Cessna Citation Mustang Released

Posted: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 - 0:08
Flight One Software and Cessna Aircraft Company have officially partnered to bring you an authentic simulation of the Citation Mustang exclusively for Microsoft Flight Simulator X! The new Citation Mustang is a breakthrough combination of power, speed and true jet affordability. Certified to be flown by a single pilot, the Mustang features state of the art engines delivering speeds of up to 340kts as well as the latest in large-format glass-cockpit flight displays, easing pilot workload, all while passengers relax in one of the largest cabins in its class. The Model 510 is certified to the requirements of U.S. 15 CFR Part 23 including day, night, VFR, IFR, and flight into known icing conditions. It is also certified for single pilot operations for U.S. registered aircraft.

Flight1 Software writes, "We've spent thousands of hours in development to recreate this aircraft to simulate that of its real-world counterpart. The aircraft has a long list of features that will impress any simpilot. Some of the exterior features include: An accurate and highly detailed aircraft exterior with 6 different paint schemes, operable cabin and cargo doors with corresponding CAS messages, visible icing effects on windscreen and aircraft, and an extensive set of external camera views." Garmin G1000 and many other systems are also modeled. For more information visit Flight1 Software.

Call! for 737 PIC and Legacy PIC

Posted: Monday, December 15, 2008 - 1:55
Senior staff reviewer Angelique van Campen gets some assistance from her co-pilot with feelThere's Call! for 737PIC and LegacyPIC. "CALL! for the 737 Pilot In Command and Legacy Pilot In Command is a First Officer, Flight Attendant simulation. This easy to use software brings great realism into your virtual cockpit by making you "feel there". "

Angelique goes into detail as to what each individual version of Call! does. She describes the checklist features of each program and how they are similar and are different. The review is concluded with, "Let’s first start with the fact that you need to be the owner of either of the feelThere/Wilco Publishing products otherwise it’s an unecessary tool since it’s purely designed to work in combination with one of these feelThere/Wilco Publishing aircraft." If you own Wilco/feelThere's 737 PIC or Legacy PIC, then this review would be of interest to you.

AVSIM Forums Pass 50,000 Member Milestone

Posted: Sunday, December 14, 2008 - 19:36
AVSIM is pleased to announce that our forum membership has passed the 50,000 member milestone. Our 50,000th member is Billy Mason, otherwise known as “Mutt” on the forums. Billy is 39 and has been an active user of FSX for awhile. Though Billy likes to fly in simulation, he said to us that he gets a little nervous about real flight. He said that his preferred flying is in smaller bush aircraft and usually on short hops. Billy, as our 50,000th member of the forums, the AVSIM Staff is pleased to invite you to our next convention for free. You will need to pay your own way to get there, but once there, all convention events and activities will be free for you. Thanks for signing up Billy, and welcome to the AVSIM Forums community! If you have not signed up for the AVSIM Forums, Where Flight Simulation Enthusiasts gather from around the world, then do so today!

Topgun Challenge

Posted: Sunday, December 14, 2008 - 17:17
Captain Dale 'Snort' Snodgrass (US Navy Retired) has a new challenge for flight sim enthusiasts, a chance to put their virtual piloting skills to the test and a chance of winning some fabulous prizes. The Topgun challenge introduces the flight simmer to the world of the US Navy pilot in the Boeing F18/A Hornet using a series of free missions completely authentic right down to the LSO calls on final, LSO briefings, and LSO grades. Every time you fly a mission you get graded and those grades rank you against your peers at the national and international level. You'll also enjoy special tournament play where winners will receive prizes such as the limited production Swiss made Debaufre Wings of Gold Pilot watch, High Performance PCs for Flight Sim from Jetline Systems, as well as other great prizes culminating in the grand prize, a supersonic ride in a military class F-5 with "Snort" as your pilot. For details on this and to register visit Top Gun Simulations

WWII Tank Simulator Review

Posted: Saturday, December 13, 2008 - 17:29
AVSIM seems to be standing for "All Vehicle SIM", according to one staff member. In that light, staff reviewer Etienne Martin takes a look at a new WWII Tank sim from Lighthouse Interactive called Steel Fury - Kharkov 1942. "Steel Fury may signal what seems to be a return of the detailed combat simulation genre that had been all but abandoned in the last decade."

