wohnlich

What is the long-term strategy of X-Plane? In other words, apart from the nitty-gritty bugfixing and small-scale additions, what extensions do you plan, say, during the next 2-3 years?

Manuthie's answer might have been buried in the other answers. To make it clear: You can select which areas to install during X-plane installation. I only fly in Central Europe, too, and that's all I have installed.

I would assume that Austin has made a lot more profit recently with the Android and iOS versions of x-Plane and its (sometimes questionable) derivatives. Also he now builds XAvion which I would assume currently is still a no-profit business for him, but still sells for 89 bucks a piece to (real world) plane owners and now also to simmers.

Now if we talk about "best pilots who have ever lived", the list is different. Consider Bob Hoover, who is able to do stuff with airplanes that seems unreal. Interesting stories, thanks for the pointer to these amazing gentlemen!

I thought about this question some more last night, and I have come to the conclusion that probably the greatest aviation heroes have been the tens of thousands of young pilots who have fought in wars, particularly World War II. In the later years of the war, many of them were sent up into the sky as cannon fodder (particularly on the German side) with nothing more than 40 hours of flight training and often in an inferior airplane. Many of them were in their early twenties (or even late teens), and their missions included flying over flak defended targets where you could be taken out by a shell anytime, and not even the best flying skill would help you to avoid it. That alone was Russian Roulette in the air. Add to this the brutality of an air battle between hundreds or even thousands of bombers and fighters, and the huge number of losses, deaths and injuries...the stress must have been simply inbearable. People like Tim's grandpa certainly were heroes of aviation--unfortunately, unsung heroes in most cases. Let's remember that many of these pilots started out like us flight enthusiasts today -- just 70 years earlier. If computers and flight simming would have been invented back them, many of them would have been on a forum like this. For many of us on the forum, the only thing that separates them from us is the fact that there is no large-scale war going on right now.

Charles Lindbergh ranks pretty high on my list of aviation heroes. Frankly, he must have been nuts, too. He flew an overloaded airplane with negligible navigation systems (by today's standards) across a foggy ocean with nothing but a couple of sandwiches to eat, hadn't been sleeping the night before and had to stay awake for 33 hours on his solo flight; fell asleep a couple of times, nearly ditched in the ocean, still managed to find the course, and thus survived an attempt that I think 24 people had died trying before him. Speaking of it, I think the most overrated flying pioneer is Amelia Earhart. If it hadn't been for her tragic loss, she probably would have been forgotten by now, like so many pioneers who set records at their time that soon fell and were superseded by even more records.

I had exactly the same impression. Xplane makes a mistake by adding neighborhood homes alongside an interstate-like road. I suspect the algorithm could be improved by checking if a road has a certain ratio of crossings per mile. If beyond a certain threshold, it is a connective road and not a suburb, and X-plane should not draw middle class homes all the 10 miles alongside the road. KTPK look smuch more like the real thing in FSX than in X-plane, I am afraid. But this is only a small sample. Still X-plane 10 wins by a small margin, in my opinion. Which is not bad for FSX when you consider that it was published when? 5 years ago? - while x-plane is brand, brand new, and puts "plausible world" forward as one of the key differentiators. Much work left to do for that, IMO. Interesting comparison, by the way!