MaxLegroom990

It's kind of sad that they've passed us by here. I went there, and found some interesting things to download later. The computer I'm using to post this is my FSX computer, and time (and MSFS2020) has passed it by, too.

Both of you have a point. What I have reacted to is really a problem related to Avsim's file system, which has a section for original aircraft, which is mostly filled with anything but original aircraft. There are lots of textures, some AI flight plans, and a few original aircraft. Perhaps the reason I looked at this is that adding aircraft for MSFS is largely a payware experience.

Has anyone noticed that what we used to consider repaints are being placed where completely original aircraft used to be found on our favorite download sites?

If they've gone out of business, I haven't heard of it yet. The stories I've read were interesting...

I get what you're aiming at here. What you're describing is a VA that tests you to a high level in certain categories, but has pilots that can barely land an airplane. While others answering this have described the technical problems of measuring landing rates in a ACARS system, I'd say that it often works better than you'd think. At Eastern Airlines Virtual, when we used the VAFS system, it had a few anomalies that resulted in positive vertical speed at landing, usually we had reasonably accurate data. That means that what was posted by the system closely resembled what I last saw on the vertical speed indicator. When I was the Washington hub manager, I was very pleased with the smooth landings that the pilots were pulling off, and was willing to help those who weren't pulling it off with whatever advice I could give. After all, it couldn't be much fun, I reasoned, for a pilot to constantly rack up damages to the plane. With the assigned flight system we had, it was more involved for me, and I hope they're better virtual pilots for it. Of course, we have to realize that this is the experience of flying, filtered through a computer, often the cheapest one we could get away with. On the idea that there's too many VAs out there, you may be right. But everyone has a right to try, and you never know what might succeed. Everyone has an idea, and many want to be the CEO of a VA. In a way, the VA with no pilots beyond the founders is like throwing a party and no one coming. It's a sad thing to see, usually. Unless you're someone like lavochkin, who does one for his own records, and his own pleasure. He's right, joining a VA is an enhancement to flight simulation. I'd add that it can be a social experience, it can fire the imagination a bit. Novels have been written describing the story of one flight, or the career of a pilot (to describe advances in postwar air safety), or a crucial moment of a pilot's life. But if you don't enjoy the flying itself, what does any of it mean? In the last year, the VA I've been part of for about ten years (hard to believe) has lost its longtime CEO, and the ACARS system we used all those years. The result is a bit more laid back, and the pilots get to fly what they want to. One thing we do that I prefer is that you can see if people are flying online from our front page. You know there's activity going on. As I'm typing this, four of our pilots are online. It doesn't matter to me if you have a pilot roster a mile long, if it consists of pilots who haven't flown with you for years. In fact, Eastern clears the deadwood off the roster regularly. But if a VA like that works for you, great. In any case, I've toyed with this too long, and it's time to leave Charleston (where I last flew to with Eastern).

Beautiful website. My helicopter flying, however, more closely recalls that scene in View To A Kill where someone fires off a smoke grenade inside a helicopter, and it spins out of control. Okay, not that bad, but not far off.

There are other forums that would yield you better results than this one, which is for people interested, one way or another, in virtual airlines. There are design forums where you would have better luck.

You may have been trying to figure out why few if any people have expressed further interest in your VA after your post. It may have gone to the point of surveys, charts, graphs, and Excel spreadsheets, all in the pursuit of just why pilots aren't signing up. In these calculations, you might consider this: You've given the wrong URLs for your own VA. The correct ones are transloadairlines.site and transloadvirtualairlines.com. Why make people Google for it?

Someone else will have to tell you what happened, even after visiting the Twitter and Facebook pages, I don't have a clue. The Flying Tigers Group Twitter is an interesting airline news feed, and the Facebook is a chronological mess. It reminds me that there's someone else who could pay more attention to their twitter feed, as it has been long neglected.

And the reason you don't buy the mattress used is the same reason you don't buy the other used...

All I intended to do this morning on the computer was to file my bid for next week's(?) flights with Noble Air, check up on a couple of scenery files I wanted to add, and write briefly to this blog. Instead, I also downloaded a Tu-144 that was over 100MB, checked the GMInsideNews forum for the latest and greatest (or at least the most predictable). I intended to do these thing briefly, and proceed to the gym in my continuing fight with my ever distorting shape. But, no, it turned into reading five pages of why people on that forum think the Pontiac brand should be extinguished, mainly having to do with a considerable lack of direction in their offerings. I also checked back on threads I'd posted to, but nothing spectacular happened except that I'd refuted someone's remarks well enough to get in the proverbial last word. That happens sometimes. I still haven't decided what to bid on in our schedule, but I will. I'd chased through several links to add Danish scenery, hitting FSNordic first, as they tend to have well organized answers there to what I was looking for. I'd read the further comments on Motor Trend's first drive of the 2010 Camaro. As they'd sampled a V6, they were essentially trying out the car I'm most interested in. I'm flat out loving what they're saying, which means that around here, the addendum stickers will be a one way ticket to the moon. An Audi A5 may prove cheaper. Hmmmm...something in the Domestic Multi-stop schedule? Nothing longer than about three hours, though. Late in the evening that can prove deadly. Next up? MSN on ten things you should never buy used, like mattresses, for example. Somehow, much of that article was a real no-brainer, and a real waste of time. But I've decided which three lines to go for. The first one takes me through some of the best scenery I've downloaded...