"It sends us back to a few days in May of 1942 on the Eastern Front of the European ground war, with Russian launching an offensive against the Axis 6th Army forces in a battle near Kharkov and Krasnograd in the Ukraine. In Steel Fury, you get to be one of several crew members on a small selection of Allied or Axis tanks. The few player models are the T-34, the Panzer IV, and the A-12 Matilda II."

"Mission maps are large and the terrain is rich with visuals. The base terrain has rivers, ponds, ditches, dirt paths and paved roads, mud, plowed fields, medium and heavy forest, a few rocks, etc. The flora includes various types of grasses, flowers, bushes and trees. Water is reasonably convincing, and it is possible to cross water features when they are shallow without sinking your tank. Structures blend well with the terrain, and include fences, posts, wood sheds, various types of houses and other structures. These includes obstacles for the tanks and infantry, such as pillboxes, barbed wire, foxholes, trenches and anti-tank gators."

"Visual effects abound, from bump mapping on the armor plates, to particles of dirt that fly around your tracks as you move or turn. Clouds of dust come up depending on what terrain you’re on, which can give your position away. Being on the receiving end of shells is dramatic as a mountain of debris gets launched on impact. One Axis mission in the preview has you take a hill; as you approach, the crest of the hill in front of you starts to get pelted by enemy shells sending smoke, dirt, debris and the occasional infantryman in the air."

"Controls for the various functions rely on a smorgasbord of keyboard commands (4 pages worth). There are remarkably very few points of interaction with the mouse except for giving the driver waypoints by clicking on the terrain (an interesting and convenient way for the commander to tell the rest of the crew where to go), aiming the main gun or machine guns, and expectedly, complete interaction with the map. Learning the keyboard commands is a challenge. Joystick input is available."

"Steel Fury delivers a deluge of clanks, squeaks, engine noises, gun loading and track noise when the tank is in operation. Firing the gun is loud. Getting hit is loudest. Sounds of battle in the distance are very good, with low rumbles and distant explosions letting you know where the action is, getting progressively louder as you near."

Etienne sums up Steel Fury with, "The handful of missions I experienced provided give a good taste of what the sim can deliver. The visuals are stunning, as is the detailed level of the equipment as depicted. While a bit short on training, Steel Fury shows it can viscerally drive home the reality of armored combat of the era. The level of detail for a tank simulation is high, and it carries a steep learning curve. Combat is very realistic. The fact the statistics show exactly what happened indicates the core damage model under the hood is quite sophisticated. This makes for an interesting sim, even if there are some gaps here and there, yet much depth exists with many options using the wonderful terrain to try different tactics."

ScruffyDuck FSX Airport Scanner Released

Posted: Saturday, December 13, 2008 - 16:24
ScruffyDuck Software and the ADE Development Team are delighted to announce the release of FSX Airport Scanner (FAS). FSX Airport Scanner is designed to help you manage your add on airport files in FSX. It works by reading the information in your scenery.cfg file. With FAS you can Scan your active and inactive add on scenery areas for files containing airport information, find out if you have invalid paths in your scenery.cfg file, check for multiple files containing the same airport, and temporarily (or permanently) remove add-on files from FSX and restore them to their original location as required.

The software is also useful for testing the impact of different copies of an airport and also removing duplicates, get information about what each file contains, display multiple instances of an airport in the priority order that FSX will use, see a detailed tree of what each airport file contains and also look at the XML source for the airport and its individual parts. FSX Airport Scanner is available at Scruffy Duck Scenery and here on AVSIM.

PFE Christmas Gift

Posted: Saturday, December 13, 2008 - 16:16
Dave March of OnCourse Software writes, "We are pleased to announce our Christmas gift to all PFE Voice Pack Expansion Set users. A FREE 700MB download is now available to enhance your PFE ATC experience. Specially processed to sound much more like ATC is being received via your aircraft's VHF radio. This 'enhanced' voice pack addition for PFE, together with some of the new features in the latest release of PFE (2.8), is without doubt the icing on the (Christmas) cake." For more information or to check out the download, visit Oncourse Software.

CALL! for the Airbus Released

Posted: Saturday, December 13, 2008 - 1:10
FeelThere is proud to announce the latest for the CALL! series. CALL! for the Airbus is a first officer simulator. The first officer will read the cheklist and will make sure you follow it.

