18 minutes ago, Gilandred said:

How is it “consumer hostile” to hold the lower cost for current subscribers?  What in your opinion should they have done?

I'm not really getting into a debate over pricing practices and predatory subscription practices. In my opinion, what they did is consumer-hostile.

Your opinion may be different, of course. 

 

 

Edited October 16, 2025Oct 16 by JonathanC

Did again a test flight with Say Intentions, VFR, SOCAL and VFR Injection. Was surprised as they were less frustration in this last experience. May revice my position as the VFR injection was very immersive. The full story with lot of pictures and comments:

 

On 10/14/2025 at 10:34 AM, bennyboy75 said:

Here I'm cleared for the descent by Dublin (perhaps a little later than the airspace boundary in real life - although the next communication was to handover to London)

Other than the handover to London that looks spot on.

I don’t know if any of you are considering buying FS Labs Concorde but filing a flight plan for it with SI would be very interesting.

A unique flight profile where your initial cruise level (FL280) has to be subsonic whilst over populated areas then at the accel point engaging full power plus reheat for a cruise climb that could take you to the ceiling of FL600.

But, here’s the tricky bits…

1) Invariably you won’t reach 600 as the air isn’t cold enough and climb rates could be as low as 50fpm.

2) During the cruise / climb you may descend occasionally to maintain Mach 2. Remember, above FL500 you’re on your own. No conflicting traffic.

3) At the other end you slow down before initiating the descent.

All very different to how a subsonic aircraft is operated. 😁

If SI can handle Concorde it deserves a pat on the back.

12 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Other than the handover to London that looks spot on.

It was pretty much spot on. I would also say that accounting for the fact that it needs to recognise the airspace boundary and then generate the handover which then needs to be replayed etc all takes time while flying at 300kts, so that would explain the tardiness of it. 

19 hours ago, Langeveldt said:

I was thinking today, I get lots of headons at taxiways at fairly mainstream airports (holding point at OMDB for example), planes just taxying towards me, even though I follow the SI guidance.  I still see loads of "generic" aircraft eveywhere, despite the fact that I have both IVAO and FSLTL libraries fully installed.  I'm guessing this is a drawback of the libraries or the sim itself, but I would love to see them gone.  It really kills the immersion.

Until these two things can be sorted, I don't think I'm ready for a price increase.  But then they are forcing us existing customers to stick with them to avoid said increase.  Not what we were told was going to be the case at all.

In balance, I still love the SI product, but it's in the dock.  

In 2024 you can disable the generics through the content.xml editor in ‘tools’ in addon linker. In 2020 I just deleted all the files from the folder asobo aircraft generic XX - simobjects - airplanes - asobo generic airliner XX and they don’t show. If you delete them from the the main folder then the sim will reinstall them. This way it sees the file structure intact and doesn’t. 

Edited October 17, 2025Oct 17 by bennyboy75

For approaches SI is limited to vectoring only and Brian admitted it. Of course you may "request" RNAV, VOR, RNP approaches, but SI will never fully understand your request, though it may give you a "permission" to execute and then...start vectoring you again. 

Traffic is still horrible, especially with parkings. BATC does much better job in this area. I'm not mentioning PSXT as it's just a different league. 

And I agree, I'd like SI to concentrate on ATC first, then deal with other things.

19 hours ago, mspencer said:

2 years ago, pretty much any of us in tech would have said "compute will go down lol don't worry" - that just hasn't happened enough to offset... all the other stuff.

I do PR for tech, and I certainly wouldn't have said that. One look at how much power it takes ChatGPT to answer one question and you start sweating about the power bill alone. And that's just ChatGPT answering lame questions. Tell it to control an airspace, and the power necessary is going to be eye-opening.

I work with a bunch of people in the AI world and from where I sit, there are a lot of rose-tinted glasses out there. No one seems to want to talk about the fact that 3 major AI players are each commissioning the entire output of a nuclear reactor just to run their data centers. Not a little one that runs a submarine - Microsoft is restarting one of the Three Mile Island power plant's reactors. 

Nuclear reactors are expensive to run, and if you're commissioning the entire output of one that means you're paying the entire cost of running it, plus profit. That's hundreds of millions per year just for operating costs - not even counting paying for the construction bill in the first place which is usually into the billions. That's fine if you're selling the power because you'll probably make a bit under a billion per year doing that, but if you're using all of that power yourself, it's just a cost.

Then you have to pay for the AI hardware, the bandwidth, the people to run the whole AI side of the operation, etc, which means it's not out of the question that, in order to stay afloat, you'd need to make that same billion per year you'd have made just by selling the power. 

The industry is kind of approaching a cliff right now, because the venture capital firms that have been bankrolling it are starting to get restless waiting for the anticipated profits to appear. Once you drop the V-cap funding, the prices have to increase very steeply in order to keep the operation running.

 

I subscribe monthly to SI but not used it since spring time, so I’ve been subsidising it’s use for every one else, …you’re most welcome 😁

Recently in San Francisco my usual $12 waymo  driverless taxi ride was coming up as $30 , these robots are starting to get greedy. What’s next , they plug us all into the matrix and use us as batteries?

48 minutes ago, eslader said:

I do PR for tech, and I certainly wouldn't have said that. One look at how much power it takes ChatGPT to answer one question and you start sweating about the power bill alone. And that's just ChatGPT answering lame questions. Tell it to control an airspace, and the power necessary is going to be eye-opening.

