John_Cillis

I like the more muted photo scenery colors, for me they look more realistic given the seasonal variations in the earth as viewed from above. I do wish cloud shadows existed, however, since they are not an fps penalty in P3D or Xplane.

OK, they already came, when they were in Northern California and the West Coast, including the Russian River Area shown in these shots.... John

So nice, I love landing videos.... Arrivals at airports--the most exciting part of flight.

It also extends from Bridgeport, CT into Jersey, so it has broad coverage for slow VFR flight of the area. John

I have tried my best to get the airports to show, following the directions but they simply do not. The photo scenery shows, but the airports do not.... So I do not know which files to put into places\wa or whether I should maintain the folder hierarchy there or not, since the airport packages contain separate folders for each airport.... Can you printscreen your places\wa folder and share, so I can set up the hierarchy properly? Thanks a bunch Never mind--got the airports to show--my places folder was not set within my scenery folder, I just had to read your instructions again.... As they say in IT (and we IT guys make the worst patients)---RTFM...

Over the Napa Valley and the SF Bay, and over Arizona, out of Stellar Airpark in the Chandler Metro Area towards Casa Grande... John

Over Aerofly FS2's highly recommended New York metro area add-on, again, outstanding VFR scenery and amazing fidelity with impossible to believe fluidity and fps... John

Love the Hyatt chain, I always used to visit the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, I'd sometimes have a drink with my pilot friend Mike in its revolving lounge. Hyatt is a good brand, I was Doubletree's international WAN admin and PC purchasing and support manager for a time between 95 and 97 before they merged with Red Lion, then merged with Promus. Fess Parker, who owned a Red Lion resort in Santa Barbara, knew me when I was evening property manager at Meadowood Resort in St. Helena, home of Napa Valley's wine auction. He invited me to work at his resort, but my career in hospitality systems instruction had started and continued with Best Western after the Doubletree/Promus merger in 97, where I worked for my old boss from DC who had moved from our Holiday Inn systems rollout project to Best Western's new Nova Plus rollout project, where I worked as lead until early 2000 when I decided to give up my weary international travel after my daughter was born six months earlier. But I did return to Best Western in early 2005 to help them for two years with their new web portal rollout, and then their second project with Harley Davidson, a travel sponsor of theirs. My boss then, a cool dude named David Wang, still a good friend, was a pilot. David told me why he gave up flying, he was showing off for a friend and two girls in his rented private aircraft near Chicago at night, when he had a total electrical failure and he lost all instruments. He said it was the most frightening flight of his life, because night can be sometimes inky blackness when you are searching for an airport. My only GA night flight in 79, my first GA flight ever, was different, we flew on a full moon over Frisco from Napa, the most beautiful GA flight I ever had, with a pilot and good high school buddy, Doug Brambrink. On my first day working on Best Western's Web Portal, which was already in beta, I noticed an embarrassing issue no one in Dev, QA or UAT caught. No copyright notice appeared on any of our web pages. David Wang sheepishly came over to me and said "glad we hired ya, good catch". I was a Keane consultant on contract with Best Western, and went on to win their prestigious K-Pin award, given out to their client/site project employees recognized by their client. I was the first and only one at Best Western to receive the award and the immediate raise it gave me, plus the perks it gave our team, which was on the verge of losing our Best Western contract simply because we took our time wanting to roll out a portal that met my load testing data, and had no Sev 0 or Sev 1 defects. It rolled out that way. My Harley Project, of which I was Project Manager and lead QA, saved Best Western one million dollars in its first month in production a year later, again with no Sev 0 or Sev 1 defects. It had been dead in the water, so I was asked to take it on, write specs which were absent because Best Western, our client, had no specs that complied with hotel business systems rules--they just were sketching out the project as they went along and I said "Not while on my watch" and my boss backed me up, as did their lead project manager, a cool dude named Ron Trog. Ha ha, rhymes with Frog but he was no Frog, very good client to work with and he gave me run of the house on the project. John