SuperTrafficBoard V2.1 for FSX

Posted: Saturday, December 13, 2008 - 1:08
Flying-W Simulation is delighted to announce SuperTrafficBoard V2.1 for FSX, a free product upgrade for existing customers. Building on the success of V2.0, this version adds significant new functionality requested by the Flight Simulator community, giving you even more options for displaying and interacting with your favorite AI traffic package. A complete description may be found at the SuperTrafficBoard website, including details of the new features available and instructions on how to obtain the update.

Just Flight Re-releases VFR Scenery

Posted: Saturday, December 13, 2008 - 1:05
Just Flights 4 volume VFR Scenery series can now be had in a complete set. Just Flight's Scott Phillips commented: "It's almost two years since we released the first volume in our VFR Real Scenery and we're extremely pleased with the success of the series so far. The reaction from press and public alike has been amazing and we're hoping that by putting the whole series together in a bespoke collection we can convert many more flight simmers to the VFR experience."

VFR stands for 'Visual Flight Rules' - this is the way that pilots navigate when they aren't using complex instruments - they look at a map and then pinpoint landmarks on the ground to work out their position. Doing this in a flight simulator requires scenery that's exactly the same as the real landscape. VFR Real Scenery is an amazing piece of software that provides just that - fly over England and Wales in Flight Simulator X and sample the view you'd get from a real aircraft. You can see the real countryside from the air and pinpoint every key landmark. They're all featured - streets, buildings, rivers, lakes, reservoirs… and all at extremely high resolution and detail!

This series features:

- the very latest 25cm digital aerial images from GeoPerspectives displayed at 1m per pixel resolution in FSX.
- 9.6m mesh terrain data which hugely improves the default relief.
- individual night textures make flying after dark a real eye-opener and, thanks to painstaking editing, are incredibly accurate - realistic building lighting and roads are correctly lit so that Britain's country lanes don't look like a Las Vegas freeway!
- water features are accurately rendered with Flight Simulator X water effects - you can land a seaplane in VFR Real Scenery.

Flight Ontario Releases Goose Bay

Posted: Saturday, December 13, 2008 - 0:40
Freeware Flight Ontario is proud to release CYYR Goose Bay a Nato Traning base and Labrador Regional Airport scenery for FS9 Custom ground and water textures cover the entire area which includes 14 coastal communities and airfields from Mary's Harbour to Nain. This scenery can be downloaded from the AVSIM Library or from the Flight Ontario website.

WarbirdSim P-51 Mustang Review

Posted: Friday, December 12, 2008 - 17:09
Chris Kielhl, one of Avsim's Contributing Reviewers has recently taken a look at the WarbirdsSim P-51 Mustang. The P-51 happens to be one of my and many other aviation fans, favourite aircraft in history. Not just because of its sleek lines, high performance, or the fact that it helped win a World War, but because it's just appealing to many for some reason. Just about any person halfway familiar with aviation will know this aircraft, and you can't really miss it at any good air show. Although there are several P-51 addons for Flight Simulator, almost all of which I purchased, I have never reviewed one. Nor have I flown one as nice as this one. This P-51 has surpassed all of my past P-51's to become my absolute favourite; I won't stop flying this one anytime soon. Coming up, you'll see what I'm talking about.

If you're a P-51 fan, but are thinking "there's so many P-51's out, and I already own two or three of them", don't let that stop you. That would be making a silly mistake, as this package really is a stunner. It has everything I could've thought to add if I had been designing it myself, and as a tail dragger nut, it simply conforms to what I know about them.

Chris is pretty impressed with this package, so why not read the full WarbirdsSim P-51 Mustang review for yourself!

Cirrus Pedals on Sale on Avsim Store

Posted: Friday, December 12, 2008 - 16:14
The Avsim Store has a few Cirrus Pedals in stock. These professional pedals were originally $595 and are offered for only $345. They were demo units but have never been sold to a customer. Hurry up, these are a great deal. Also, we have receive the new X-Plane version 9.21.

Visit the new Avsim Store today.

