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Correct. But it's up to you if you are a part 135 operator. To each what they prefer.

It's rather simple, actually. Sign up and you will be automatically added to airline "Newsky Academy", for which you have to fly at least one hour or so. Then book a flight, which basically amounts to picking departure and destination, and a suitable airplane. APL2 is better there since you can just fly the next flight on your schedule, whereas in Newsky you have to know where you want to go. Newky is better if you want more flexibility in what flight you will do next time. After you picked a flight, the tricky part starts: get fuel and payload right. Weight and balance is very much part of a pilot's job. For me, having this feature is on of the main reasons why I am using Newsky now. Do reduce payload and lose revenue to be on the safe side? Or do I stretch the reserve fuel rules since Simbrief values are quite high anyway? I like that 🙂 Once this is done, start your flight and pay attention to your takeoff and landing (stay on centerline and hit the landing zone). You don't have to do/fly schedules or manage an airline at all. Just fly free flights for the academy, or join another existing airline. Peter

Yes. Newsky seems not to change anything in the sim, it just monitors variables. I am flying the ATR, so I just import Simbrief data into the airplane's tablet and that's it. One inconvenience for me is that Newsky works in kg, while my flights are mostly in the Americas. I convert total payload and minimum fuel with a calculator and set Simbrief data accordingly.

As Alvega wrote, APL is about the pilots job. Since the exact payload doesn't affect a pilot's salary, APL does not even specify the amount of payload. However, it gives you a Simbrief link to plan your flight, and Simbrief puts in a random payload. Very convenient, and you will never run into trouble unless Simbrief messes things up (which happens rarely). In Newsky, things are very different. You have to lease airplanes (currently you can lease as many as you want) and to specify cabin layout and cargo compartment size. Depending of the rating of your airline, you will then be offered a certain payload. My airline has a pretty high rating, so payload tends to be at full capacity. It happens regularly that, on longer flights, payload and fuel exceed MTOW, so you have to carefully plan your flight, maybe reject some payload, or play with the fuel reserve rules. E.g., you can pick an alternate that is close by, thus reducing the block fuel that Simbrief tells you to load. Newsky only mandates a minimum amount of fuel that is pretty low, but you can add as much as you want/can. You lose points if your plane is not correctly loaded. I personally like the challenge to get fuel and payload right.

I had the same problem with other airlines in APL. From my observations in APL, I would say this may reflect one of the following issues: 1) The RW airline has several routes with different flight numbers connecting the same cities, and I picked the wrong flight number in APL 2) The RW airline has several routes with different flight numbers connecting the same cities, and APL only has a subset of those 3) APL routes are not current. I think APL does a winter and a summer schedule cycle, but many airlines change their schedule on a monthly base. APL is bound to be behind most of the time. 4) APL schedules can sometimes be plain wrong. I've been browsing through APL airlines a lot and have seen airlines based in the Carribean how offer most of their flights in the Middle East. I also remember how thrilled I was when I found a transcontinental flight to EDDR (I am partial to that airport) and then realized that it was offered by a small airline in South America. In reality, EDDR has only a few scheduled flights within Germany and charter flights to mediterranean holiday destinations. Having said that, APL schedules are close to real schedules 95% of the time, and errors cannot be fully avoided.

Ah, OK, I misunderstood. You can search worldwide for flights, and it will show you the flightpath. However, waypoints and airways are added only in the US, correct. I get those from Simbrief, and I think APL does the same.

Nope, you can search for flight number, airports, even plane types worldwide. I am not sure if that requires an account, but the basic account is free.

I forgot to reply to that point: you don't have to give up you career, you may even be able to use both programs concurrently. I have used APL together with Virtual Pilots Association (VPA), Self Loading Cargo, Vatsim, ... I also made one flight with Newsky, Vatsim, and VPA. And you can use RW routes with Newsky, just not as elegantly as in APL. You either enter the schedule yourself (I am doing that for my sort-of Calm Air VA), or you can fly free flights and get the route from Flightaware.

