Who’s Ready to Explore Alaska?

Yep, it’s finally time. After years of development and months of testing, a big patch of SE Alaska is finally available for you FSX bush pilots…

Laugh in a Cracker’s Face!

The Avsim forums are up and running again, and even seem to be largely intact from before. That’s an astounding effort from all involved. Good job, fellas.

Oh, and take THAT, whichever lowlife scuzzball thought it’d be fun to wipe them out. Now let’s show our team spirit and go make or comment on a forum posting today.

http://forums1.avsim.net/

Emma Field Inspiration

I’ve been so wrapped up in finishing Tongass Fjords lately that I haven’t taken the time to post on Emma Field’s progress. Here’s a little taste of what’s going on…

Avsim Hack Makes the News

Occasionally, our little hobby grabs the attention of the mainstream press—usually when things go astray. The BBC posted a news item this morning about the destruction of Avsim by hackers. I whole-heartedly agree with Derek Davis’s quote from the end of the article – Avsim will indeed rise from the ashes. The article also quotes me (albeit unattributed) from a post I made on SimFlight: there is a special place in hell for hackers who pull stunts like this.

It’s almost worth going to hell just to kick those *&^#% in the nuts when I get there.

Avsim Hacked

By now you might have heard the news: some low-life numbnuts bottom-feeding scumbag (or group of scumbags) has decided it would be fun to hack into the Avsim servers and take down the world’s largest FS website and file library. Nice. Rather than me going on with choice expletives all morning, I’ll reprint the press release from Tom Allensworth, Avsim’s head honcho:

“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.”

Needless to say, this is terrible news for the hobby. Let’s all put our collective heads together and think/pray/meditate for the speedy recovery of their data, with a side of prosecution for the mindless idiots who would do such a thing.

A temporary forum has been set up for Avsim users here. I encourage you to visit it for updates on the situation, and to express your support to the Avsim team. I imagine they’re in need of it right now.

Simming La Vida Loca — Read it!

I just visited Jarn’s eyeball-grabbing FS website after too long an absence. Embarrassing, actually, since he’s in my blogroll. If you’re not familiar with his work, drop everything and go there now. No kidding.

Here, kitty, kitty…

That stampede of thundering hoofbeats you hear is the crowd of armchair aviators rushing to Aerosoft to get their Catalina. Yep, hard as it may be to believe, they finally pushed the kitty out the door. From the looks of Nick Churchill’s gorgeous screenshots, it’s another masterpiece. Stefan Hoffmann, the talented gent who brought us the Hughes H1 racer, was the lead on this one. That’s all I need to say.

iBlueYonder Now Tweeting

Just a heads-up: I recently added Twitter “tweets” to my FS repertoire. If you’d like to follow me, visit the Twitter site, log in, and follow “bwomack”. I’ll try to make it worth your while.

What’s that? You don’t have a Twitter account? I won’t tell anyone. Just visit the site and set up your account today. You can just lurk if you like and follow me and others, but I’ll bet that after a while you won’t be able to resist joining in. It’s that fun.

Grab Your Duke!

I should have known that those beautiful screenshots meant the RealAir Duke was poised to roll out of the hangar. Just announced: the Duke is ready for sale! Head on over to RealAir and get yours.

RealAir’s Duke is Looking Good!

I found a link on Sim-Outhouse the other day to some preview screenshots of RealAir’s upcoming Beechcraft Duke project. It’s from RealAir, so you know it’ll be one high-quality piece of work. The preview shots are absolutely stunning!

Here’s something else I find fascinating about them: somehow, through a wide variety of craft (Scout to Spitfire, and now to a Beech twin), their modeler Sean Moloney has managed to create a very distinct visual style that’s instantly identifiable as his. And this while also faithfully reproducing the real-world aircraft. He’s a rare talent, for sure. And we all know about the chops of the legendary Rob Young, their flight dynamics guru. Between the two of them, they’re a formidable team.

This should be a fun release.