Just Flight 747-200/300 Series Released

Posted: Friday, December 12, 2008 - 12:22
F-Lite 747-200/300 by Just Flight for FSX and FS2004, The 747 is acknowledged as the world’s most easily-recognized aircraft. From the team at CLS comes a 747 package featuring the -200 and -300 passenger variants with three engine configurations spread across 21 different liveries. Features included with this package, 2D and 3D interactive cockpits, wing view, push back truck, doors, thrust reversers, Your choice of engines – Pratt & Witney, General Electric and Rolls-Royce, special effects including tyre/wet runway water effects, engine start and touchdown tire smoke, wing flex and mind you don’t over-rotate or you’ll see the underbelly spark effects and a layered paint kit for enthusiasts who want to create their own liveries. Full product details can be found at Just Flight .

Geneva Int'l Airport Released

Posted: Thursday, December 11, 2008 - 2:13
FSDreamTeam is pleased to announce the release of Geneva International Airport. Available for FSX and FS9, with a license valid for use in both simulators.

As a worthy follow-up to the successful Zurich scenery, due to its smaller size compared to the latest releases, the detail level is very high without having to compromise performances. As with JFK scenery, Geneva for FSX comes with the new FSDreamTeam scripting engine, introducing 2 new docking system types available for the ParkMe function, and YouControl features to control several scenery animations. The scenery is available in Trial version, and can be freely downloaded from FsDreamTeam website.

PFE version 2.8 And FDC version 3.9 Released

Posted: Thursday, December 11, 2008 - 1:25
OnCourse Software are pleased to announce the release of PFE version 2.8 and FDC version 3.9. These new updates offer several fixes plus full interactive support for those using FDC and PFE together. If FDC is playing a checklist and ATC contact you the checklist will pause automatically then resume once the radio transmission is complete, so you won't miss that all important instruction. ATC chatter will be (optionally) lowered in volume at other times whilst FDC audio is active. Cruise altitudes, transition altitudes, etc, are passed from PFE to FDC, all of which add to the smooth interaction and functionality. It's almost like running one program. New features added to PFE include a simulated ACARS ATIS system, minimum FAF altitudes can now be set for individual airports, ATC volumes can now be adjusted during your flight plus of course support for the exciting new and FREE XPack2 enhancement package. Full details of ALL these changes and more can be found at the OnCourse Software website.

I Am An Air Traffic Controller 3

Posted: Thursday, December 11, 2008 - 1:22
Brad Davis of AeroStudios announces, "Now is your chance. Our inventory just arrived today, 2 days early! We are now shipping the first orders of this amazing new Tower Simulator. Just in time for Christmas. If you were waiting until the item was in stock, now is your chance. This is one of the most impressive air traffic control tower simulators you will find. For complete details, visit the "I am an Air Traffic Controller" website.

Bell Agusta 609 Tilt Rotor By Wilco Publishing

Posted: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 - 18:14
Wilco Publishing releases their Bell Agusta 609, with an operational ceiling of 25,000 ft., this versatile aircraft will fly in icing conditions and extreme climates, from the Arctic to the desert with a range of 750 nautical miles and cruising speeds of 275 knots. Features include : Seven aircraft variants with ten liveries, Advanced FSX missions take advantage of this incredible machine’s capabilities, Training videos, VSTOL, VTOL operations and flight tutorial, Unique levels of interior detail including crews, passenger and patient fully animated. Compatible with Flight Simulator X and 2004 full product details can be found at Wilco Publishing .

RealFlight F6F & F3F Hellcat Released

Posted: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 - 15:17
RealFlight is proud to announce the F6F & F3F Hellcat for FSX has been released. Utilizing all of the new features of FSX, including DX10, high resolution textures, bloom, self-shadowing, normal mapping and specular mapping, this famous aircraft has twelve (12) different liveries for your flying pleasure. A fully animated Virtual Cockpit with a complete loadout option allowing you access to all of the fully operational weapons systems puts you firmly in the pilots seat. Dean Greasley of RealFlight states "We have tried and hopefully succeeded in creating a quality product that will make our debut into the flight-simming industry a truly memorable one ". For further information - head over to RealFlight

New Titles in Avsim Store

Posted: Tuesday, December 9, 2008 - 17:53
The Avsim Store now carries products from Flight1 Software and Wilco Publishing. This includes top titles like Wilco B777, the new Cessna Skyhawk 172 or the exciting Tower Simulator. Download versions are available. Also, many FS9 title are available at a discounted price, check out the bargain bin section.
Visit the new Avsim Store today.