The MaxLegroom name was at one time the Photon alias I used when I figured that I was going to get completely beat down in a particular game. As a result, my highest score was with this name. Photon, if you don't recall, was a laser tag game played in a maze like arena. This was in the '80s, by the way. I knew people who played in the last Photon game a dozen years ago. I've actually heard of all the panel designers you've mentioned, though I know I've probably never flown a plane with one of Lou Betti's panels. Eric Ernst's, for certain, definitely the 767 panel. I plan to talk about panels at great length later, when I manage to gather my thoughts into some sort of order. Your SR-71 experience reminds me of a recent XB-70 flight I did. I took off from Langley with only so much fuel on board. Got it up to Mach 3 and FL690, ran out of fuel somewhere over Georgia, did a dead stick landing at Eglin AFB.

This new blog feature is interesting, isn't it? Suddenly you're faced with some of the problems professional writers have, which is to find something interesting to say. I thought I'd start at the beginning, which for me, was in the spring of 1996. I'd bought a used PC from a friend, paid another friend to modify it, as it would not run the original Need For Speed as it was. I also got online as soon as possible. My first attempt at downloading an aircraft for Flight Simulator, and it was FS5.1 I had at the time, was through a BBS, and it was a abject failure. The download was in ASCII, or something like that, if I recall correctly, and I had no idea whatsoever what to do with it. It wasn't too much later that I discovered Flightsim.com. While it is worth noting that I certainly have found most of the world's flightsim sights that have downloads, it was Flightsim that I found first. I was amazed by what I could get. One of the most memorable panels I downloaded was for the Airbus A320. I'd never seen the new glass panel cockpits before, and found it amazing. The same for the reasonably accurate sounds for a Boeing 777. The other thing I did was join a virtual airline. I started my virtual career as a airline pilot at Noble Air's Philadelphia hub (it went away years ago, alas). Getting a type rating was at the time important, at least at that hub, and done here by flying a round robin with each aircraft you intended to fly. I made that route in plenty of aircraft, including some, like the L-1011, which Noble Air no longer uses. I recall using one of the payware adventure compilers, with an interesting result. I was flying KPHL-KDEN-KSLC-KSFO, and was descending into KSLC, and the weather kept changing. When a mountain loomed out of the clouds rather too suddenly, I diverted elsewhere. In this case, that was KLAS. More about my Noble Air career later. I also recall that we had a 767 that had a drinking problem. A flight from Philly to Vancouver involved a stop in Minneapolis due to the fact that I was running out of fuel quickly, and that was on a full tank. I passed on FSFW 95, as it took a while for me to go from 3.11 for Workgroups to Windows 98. At the time, my PC was a Pentium 100, I can't recall how much RAM was involved, but my latest cell phone probably has more. And I now have thumb drives that have more space than the 1.2 gig hard drive on that computer. Needless to say, it ran FS98 only so well. As time went on, other things changed. A tour of duty in Korea also involved a change of hubs, as I wanted something nearer to where I actually was, so I moved to the Singapore hub (also no longer there). I recall that flying into Jakarta was a bit of a roll of the dice. The scenery was nicely detailed, and combine that with a A320 and custom panel, and the result was like using a series of postcards to fly the approach. I've tended to joke that the Need For Speed series had that name for no reason that has to do with cars and fast driving. However, over the years, it ranks second to Flight Simulator for demanding faster computers with more memory and hard drive space. A bit of comedy here, though. While I was in Korea, I'd bought some computer parts at a show while I was on mid-tour leave. Having brought them back to install, I had a friend in one of the other barracks install them. As he left, he joked,"Now these aren't supposed to go up in smoke until 30 seconds after I leave." They went up in smoke in fifteen seconds, and I re-installed the old stuff, thus permanently eliminating any fear I had of working on computer systems. The computer I'm writing this on is the third I've built myself. I bought FS2K, but used it little. The system I had just had built was finally running FS98 with decent frame rates, and it crashed much less frequently. I'd used FS2002 a lot until I finally got a computer to run FS9 decently. It's funny, but as time goes on, in some ways I have less interesting stories to tell, as many of them were frankly related to a computer malfunction. For example, while flying the run to Bangkok, something ignorant happened to my computer, and I ended up sending in the report only on the first leg, meaning from Singapore to Bangkok. I never did get why I got so many sly winks on that particular one.:) As I've had better systems, it's been more an experience of downloading new stuff, and sometimes forgetting about it until much later. For example, I'd added the airport at Sacramento, and forgotten about it until I had some reason to fly there. And if you download enough from these sites, you'll end up with AI traffic that you have no idea where it came from. For example, I recently tried out the Goldenbird III business jet by flying it from Freeport to Miami(nice plane, BTW). When I landed at Miami, I found a DC-4 on the ramp, and as I moved around it to park, I found it was in Pan American colors, of the style used on the jets. As for my Noble Air career, I continued as a virtual ex-pat for a while. I'd left Singapore for Russia, and when my hub captain ran off (screaming, I presume), I took a shot at filling his shoes. That I didn't have time to attend to things properly is why we no longer have a Russian hub. My apologies to the pilots who must have been thinking "Who the **** was that, anyway?". Your patience is appreciated. From DFW, I can return there anytime I want, anyway, though. It's been an experience I can recommend, even if I haven't been quite the most social of our pilots. I'd add that I've enjoyed much of the efforts others have put into aircraft, panels, sounds, and scenery. I tend to appreciate realism, like the incredibly real scenery of Norfolk by Matthew Perry. Or David Maltby's aircraft, especially the Comet 4. That ranks as one of my all time favorites, especially now that I have a computer that does well with the VC. One thought running through my mind is that I do need to contribute something myself. I could do many of these things if I put my mind to it, and I have FSDS3.51 and some interesting projects in mind. Lockheed SST, anyone?