I consider myself pretty well-versed in both geography and the eye-candy that Flight Simulator has to offer - after all, I am a super genius. Sometimes though, I want to explore something new. We recently came across a great Web site that helps you do exactly that: SimTours.net. Jes Sondergaard has put together a great resource, and with your help it can grow and get even better!

As the site puts it, “SimTours.net is a catalogue of flights, destinations, adventures, and FSX missions for Microsoft Flight Simulator.”

You’ll find interesting places to fly, things to see, difficult approaches, even Easter eggs. Also of note is the Rewards section that features lists of all the rewards available in FSX and Acceleration missions, as well as lists of rewards available in Free Flight: http://www.simtours.net/rewards.php

Also of note is a page which lists the locations of all the aircraft carriers in the sim! http://www.simtours.net/defaultaircraftcarrier.php

Want to fly somewhere new but need an idea? Check out SimTours.net today!

Here's a site that we've recently added to our links page - Screenshot Artist. The artist in question is Nick Churchill, and he's earned the title, no question about it! Nick posts shots in a gallery section of his site, and also uses them to illustrate product reviews written by a number of talented contributors.

This is really spectacular work—give it a look!

And, for those of you who have asked about the official Microsoft position on screenshots, videos, etc., it's all spelled out right here, in crisp-yet-friendly legalese.

Here's a new add-on airport that's worth a look - Ercan International, ICAO identifier LCEN. From the file's description:

Extensively detailed and realistically depicted scenery for North Cyprus Ercan Airport. Created ... from scratch, the scenery includes accurate buildings, hangars, parking bays, night texturing and illumination effects. The scenery contains variety of animations, such as the radar, flags, windsock and vehicles.

In real life, this airport has seen a lot of changes and new construction over the past couple of years. Now, thanks to the designer of this (free!) package, Serdar Nuzhet, you can see it for yourself in FSX.

Look for it in AVSIM's file library by clicking here (free registration required).

We've gotten a bunch of emails lately from users wondering how they can initiate a seaplane flight on the water. While in the real world you can use a dolly to get off a land-based runway (or the wheels if your aircraft is an amphibian), adding full power in the Flight Simulator X Beaver or Goose while you're on land doesn't do much except waste fuel. What's a virtual seaplane pilot to do?

Well, we asked our data team to generate a list of all the designated water runways in the Flight Simulator X facilities database. Mike Singer spills all in: Water Water Everywhere: The fine art of finding a water runway.

Great news for vintage aircraft afficionados and history buffs in general: A group called Pemberton and Sons Aviation right here in Washington state achieved a major milestone a couple of weeks ago when their beautifully restored 1928 Boeing Model 40C biplane flew for the first time ... in 80 years! It's not often that the population of rare old flyable airplanes actually increases, so it's worth celebrating whenever it does.

I've seen one or two references to some Model 40's for Flight Sim - if you've seen one you really like, let us know!

Our partners at the EAA have just released a 17-minute video overview of AirVenture, also known as "Oshkosh."

If you don't know what that is, go watch the video, available for online streaming and download.

If you do know what it is, watch the video anyway.

It's a wonderfully shot video, full of lush airplane goodness, narrated by Harrison Ford and, if I'm not mistaken, I can hear my pal Erik Lindbergh chatting over part of it as well. The EAA site says "it will make you yearn for July and the chance to return to aviation's most beloved annual event." They're absolutely right.

No, this isn't another discussion of the Secret Shuttle mission that takes place around Area 51, it's just a video clip of flying finesse, at its simple best. The clip shows a masterful one-wheel crosswind landing in a Citabria. If you're like me, or, more likely, if you simply like airplanes, then you'll see this for the work of art that it is. The way the pilot, Bruce Paylor (disclosure: I know him) holds the slip, then gently rounds out into the flare, keeping the upwind wing low and then starts rollling on one, then, two, then three wheels is gorgeous.

Click the image (or just click here) to watch the clip, and be sure to check out some of the other clips in the series for more vintage tailwheel goodness!

After you watch the clip, then give it a try in Flight Simulator X - pick an airport and setup a flight with a crosswind of 5 knots or so about 25 degrees off of the runway, and shoot some landings in the J-3 Cub. If you want to take it even further, look around on the web for an add-on Citabria for FSX. There are some great freeware versions out there, or you can check out RealAir's popular payware package.

Is in the cards!

Wandering the Aces halls this morning to see who else made it in through our greater-Puget Sound area "blizzard," I couldn't resist snapping this stealthy phone-cam pic of one of our conference rooms. What you can (barely) see in the background is part of an in-progress "card sorting exercise," something we use from time to time as way to capture and loosely organize a brainstorming session. Obviously, I can't offer any details at this point (I do actually like this job quite a bit) but I can say there are some exciting ideas tacked on to those walls. It's nice to point to some supporting evidence to back up one of our most-used trade show responses: "We haven't announced anything around our future plans, but it's safe to say that we're 'always' working on the next version. Or two."

It may seem funny to be using something as decidedly analog as index cards at a place like this, but, hey, if it was good enough for Babbage (and Jacquard and Hollerith), it's good enough for me!

(Image courtesy of ACME Portable Machines, Inc.)

Here's something that just hopped around the Aces team inboxes, including a screenshot that's somehow vaguely famliar ...

