Read the interview here.

 

Interesting read here too: the view from a former senior airline pilot totally devoted to X-Plane :-)

It's an interesting interview overall from reading the transcript, but this bit in the transcript is the interesting eye catcher:

 

 

Our X-Plane scenery puts those simulators completely to shame. Our scenery in Seattle is absolutely excellent, and if we go to Paris, France, it looks just like Seattle. And if we go to Australia it looks just like Seattle. In other words we have these incredible buildings and architectural renderings, but it's not different per region yet.

 

Austin is starting to think like a lot of us now.   It's promising times ahead.

Our X-Plane scenery puts those simulators completely to shame.

Please buy me a keyboard. I spat my coffee all over it.

I'm going to tell you the truth, I took off from Dallas TX at night the other day in X-Plane 10-64bit and I almost fell out of my chair, the scenery lighting, with all the buildings street lights and city lights, was so beautiful.  Nothing like FSX.  It just blew it away.

Yesterday I took off from Boston in the day and the city looked way better than what I am used to in FSX.  It was full of buildings and highways with lots of traffic.

I still enjoy FSX, but X-Plane is getting there quick.

I'm going to tell you the truth, I took off from Dallas TX at night the other day in X-Plane 10-64bit and I almost fell out of my chair, the scenery lighting, with all the buildings street lights and city lights, was so beautiful.  Nothing like FSX.  It just blew it away.

Yesterday I took off from Boston in the day and the city looked way better than what I am used to in FSX.  It was full of buildings and highways with lots of traffic.

I still enjoy FSX, but X-Plane is getting there quick.

 

Night flying in XP is in a league of it's own! This alone is what made me jump FSX in the first place, but to say XP scenery puts simulators to shame is a bit of an exaggeration. This goes along the lines of when he said XP's ATC was incredible!

 

I wonder what simulators Austin was referring to, though...

I'm going to tell you the truth, I took off from Dallas TX at night the other day in X-Plane 10-64bit and I almost fell out of my chair, the scenery lighting, with all the buildings street lights and city lights, was so beautiful.  Nothing like FSX.  It just blew it away.

Yesterday I took off from Boston in the day and the city looked way better than what I am used to in FSX.  It was full of buildings and highways with lots of traffic.

I still enjoy FSX, but X-Plane is getting there quick.

 

 

Night flying in XP is in a league of it's own! This alone is what made me jump FSX in the first place, but to say XP scenery puts simulators to shame is a bit of an exaggeration. This goes along the lines of when he said XP's ATC was incredible!

 

I wonder what simulators Austin was referring to, though...

I'm going to tell you the truth, I took off from Dallas TX at night the other day in X-Plane 10-64bit and I almost fell out of my chair, the scenery lighting, with all the buildings street lights and city lights, was so beautiful.  Nothing like FSX.  It just blew it away.

Yesterday I took off from Boston in the day and the city looked way better than what I am used to in FSX.  It was full of buildings and highways with lots of traffic.

I still enjoy FSX, but X-Plane is getting there quick.

 

 

Night flying in XP is in a league of it's own! This alone is what made me jump FSX in the first place, but to say XP scenery puts simulators to shame is a bit of an exaggeration. This goes along the lines of when he said XP's ATC was incredible!

 

I wonder what simulators Austin was referring to, though...

I'm going to tell you the truth, I took off from Dallas TX at night the other day in X-Plane 10-64bit and I almost fell out of my chair, the scenery lighting, with all the buildings street lights and city lights, was so beautiful.  Nothing like FSX.  It just blew it away.

Yesterday I took off from Boston in the day and the city looked way better than what I am used to in FSX.  It was full of buildings and highways with lots of traffic.

I still enjoy FSX, but X-Plane is getting there quick.

 

 

Night flying in XP is in a league of it's own! This alone is what made me jump FSX in the first place, but to say XP scenery puts simulators to shame is a bit of an exaggeration. This goes along the lines of when he said XP's ATC was incredible!

 

I wonder what simulators Austin was referring to, though...

Please buy me a keyboard. I spat my coffee all over it.

No.  Use the keyboard you used to type that message & smell the coffee. B)

Please buy me a keyboard. I spat my coffee all over it.

ummm...why?  Do you not agree that $20 million simulators have terrible scenery?..cause the do.

What is wrong with the forum? It doing all these multiple posts and I tried to login via another browser and I'm unable to. I also just saw the message on the main page where it says we need to login with our forum names and not emails, but I still can't login! If I log out of this session, I will be screwed! lol

Please buy me a keyboard. I spat my coffee all over it.

..uummm...why?  Do you not believe that XP have better scenery than $20 million professional simulators?

Really!  A "former" senior airline pilot thinks a sub-one-hundred dollar software simulator without ATC communication is better than a multi-million dollar simulator?  Maybe that's why the description, "former".  Or maybe the million dollar ones also don't have ATC. 

Honestly, I'd rather see the flight dynamics / turboprop / turbofan / jet / prop engines fixed, plus ground roll, weather effects... addressed. Apparently, according to Ben's blog,  at least the fog will receive some of their attention...

this is what I liked about the whole interview:

 

"And so in the future what we're going to be moving towards is architectural style. Air traffic controller procedures and accents, and aircraft that really reflect each part of the world to really dive into the subsets of culture and aviation so that is not just homogeneous so we have an excellent setup right now. The next thing to do is that more variety, it's the different parts of the world look like those parts of the world."

 

Finally!!!