[1] Correct. That is where APL shines [2] I could only find something on how to receover your score / restart you Newsky flight if MSFS crashed for some unspecified reason. I think Newsky runs outside of MSFS and probably uses Simconnect to read data. That means there is basically zero chance that it causes a CTD. [3] APL is around since 2018 or 2019, Newsky is much younger. Also, every pilot first has to enrol in the Newsky Academy (for 1-2 flights), which has about 4500 pilots in it, plus about 250 active pilots. That means 4500 total users, and 250 new ones in the last month or so. Still APL is payware and it numbers are impressive and well deserved. For me, there was another reason. I first looked into Newsky in early January. Back then, almost all airlines where from Poland, and they even used Polish most of the time in the Discord channel. By now they switched to English almost exclusively, and there are many active airlines in Europe, Middle East, and South America. There are also North American airlines, but there is only 1-2 US airlines with good activity, I think. ANd non from Canada. Having said that, you can still fly wherever you want, and my gut feeling is that their user base is rapidly spreading over the planet now. [4] I have made 5 flights with zero problems. My last one was my first perfect score 🙂

I love the plane. I only stopped because I now like other planes even more, but I am sure I will fly it again.

Flight tracking of Newsky is good, but not on the same level as APL. It has a logger that analyzes your flight path and notices events like taxi speed, parking brake, engine status, altimeter change and landing lights change. It appears not to monitor seat belt signs and strobe lights, but it could be that this depends on the airplane. As I said, the best part of the tracking system is takeoff and landing. They monitor vertical speed, centerline deviation, how well you have hit the landing zone, and they even take into account challenging conditions (like crosswind) to determine your score. That part is even better than FSCaptain, which has a similar system, but only for FSX/P3D and only in the current beta version. A full, albeit a tiny bit outdated, description of features can be found at https://wiki.newsky.app/ Depends on what you are looking for. Yes, as of now the user base is much smaller than in APL, but every time I look at the map there are 30-80 planes in the air. That's significant for a fairly new program. A big plus of APL are real-world schedules. However, in my opinion, a big minus is that you can only fly for real-world airlines. Newsky has no RW schedules but 900 virtual airlines, most of them founded by users. OK, most of them are inactive, but you can set up exactly the airline you want. For instance, I am currently interested in Calm Air, a RW airline in Northern Canada. It does not exist in APL, and my impression is that they do not act quickly on suggestions. I suggested Calm Air and Air Saint Pierre a long time ago, but they are still not implemented. A big plus of Newsky is user interaction. In APL, you only get to talk with other users on Discord. Newsky has that as well (and a friendly moderator), but in the game you compete with each other for the same payload, you can send each other messages, join each others airline, or form alliances. It is more like a modern version of FSEconomy, and that is an aspect that I really miss in APL. On the other hand, I enjoy the events in APL. As for variety: for what I am looking for, Newsky beats APL hands down. No schedules where you have to fly 5 times in a row between the same cities; no restriction to a single airline at a time; and if you want to have an airline that only flies between Barra, Saba, and Lukla, you can implement it. What I also like is the economic aspect: you get to see how much your airline earns with each flight, and it tells you the expenses. The numbers appear to be realistic, which sets Newky apart from Neofly and OnAir. APL has a different focus, of course, but it is nice to see that saving fuel during a flight can save you money. Both are great programs, but at the moment I am more leaning towards Newsky. Peter

Spot on, Noel. I personally didn't have too much problems with the pause penalty anymore after the dev changed it so that it only kicks in after 10 seconds, but I see your point. And yes, Kurt moderates the Discord channel in a rather condescending way, discouraging and closing any suggestions for features, however politely they are brought forward. He is really doing APL a disservice and contributed to my waning interest. I needed a break from APL right after I made it to captain. I discovered that Newsky.app has made great progress over the last year and is now very enjoyable. APL is a great program and still better at tracking the entire flight, but Newsky is free, much more flexible regarding selection of flights, lets all users compete for the same passenger/cargo job, and probably has the best landings rating system I have ever seen in any addon. Peter

Correct, that's why we can measure distance. However, the universe is also not static. As long as something moves, we can measure time. I doesn't have to be an oscillating motion, although they are extremely common and much more precise. In fact, measuring time is now so precise that the most accurate way to measure distances is to measure the time light (or electromagnetic waves in general) travels between two points. That's how the unit of length, meter, is currently defined in the SI system of units. And that's how the GPS system works, it determines your position by measuring the time radio signals need to get from several satellites to your cell phone.