First time I cried as a Man was after my brother, former Air Force, passed away suddenly in '92. I was Controller of Harrah's Reno/Tahoe hotel and food/beverage ops back then, and my brother worked as a bartender across the street in Reno at Fitzgeralds, where they cut scenes for the movie Sister Act--His entertainment lounge he ran was converted into the "Moonlight Bar" I was at home all day in March of 92 online, we used modems back then, remember them? So I could not get incoming calls, I used a special code to block incoming calls with a busy signal so I would not lose my session, I was on Prodigy back then, my Sim of Choice was Flight Assignment, ATP, which I loved because it was the first sim where I could do transcon flights. I even found a way to hack the ground colors, so the cities I made gray during the day, and yellow at night, vs there original colors, since I knew assembler language that it was coded in. When I went offline that night in March of 92, the phone rang, and my Mom simply told me my brother who I loved so dearly, who taught me how to read, how to ride a bike, how to defend myself in a scrap, had passed away at age 33. I went to funeral the next morning in Reno, I lived down in Gardnerville NV since my accounting office was in our Tahoe property. Several of my employees came to support me, I was held on oneside by my brother's ex wife, and on the other by one of my female employees, I think her name was Martha, since her daughter was crushin' on me at that time. Since my brother served in the Air Force in the late 70's, he was given a military funeral. He never saw action, but those on defense of our country were always trained for action, just in case. He was an aircraft electrician. I had to drive to Napa to be with my despondent parents after the funeral, but first I had to drive back to Gardnerville to pack my things, and while I was driving I was almost in a car accident--I cried, and cried, and cried, thinking of all those good, and sometimes bad memories, I shared with my brother, the first to go in my nuclear family. Now they have all gone upstairs, but I always remember, in threads like this, this song, from "Mike and the Mechanics", Mike Rutherford of Genesis Fame.... It applies to the man brought home from Vietnam, and his family too. Why, because I know he is up there, and he knows his family loves him. Take my word on that....

Blast from the past, on training flight out of Area 51.... I love the starkness of the Nevada desert, it has a peaceful, unspoiled beauty that only scorpions and tarantulas could appreciate.. John

I've only been to Monument Valley once in real life, even though I live in Arizona, it is a long haul to get there, you have to go there via the backdoor out of Flagstaff, it takes virtually forever to get there. It is breathtakingly seen in the movie "The Eiger Sanction" with Clint Eastwood and George Kennedy (of Airport 75 and 77 fame). They climb one of the tall spires there as they prepare for Clint's attempt on the Eiger. I have been at the foot of the Eiger, in Grindelwald, Switzerland, so the movie has connections for me in a way, seeing both places in the film, although I did not see the Eiger until 84, and Monument Valley until 2013.... I never found, in any sim, anything close to what Aerofly FS2 has done with Monument Valley's mesh, nothing has even come close, not even Google Earth captures it so well. It made my download of their Utah/Colorado scenery today worth it. John

I am new to Aerofly FS2.. I've added a handful of freeware aircraft, Utah, Colorado, Switzerland and some free Northern Washington scenery. I do not see myself getting Microsoft's next product, now that I have AFS2. I already have P3DV4, and Xplane11. I have already added a 2TB SSD drive for the rest of the add-ons I wanted. Given Aerofly's FS2's amazing speed and performance, beautiful vistas, and well color matched photo scenery, I now have a third sim which I can enjoy, and it is now 2/3rds of my simming already. It loads so fast, does not crash, and its interface is simple and intuitive. I feel it is for those of us who have flown in real life, but want to sim in a relaxed mode to see the world we missed from above, either as business travelers, business GA pilots, or in my case, occasional Light Sport and Trike Flying. I am so happy I purchased AFS2, my 2TB SSD expansion, made it all possible. John

OHHHH yEAHHH

i love the old Frogs in the "Bud ..... Weiser ..... Bud ..... Weiser" commercials, those were so funny1

Superb!

Very nice theme!

Nothing better than Schweiz!

