RudiJG1

John, the guy next to me on that flight was retired USAF...he was sure the incident we experienced together resulted in a broken eardrum...he was in pain, but it was pain he was familiar with due to his USAF flight record. I was shaken but physically fine.

1998, and I was traveling from Jakarta to Washington DC to arrive in time for the scheduled C-section birth of my son. I had a layover in Honolulu and boarded the flight to LA (the second of three flights!) well before dawn. The flight took off uneventfully, and just as we reached cruising altitude and breakfast began to be served...the entire passenger cabin rapidly depressurized. At that point, two oxygen masks tumbled from the seat back in front of me onto my lap. I stared at them, handed one to the guy on my left, and put the other on. The plane then began a steep dive...a really steep dive, with the noise of the wind and the shaking aircraft increasing.No screams, no conversation, and no announcements over the PA. Needless to say, I wondered if I was going to meet my soon-to-be-born son and see again my 4-year old daughter and my wife. After what seemed like a really long time, the plane began to level off. At that moment, the captain came onto the PA, apologized for the lack of communication ("I was kind of busy up here..."), and explained that all the panel lights were green but one - cabin pressure. He had no idea why we lost cabin pressure. He had had to dive from cruise to 12,000 feet in order for us to take off the oxygen masks. The bad news? We had to return to Hawaii! When I got off of the plane, avoided the reporters and TV cameras and went straight to the pay-phone (remember those?). I called the local office of my company, who arranged for another LA flight within 2 hours! I arrived in DC 2 hours before the birth, jet-lagged, stressed, but happy and relieved to be there with my wife and daughter. My son turned 20 last February.

I second Gerard's preference for Black Marble. I've used the ORBX products for years and initially found their night lighting pretty good....until Black Marble.

If you do a search for the topic in the P3D forum, you'll find dozens of opinions about the program, which I like.

No crashes here either on my Win 10 system running on an i5-2500K overclocked to 4.4GHz, 16 GB ram and nVidia 1070 GTX

Yes, but the "generic" rain in P3D is unaffected by the FSL A319 (and soon-to-be A320) windscreen effects. FSFXPackages does offer an alternative.

David, there's an option to toggle this in P3D settings...I think it's under the General tab?

See here: FSL forum post on registration and downloads

Flight1

Neither PTA or the GTN is working yet

That's disappointing to hear...even the /r/flightsim admins on Reddit condemned the hacker. And then to make completely unfounded accusations against FSL and add insult to injury via a backhanded comment about an older product...well, that warrants an "unsubscribe" to his YouTube channel. Call me naive, but what ever happened to common decency? And in the spirit of transparency, I'm a beta tester for FSL.

The FSL forums are back online as is their primary website.

And for those with aging CPUs like mine (i5-2500K), the best combo is ASP4/ASCA for weather and clouds along with SkyForce for cloud enhancements. I've found that REX cloud textures, even at lower resolutions, cause stutters on my system.

Depends on whether there's wind...

I've just finished my first flight with version 1.1.0 and tested the weather radar with some serious weather at the Florida/Georgia border earlier today. I'm running Active Sky for P3Dv4 as well and did see radar returns, although their depiction was sometimes erratic and inconsistent. By that I mean that the returns would occasionally be missing from the ND pop-up, and at times, the returns would disappear, even though the cumulonimbus I was looking at through the windscreen didn't.