I have the greatest respect for Penrose's work, he was a giant in the field of General Relativity and his work from the 60s-80s truly deserves the Nobel Prize. But I haven't looked into the details of his conformal model since it contains several words that I am skeptic about. 1) Cosmology: a fascinating field with some great achievements, but there are no repeatable experiments, and it is a playground for all kind of fancy ideas that can't be tested. Just because a hypothesis is logically consistent doesn't mean it is right. And, frankly, 10^100 years is quite a big number, about 10^90 times the age of the universe. I don't care very much about predictions for time scales that will never be accessible to observations. 2) Conformal: Conformal symmetries are beautiful math, but they tend to create bad physics because they oversimplify things. Physicists do that quite a lot. You may have heard about the joke about spherical cows in a vacuum, but that's not really a joke: I once heard a serious research talk about a model with spherical crabs and the effect of sonar on those. At least they were in water and not in a vacuum. Plus, my first research field was superstring theory, which employs conformal field theory. I enjoyed the logic, but never looked back because the predictions weren't really relevant for any kind of experiment. 3) Thermodynamics: that may come as a surprise, but I never liked thermodynamics. Sure, it is an extremely useful theory and very successful in describing machines and many other things. However, it works differently than other physical theories; it is just not my taste. I prefer statistical mechanics (SM), from which thermodynamics can be derived. Thermodynamics mostly describes equilibrium situations (where everything has settled to some temperature), but SM can describe more general situations. Such as experimental violations of the second law of thermodynamics.

Dave has a point, but that point also applies to space. Indeed, anything that we observe must be based on measurements, and time is no exception. Like Dave said, we measure time using clocks, which usually consist on some form of periodic motion. The Earth's rotation is a very old but inaccurate example, the current standard uses oscillations in Cesium atoms. And yes, in a universe that is completely static, time would lose its meaning since nothing could oscillate and allow us to measure time. You need something to change to perceive time. The same argument refers to space. How do you measure a position? Typically by referring to a reference point, say the corner of a room. You then measure the change in position from that point using a ruler, for instance. In a completely empty universe, measuring position would be impossible. Both time and space are defined and observed through changes in something, either the advancement of a clock's hand, or the reading on a ruler. The fun starts when you try to actually do that. To make something oscillate, you need a force, which changes the location. And progressing on a ruler also requires some form of motion, which involves a period of time. Hence, you can't measure time without perturbing location and vice versa. Nevertheless, we can get very accurate measurements of position and time, but not without limits. In relativistic quantum physics, the Compton wavelength of a particle sets a limit of how exactly we can localize it. If you tried, you would have to invest so much energy that you would start creating pairs of matter and anti-matter: instead of knowing the location of a single electron more precisely, you'd end up with two electrons and a positron. Peter

It's complicated. Imagine you have a tray fully packed with marbles, so that none can move. If you take out one marble, they can start moving by filling the hole that is left behind. Instead of describing how all the marbles on the the tray move, you can instead consider how the hole moves. If you push a marble to the right, the hole will move to the left. The hole behaves like a marble that moves in the wrong direction. And, since the marbles obey the laws of nature (Newton's 2nd law), the hole also obeys a law of motion, which looks exactly like that of a marble moving backwards in time. Now look at atoms. Electrons in an atom obey the Pauli principle, they can't be in the same state and therefore fill up energy levels. The number of electrons is fixed for each chemical element, so the ground state of an atom looks like a bunch of electrons sitting in energy levels (think of a ladder), filling it from the bottom upwards. You can kick electrons in an atom around using electric fields and light. If you do, an electron will leave a hole on the ladder step it previously occupied. That hole will again move like an electron, but with opposite charge and backwards in time. For atoms and trays, this hole theory is just a convenience, not a fundamental property. However, if you consider relativistic electrons with mass M, they can have either positive energy that is larger than (or equal to) their rest energy M c^2, or they can have negative energy less than -M c^2. The latter poses a problem since you could generate an infinite amount of energy by letting electrons fall down the infinite energy ladder, so-to-speak. Dirac proposed using hole theory to resolve that problem. In the ground state of the universe, all negative energy states are occupied. You can remove electrons from these states, thus creating a hole that moves backwards in time. Such a hole is called positron and corresponds to the anti-particle of an electron. They move backwards in time, but only since they are kind of a hole in the ground state, and their net effect is to preserve causality. I looked a bit more into the positive-energy solution by Lentz. It has been criticized in https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.105.064038. This paper is very technical but asserts that a warp drive would generally be in violation of some fundamental principles in general relativity. This is a serious rebuttal of the Lentz's solution (which, however, is really interesting and good work, despite being on shaky ground). Matt Visser is a leading expert on warp drives and has been working on it for a quarter of a century or so. By the way, it is even difficult to precisely define what energy is. The generally accepted way is associated with a symmetry (a so-called time-like Killing vector). This symmetry exists in flat space, but not always in curved space. Without a symmetry, it is even difficult to define what positive and negative energy is, so the entire discussion about energy violation and negative energy in curved space is still work in progress. We have a fairly good, but not yet complete, understanding of what happens. So, I wouldn't rule out a warp drive completely, but I would be surprised if someone could build one. Well, chances are I won't be around anymore to witness this on April 5, 2063 🙂