This looks like a pretty interesting Flight Sim PC - a portable machine with 3 LCD's built in! It reminds me a bit of one of the early portable PC's that came to be known as "luggables", like the Osborne 1. Except, of course, that the Osborne 1 had a single 5" monochrome screen with a  resolution of 52x24, and ran at 4MHz, while a triple monitor system like this one can draw 8.35 million times as many colors at a total resolution of 3840x1024, and includes two processors running at 2.4GHz each. And I wouldn't be surprised if it weighed less!

Check out ACME Portable's site by clicking the image.

If any of our customers go out and get one of these, let us know what you think!

Microsoft alum Bruce Williams -- pilot, instructor, and general raconteur, not to mention author of the book Microsoft Flight Simulator as a Training Aid -- has added some great new aerobatic and formation videos featuring his Extra 300L to his blog.

Check out his post and find the videos here:

And, if you see anything you want to try yourself, grab the FSX Extra (which includes Bruce's actual paint scheme) and give it a try!

Aces High
Here are a couple of video clips that have been making the rounds of our hallways lately. The first is a CNN "Art of Life" segment, profiling Bruce Dickinson, an unassuming British man who flies a Bücker 131 Jungmann as well as a Boeing 757, sings lead for heavy-metal hall-of-famers Iron Maiden, and likes Microsoft Flight Simulator because why wouldn't he? (Pay close attention at around 2:45.)

Click here for the CNN segment.

We Resemble that Remark
The other clip from the "worth passing along" file is flash movie by a Dutch group called Wortel Drie. The movie is called Emergency Exit, but, around here, it might as well have been called Hits Too Close to Home.

Click here to watch Emergency Exit.

One of the most popular new features in our Acceleration expansion pack (available now at stores everywhere! Well, nearly everywhere...many of the major continents, anyway) is the F/A-18 Hornet. Whenever we demoed Acceleration at shows (Oshkosh, Reno, etc.), the F/A-18 was always everybody’s favorite aircraft.

Flying a highly-maneuverable fighter onto and off of aircraft carriers is arguably one of the most enjoyable (and challenging) things you can do in Flight Simulator.

At shows, most people seemed happy to just firewall the thrust levers, raise the gear, and fly. What they probably didn’t realize though is that the F/A-18 in Acceleration is more than just a fun airplane. It’s also one of our most complex. The avionics and autoflight systems were modeled to a depth we rarely go to (with perhaps the exception of the Garmin G1000 in Flight Simulator X).

The good news is that very late in the development cycle we managed to squeeze in some realism we hadn’t planned on. ("As Real-er As It Gets!") The bad news is that as a result, these features and functionality weren’t documented. We’re working on remedying that, and when we’re done we’ll post a more in-depth article here on FSInsider.

Thirsting for information right NOW? You’re in luck! Our friends at Virtuali s.a.s. (who created the virtual cockpit for our F/A-18, including all of the 3D gauges and glass panels) are hosting an "Unofficial F/A-18 Acceleration Pack" forum to provide information and answer questions about the F/A-18 autopilot, radios, and radar.

If you’re interested in delving into the F/A-18’s systems a little deeper, take a look!

So, we're back from Oshkosh, and the dust is just starting to consider the possibility of thinking about settling ... little does it know that it will be disturbed again very quickly, with Leipzig and the Reno Air Races looming - stupid dust!

Hopefully, anyone who was interested read my daily reports via my blog - if you missed them, see the July Archive.

With that out of the way, then, I wanted to point out an interesting chart based on data from the computers we used at the show. One of our senior Test Engineers (and flight instructor, jump pilot, airline captain, and frustrated Little League'r) Mike Lambert captured the number of hours flown per aircraft from each of the 8 PC's we had running FSX and an early preview build of the Acceleration expansion pack. 

In the past, at a show like Oshkosh, the Extra 300 always seemed to win out - whatever default flights we setup, as soon as we look away, half the machines, at least, are back to the Extra. It makes sense - it's sporty, maneuverable, and great fun to fly even for just a short period. Not to mention the fact that the real thing is often visible in the skies just outside (and a little above) our booth.

As you'll see, though, the Extra has some competition ... actually, that's an understatement: it's more correct to say that there's a new Extra, and it's called the F-18.

This data is far from scientific, and  certainly doesn't reflect the overall popularity of aircraft in normal, at-home usage scenarios. However, it is nice to be able to look at it and surmise that the F-18 (the only one of the three new aircraft in the expansion pack to be somewhat finished and presentable at the time of the show) is likely to be well received. Click on the chart and see for yourself!

Jeff Van West, whom a few of us worked with when he wrote the Inside Moves guide to Combat Flight Simulator 2, and Kevin Lane-Cummings have published a great new book - Microsoft Flight Simulator X For Pilots.

Subtitled Real World Training, and with a tagline on the cover that reads "For serious pilots, it's not a game", the book means business. In the book's impressive 700+ pages, the authors cover topics that, unsurprisingly, mirror real-world training paths, from Student Pilot through ATP. The illustrations are clear, well-chosen, and plentiful, as are the sidebars that cover everything from real world aviation accident information to recommended web sites and other reading material.

Van West and Lane-Cummings have done an excellent and very thorough job of presenting a tremendous amount of information. Their book should appeal both to virtual aviators looking for more realism and structure, as well as real pilots hoping to get more from their PC's.

For more information about the book, see the publisher's site here.