I work with a bunch of people in the AI world and from where I sit, there are a lot of rose-tinted glasses out there. No one seems to want to talk about the fact that 3 major AI players are each commissioning the entire output of a nuclear reactor just to run their data centers. Not a little one that runs a submarine - Microsoft is restarting one of the Three Mile Island power plant's reactors. 

Nuclear reactors are expensive to run, and if you're commissioning the entire output of one that means you're paying the entire cost of running it, plus profit. That's hundreds of millions per year just for operating costs - not even counting paying for the construction bill in the first place which is usually into the billions. That's fine if you're selling the power because you'll probably make a bit under a billion per year doing that, but if you're using all of that power yourself, it's just a cost.

Then you have to pay for the AI hardware, the bandwidth, the people to run the whole AI side of the operation, etc, which means it's not out of the question that, in order to stay afloat, you'd need to make that same billion per year you'd have made just by selling the power. 

The industry is kind of approaching a cliff right now, because the venture capital firms that have been bankrolling it are starting to get restless waiting for the anticipated profits to appear. Once you drop the V-cap funding, the prices have to increase very steeply in order to keep the operation running.

 

I work for an expert network that puts investors in touch with industry experts.

Literally every single phone call I take is about AI.  Absolutely every one.  How we are going to "leverage the growth in AI to streamline our labour output". 

Essentially lots of people are going to be losing their jobs.  From doctors, to lawyers, to radiographers.  I'm hearing it from the horses mouth every single day.

I pray for the AI bubble to burst, because I don't like what's ahead.  I think the slashing of labour forces is going to mean they can spend money on their own power generation.  

You're essentially talking about "reshaping", in my estimates about two thirds of jobs.  Many, many people are going to lose their jobs.  So there come your savings.  

1 hour ago, Langeveldt said:

I work for an expert network that puts investors in touch with industry experts.

Literally every single phone call I take is about AI.  Absolutely every one.  How we are going to "leverage the growth in AI to streamline our labour output". 

Essentially lots of people are going to be losing their jobs.  From doctors, to lawyers, to radiographers.  I'm hearing it from the horses mouth every single day.

I pray for the AI bubble to burst, because I don't like what's ahead.  I think the slashing of labour forces is going to mean they can spend money on their own power generation.  

You're essentially talking about "reshaping", in my estimates about two thirds of jobs.  Many, many people are going to lose their jobs.  So there come your savings.  

Short-term savings maybe. The thing about firing almost everyone is that almost no one is left to give you money for what you're selling.

That's a reality that doesn't seem to have dawned on the AI fanclub yet. 

The funniest part about that is that they tend to be staunch capitalists, and AI is going to kill capitalism dead. You can't have capitalism if most of the players in the economy can't get their hands on any money.

 

10 minutes ago, eslader said:

Short-term savings maybe. The thing about firing almost everyone is that almost no one is left to give you money for what you're selling.

That's a reality that doesn't seem to have dawned on the AI fanclub yet. 

The funniest part about that is that they tend to be staunch capitalists, and AI is going to kill capitalism dead. You can't have capitalism if most of the players in the economy can't get their hands on any money.

 

I'm worried there will be a small upper class supporting themselves while most of the population struggle.  The guys I listen to every day will be absolutely fine just trading amongst themselves.

I used to live in recently post-apartheid South Africa and it worries me a little bit like that situation.  Essentially 10% of the population completely shielding themselves from 90%.

I do of course hope that you are right and the bubble bursts without damaging you and me.  

Anyway, apologies mods, I have digressed from the topic at hand.  Now if they could just stop A330s taxying directly into me that would be great.  

Edited October 17, 2025Oct 17 by Langeveldt

3 minutes ago, Langeveldt said:

I'm worried there will be a small upper class supporting themselves while most of the population struggle.  The guys I listen to every day will be absolutely fine just trading amongst themselves.

I used to live in recently post-apartheid South Africa and it worries me a little bit like that situation.  Essentially 10% of the population completely shielding themselves from 90%.

I do of course hope that you are right and the bubble bursts without damaging you and me.  

Anyway, apologies mods, I have digressed from the topic at hand.  Now if they could just stop A330s taxying directly into me that would be great.  

Believe it or not, I don't. Even in South Africa, the 90% had money.

You get 90% of the population starving, homeless and knowing it's all the 10%'s fault? Yeah, there's a reason those guys are building bunkers right now, but it's not going to help. They have to come up for air and food at some point and if they don't then great, they've voluntarily put themselves in prison and the rest of us can get on with reshaping society.

In short, it may not be fun in the short term, but it will be self correcting and then after that, assuming AI ever actually lives up to what its proponents say it can do (it certainly can't right now), we'll end up with a society wherein we're much more free to do what we want because the computers are doing all the work we don't want to do.

 

I would like to discuss this topic further @Langeveldt and @eslader - I also work(ed) in large enterprise tech, senior roles, and am watching this coming future with .. trepidation. AVSim is not the appropriate place though. Do you know of another forum (preferably a forum, not reddit or discord) where there's sensible conversation about stuff like this?

5 hours ago, G-YMML1 said:

especially with parkings. BATC does much better job in this area

BATC uses the scenery’s parking spots, while SI uses airport profiles. So any misplaced aircraft in SI is probably due to that.