1) Interesting, I wasn't aware of this paper. I'll look into it and get back to you. Full disclosure: I have published on warp drives, so I know how they work, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert in the field and I don't follow the literature on it. 2) Ah, we're getting into the finer philosophical points. Yes, time travel is logically possible if either (i) everything that happens is predetermined, according to some kind of master plan, or (ii) history repeats itself. That's really all closed time-like curves are, and you can think of this as a particularly dull form of a master plan. I personally don't believe in either of these possibilities, but I am a firm believer in causality. That's why I do not believe in the possibility of a warp drive. Going faster than the speed of light would mean that, in some reference frame, you are going backwards in time. Now, space-time curvature considerably complicates this argument, and I never tried to fully elaborate on this. Plus, going backwards in time doesn't necessarily lead to a contradiction. For instance, anti-particles go backwards in time, but the effects of their motion are in full agreement with causality. So I can't prove a contradiction, but you will not catch me applying for a job at Ivo 🙂

Like a warp drive, wormholes also require negative energy to be created. And they do create causality problems: And yes, as long as you stay under the speed of light, a warp drive doesn't need exotic forms of energy. But, seriously, who ever wants to drive under the speed limit 🤠

You are both correct. Unruh radiation is similar to Hawking radiation near black holes, but there is not experimental proof for it. Conventional theories predict that it will be tiny. You need 10^20 g of acceleration (100 billion billion times Earth's gravity) to get a thermal radiation of just 1 Kelvin (about a third of the cosmic microwave background radiation). I didn't go into the details of the quantum drive, it is based on highly speculative assumptions. If conventional theories are correct, you wouldn't need an Unruh shield. And yes, one may in principle be able to bend space and time, but the amount and type of energy required is beyond anything we can even imagine to produce. Vacuum energy is not very well understood, and there may be logical inconsistencies (like time travel) be associated with it. I am not holding my breath for a warp drive trip. Peter

This technology is based on a hypothesis that is hardly discussed at all among researchers. Having said that, I am looking forward to the test. Experimental verification is precisely what a scientific hypothesis needs to succeed (or fail), so they are following scientific standards with this launch. Peter

I never tried IVAO but never had the impression that it was dominant. They were on par for a long time, I would say. And, at least historically, IVAO tended to be stronger in Europe and Vatsim in North America. In any way, Vatsim has its own problems. The old funding model disappeared, and recent changes in pilot training led to the closure of Vatstar, a group dedicated to training only. It may just swing back and forward between IVAO and Vatsim, it might not be a bad thing to have two networks. In any way, I believe that 90% of real ATC will relatively soon be provided by AI, supervised by human controllers. And my guess is that this will happen even sooner in flight simulation. The highly formalized language in ATC invites AI applications. Peter

Should normally be visible just on the left edge of the windshield. If it is not, click on the column to the left of the windshield. The manual is in the Documentation folder and has an FAQ at the end.

On the tablet under "services"

Did you do an inspection before flight? I do that religiously with this model 🙂

Flies just great 🙂