only reason they were buying MS products (read: operating systems) anyway and that reason now had disappeared. Obviously many people, especially in communities like ours, were extremely disappointed. But to what extent did the recent unfortunate events in Redmond REALLY change your behaviour towards Microsoft? Let us know in the poll (see right-hand column).
By the way, you can also still show your support for FS via our Facebook group here !

Unfortunately ’something’ gave up on us yesterday, resulting in simFlight and our forums being off the air during most of the day. We apologize for that, even if we couldn’t help it. We know ow much you rely on our daily news and cozy forums, so not having them always is ‘an issue’. Everything is back working now and hopefully it doesn’t happen again any time soon !

Francois.

Nina and I are away for a bit of rest, a much needed break, so simFlight news will come to you from the snow covered flanks of the Mont Vallon, the Dent de Burgin and other exotic named mountains for the next three weeks. In between skiing and relaxing (duh!) we’ll continue to bring you news as we find it of course. Meanwhile, we sure could do with some additional, loyal and regular contributing editors for simFlight.com. If you think you’re a good English writer, know everything about FS and have time to spare, send me a note at francois at simflight dot com.