AeroflyFS2 Utah add-on scenery. By far, the best Monument Valley mesh I have ever seen! John

I found AeroflyFS2 to be breathtakingly different from XP11 and P3DV4, a worthy companion. Worth getting even if you are waiting for Microsoft's release Its biggest strengths: *Good default aircraft, some good freeware, and the payware Justflight Duchess.... *Fantastic load times, never a crash, and the best fps and stutter free performance, and Vulkan support *The Swiss add-on scenery (payware), the best Swiss scenery and mesh, for any sim. *Huge coverage of the Southwest, my stomping grounds, including all of California, Nevada and Arizona *A nice, simple flight planner which can fly vectors into your destination airport of choice *A simple weather engine *Steam *Not a huge disk space hog Weaknesses *No nighttime lights, except with a few free add-ons *No rain *No way to save replays, and short replay time *No way to save default flights, or a flight in progress *Not many airports, or airport add-ons

I first went thru the St. Gotthard, via rail tunnel, in 1977 on my way from Milan to Luzern. I went thru it in the other direction via road tunnel, the longest I have ever been thru, in 1984 from North to South, on my way to Venice from Luzern. Last, i flew over it in a Lufthansa 737, in both directions, on a business flight from Frankfurt to Bologna and back in 1995. The southbound Lufthansa flight was funny. I flew from Phoenix to Pittsburgh, then Pittsburgh to Frankfurt on a US Airways 767, one of my nicest flights ever. While waiting with a massive case of jet lag, since I rarely sleep on airplanes, I was in the departure lounge to Bologna when out of my blurry eyes I noticed a dark skin colored man from India staring at me. Finally he got up, sat next to me and said "JOHN, what are you doing HERE!". He was a former colleague and close friend from India who I had worked with a year a half before, before he left my company to return to India to be with his family and take up a job at home. As I was flying in from Frankfurt, he was flying in the opposite direction from Delhi to Bologna! Not the first time in my business travel that serendipity like that has happened to me, it has happened to me quite a few times, meeting former colleagues, even family, on layovers, like happened to me in 1990 on a layover in Caracas, Venezuela. As we boarded the Lufthansa flight, my friend wanted to talk to me on our flight to Bologna, where he also had business to conduct. He shooed out the passenger next to my window seat, and we talked the entire flight southbound over the St. Gotthard pass to Bologna. He was a life saver, because I had not exchanged money for Italian Lira back then, so he paid for my bus fare from the Airport to my destination, where we parted ways. An angel of mercy for me that day, tired as I was. My landing on Lufthansa in Bologna was the worst landing ever. As we were in ground effect before touchdown, the pilot flared too early and we slammed into the runway from about fifteen feet, opening many overhead bins and dropping contents on the floor. In my suitcase, a bottle of cologne was broken, so I got many cute remarks on how I smelled by my client there, lol! Worst landing ever in my life. John

Humor away, that is what Mother Fr's are for (just kidding, I know you will love the joke)....

Ahah, a Led Zep fan. My favorite rendition of Stairway to Heaven was from the album "The Song Remains the Same" (Robert Plant begins with "This is a song of hope..." I identified with that song in '77 when I went to Switzerland the first time, when I went up Mount Pilatus, which some say is where Pontius Pilate was buried, but I really think the mountain was named after Pilatus aircraft. Every time I fly I think of "Stairway to Heaven" because it took us humans so long to get off the ground, take that leap of imagination, and learn how to fly. Sully's Geese in "The Miracle on the Hudson" were sadly on a training flight when they flew into his Airbus.... But they did not suffer, because birds are like the Phoenix, they rise again, lol.... Tongue taken out of cheek now...

The Sim is Aerofly FS2. I held off on getting it because one-- I needed disk space, and two, I wasn't sure about taking time off from Prepar3D or Xplane11. It is a good sim, but it does not offer a lot of scenery coverage, but it covers California, Nevada and Arizona which is the area my family coveted and hunkered down in, lol. I've added some Swiss scenery to it (Pay Ware) and some scenery for Northern Washington, Freeware.... The aircraft are varied, I wish they would have ultralights, but the Helicopter is good and they do have a Bleriot, which is an ultralight in a way. Their gliders are good, that is how they started, and the execution of their atmospherics is wonderful. There are downsides, but it has caught my attention and I will use it from time to time just for good, tweak free, fluidity in the sky, which I feel it will do and the new Microsoft products will do with Vulkan technology. After all, the Vulcans from Star Trek have seen our first successful attempt at warp drive (hidden joke), its about what we can do with CGI, like the movie "Brainstorm" foretold..... John