.....of reality.I just flew commercially to San Diego from Detroit this past couple weeks returning today. I am not really a jet guy and only give a passing glance to it. I do have ultimate traffic installed, along with Justin's mesh, landclass, Megascenery for San Diego, and now the new FyTampa Sandiego scenery.I have to say -when I showed up to DTW-and saw exactly the correct aircraft at all the gates around my flight to Chicago that ultimate traffic rendered-then tonight took my personal aircraft and busted San Diego's airspace to watch my airbus from Chicago land and taxi to the precise gate with all the other correct aircraft around-MS has really stepped over the line of reality! Simply incredible-how lucky we are!The United airbus to the right at the gate in the shot is the 11 am arrival from Chicago I was on-while I bust the class B in my GA aircraft. Now if I was shot down by a couple F16's I would know reality had been completed! :-)I simply shake my head in amazement though.....http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/Geofdog2.jpg

You are so right - I'm flying mostly up in Alaska now and there are ultimate traffic planes all over the place up there. When I first started my trip in the fall, there was little traffic above British Columbia but as soon as I ran ultimate traffic it seemed as if the flood gates opened. I'm not sure what Northern Canada will be like but I can only say that the realism offered now is just flat-out incredible!!!

You know GeofA....if you took a poll here, I'm certain everyone, or the vast majority will also be amazed at how far our beloved Flight Simulator has come. I am extremely impressed with the level of realism available through third parties with the AI. I am also impressed with how far the ATC has come. I can't wait to get FS2006 to see if even more strides are made to make the ATC even closer to reality. THe weather has also travelled leaps and bounds over previous versions. While we still need a "cray" to run at max "eye candy" most people, including me, have accepted that as a price to pay for the progress of our sim. Consequently, I find myself actually saving from the time I buy the latest version, for hardware upgrades and also for the next version. As a matter of fact, when I bought FS2002, I was so impressed, that I immediately put away $100US which was supposed to be for the next version...I figured if FS2002 was $70, and it was that good, then FS2004 will probably have a price increase....thankfully, I have put the $45 I saved toward hardware upgrades.So I am just as impressed as you are with the progress and I'm looking forward to the next version as much as the next guy.What I don't like, is the complete silence of Microsoft when it comes to acknowledging bugs and issuing patches for them. I'm not talking about missing bridges....things such as those are easily fixed by the hardcore community.....as a matter of fact, I completely support the procedure of giving us a basic scenery engine, basic airplanes, etc. and making it simple enough for developers to tweak, change or beautify this engine through trial and error initially, and then through the SDKs. But when obvious show stoppers crops up, like CTDs and crazy wind shifts, people in the community would like to know that Microsoft has heard our pleas and has acknowledged the problem.Personally, all I want is for Microsoft to publicly acknowledge the problems, and even though the fix for the windshift/autogen is left for the next version, at least issue a fix for, or let people know that they are trying hard to fix the CTDs.No......I'm not saying that they should post on the Avsim forums....as a matter of fact I would never support such a move. However they do have a website dedicated to FS9.....issue announcments there. That would be enough to satisfy me....and I'm sure a lot of others.