You are absolutely correct here - trademark issues are involved here, not copyrights as some imply.There was once (on old forum) long post by an Avsim staffer explaining why real-life airline names are excluded from official MSFS releases yet you may find them on subsequent (even commercial) 3-rd party addons like Flight1's UT, Eurowings products or others. Sounds like a paradox but it is not. Michael J.

>>It doesn't take a genius to figure this one out. Buildings don't >>fly and so they don't crash.>>>>Michael J.Not real polite Michael J. I think he had a valid question. This is information sharing, not let's make the other guy feel stupid for asking a question.My two cents.J. BirchCFI,CFII,MEIMobile, ALwww.clearedasfiled.com

Michael J,It might surprise you but buildings do crash, not very often but they do crash. A building at Heathrow crashed a couple of years ago. As far as I know nobody was injured since the building gave plenty of warning that it was crashing by means of movement of its floors, cracks running up its walls and finally much creaking and groaning. Over about three days this building crashed into a big hole that opened up beneath it. Tunnelling work on an underground railway passing underneath its foundations may have something to do with this event.Structures also crash. The Tay Bridge crashed on the night of 28th of December 1879 taking a train of six carriages and 75 passengers with it. In the following enquiry much was made of the poor quality bolts specified by Thomas Bouch, the designer. What the poor man did not know when he specified

Hi there,>Does/would Bombardier, or any other company, have any legal right to prevent depiction of their facilities in FS that are in plain public view?:). It depends, whether it is actually viewable from a publicly accessible area. In general, airports are private property, and while the outside of the main terminal building mey meet this criterion, buildings in other parts of the airport may not. So, for example, while you'd have every right to take a photograph of your neighbour's house, as it's visible from a public road, your neighbour has every right to prevent you from entering his garden to photograph the back of the building. Then there might also be tightened security legislation that applies to airports, along the same lines as laws in most countries that prevent you from taking photographs of military and government installations.The same rules apply to aircraft (in most non-US countries). Airlines generally paint their logos on the outside of the aircraft and fly through the skies with them, for everyone to see from a variety of public places. So, you're basically free to take pictures of them and paint FS planes in airline colours. However, as soon as the depiction of a trade-marked logo adds to the inherent value of the product sold, (for example a payware repaint), the logo owner would have a say in the matter, although in practice most airlines just see it as free advertising.Basically, MS is just following the path of least resistance by choosing to include only fictional airlines - after all, within a couple of days of the release, there will be plenty of repaints for us to choose from. As to their depiction of the airports, it would be my guess that they just approached the airport authorities of the ones they wanted to design, and got permission to include the hangars as they did. And who knows, there might even be a few buildings missing, just like the Bomardier one at CYUL. BTW, airline logos on hangars are nothing new for MS - the default FS2002 scenery of KSFO includes a United Airlines building...Cheers,Gosta.http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky/images/wxrebeta.jpg

Yes Denis, I see your point, but in Michaels view, no one can take the controls of the building or bridge and intentionally pile it into another building.Also to the other poster, crashing a F1 car into a building has no novelty value as people do that all the time (including in real life). It has a somewhat less psychological impact than flying an aircraft into a building and after the events of a couple of years ago MS (not Mickey the Schu) would be even more jittery about the fallout, especially after some of the fatuous reporting surrounding flightsims by the great uninformed in the media.Cheers,Chris Porter:-outtaPerthWestern Australia

Let me just say this, Formula 1 cars don't have paying passengers onboard.Don Bowlerdell 82502.53 ghz 512 mb rdramati 9700 pro

*Let me just say this, Formula 1 cars don't have paying passengers onboard*That maybe so, but my point is to the actual connection between crashing and advertising. Lets face it, you can crash almost any sim, but why should this be an excuse not to use their logo as people will crash them anyway? The aircraft industry is losing out on free advertising and perpetuating the fear amongst people by reminding them all of the time, about their anxiety of terrorism. Anyhow, this was an issue before 911 and I suspect that this was originally a copyright 'money' issue rather than a terrorism one, but the excuse just changed after the attacks.

"JET 1", whose post is just above has an accurate reply (perhaps some others did also). It has really nothing to do with airplanes crashing into anything, than it does with playing favorites of one airline over another, and potentially alienating customers. Considering how complex the sim is as it is, and all that is modeled within it, there is enough to potentially cause such alienation as it is. Why add to it?MS knows very well that their default aircraft will get repainted in various airline paint schemes, and they do strongly encourage 3rd party developers and their efforts towards enhancing the sim. Let's face it, for $70 no one should expect MS to provide much more than a nice "foundation" for building upon, and one could certainly not expect to see 400+ paint variations on something like the 737 right off of the default MSFS CD-ROM. As to buildings, if they decide to model a particular building, and that building in real life has an airline's name on it, well, that's realism, and they do it. Otherwise, what they are doing is giving you an airliner with a generic "place holder" texture on it. For the majority of FS purchasers (and yes, it IS the majority) this livery will suffice. For those who wish otherwise, MS knows those repaints will be coming along rather quickly after release of the sim.Even Ultimate Traffic could not possibly include all the liveries that would be necesssary, certainly not for $29.95, so they too had to use a generic livery for certain aircraft/airline combinations.Planes crashing has really nothing to do with it as, and let's face it, many of those virtual airliners soon end up with real airline paint schemes on them, and ultimately, ANY airplane that crashes, regardless of how it is painted, is an unfortunate event. For that matter, one could crash a generic repainted airliner into a building / hangar with a real airline's name on it, right? That would not look too good either.If MS did not want planes to crash in the sim, they would eliminate that ability (I believe Fly! did not model crashes, correct?), along with crash damage modeling, textures, effects, etc. We actually elect to do this with our 3rd party aircraft, so the worst you might see is a Piper Archer or Cessna Cardinal with it's nose burried in the ground! ;-)Regards,Lou Betti

Well, I guess I got my question answered. Thank you all very much,,,,even you Michal.... I can take a left hook with the best of em.

>>Yes but AI traffic never crashes and the AI aircraft modesl>aren't (very) flyable for the end user.AI never crashes?!? Have you been WATCHING some of these guys?!? I guess all the Embry-Riddle dropouts have decided to populate my sim, because I get a LOT of crashing AI (wheels up landings, runway overshoots, mountain crashes around KSLC, etc.). ;)Rob D.Insert spiffy graphic here...

Any idea why in fs2004 they have buildings with current airlines on them but the default ac are still made up? I assumed the reason they had fake airlines was because of copyrights, however now that buildings have real names on them that seems to not be the case. I don't know, I'm just asking.