and Jupiter aligns with Mars . . . .
JustFlight has now released 4 small general aviation payware aircraft, the skies are on the verge of becoming alive with the new 3rd party ATC and surely some sort of improved weather can’t be too far behind.
I hear rumors of some sort of Safe Taxi or Taxi Assist and Verbal callouts, may be on the developer’s todo list.
Aerosoft stepped up with two major scenery packs and introduced animated wind turbines by the hundreds, moving autos and boats with their Helgoland Island. Then followed that one with their outstanding Lukla - Mt. Everest Extreme with a dozen high altitude airports with some excellent colorful cultivation.
What is still missing is a powerful airplane or helicopter capable of reaching those high altitude airports.
The run of the well received Orbx add on airports may have been the single largest boost to enjoyment. The well known Chicago's Meigs Field in Lake Michigan, then Monterey with the beautiful Peninsula views , Palm Springs with all those idle wind turbines, but, a totally outstanding airport development, scenic Innsbruck in the valley with the animated train, the high country Eagle County, Colorado, and then nothing. The one-off True Earth Netherlands was probably the best bang for the buck.
The freeware scenery from Orbx - Swiss Cultivation and Saanen airport - was very well received.
Some pleasant surprises were the freeware Dornier Do27, the SIAI Marchetti S-211 Jet trainer, and the continuous mods to the Cessna 172 by Jan. The most recent freeware is the Cessna 152 by Sylvain.
One prolific freeware developer, Krsysztof Kaniewski, has given us more than 50 popular flying models, plus a very capable sports car for checking out our scenery at close range. While these airplanes have very limited panels and cockpits, they have good sounds and stunning exteriors and are fun to fly. Some of my favorites are the Piper Cub series, the Ercoupe series, J2F - Duck, and the Stearman biplane.
LarryLynx stepped up with his two totally outstanding freeware UK airports - then followed up with the F-104G Starfighter for free and has this Super Helicopter. Thanks Steve.
We were given an easy, really easy, program to build basic airports anyplace on earth with fsCloudPort. While there are serious limitations preventing crossing runways, ramps and taxiways, we do have a super collection of static aircraft, 3D buildings and recently a nice choice of water towers and tanks. So for, we have 2,576 airports in 156 countries - ready to download. Thanks Phil for your generous contribution of time and personal costs, and thanks to all those that contributed their airport designs.
We have a totally free upload/download website for sharing our user created projects ai https://flight-sim.org. This site will now handle very large file sizes. Thanks Higgy.
We have several teams of user developers that seems to break new ground in scenery development and enchanements. Some that immediately come to mind are the Swiss Refineries, Turkey Creek Power Plant in Florida and the magnificent Project Apollo50 projects.
Other scenery projects are La Martinique, Caribbean Islands, some other tourist islands, some major swatches of Germany, Italy, and most recently large areas of IZOJUB's Scotland and Hartmans's Norway. The Norway project is beginning to look like a payware scenery area with advanced cultivation. The city of Paris and surrounds is the most recent collaboration and Sydney may be the next major city for release.
The list of individual user developers is getting longer each day, and most of these guys have contributed support programs that are required by the few master developers to bring their work to conclusion for us to download. In no special order here are a few that most of use every single day: Nick's AeroScenery, Nabeel's Cultivation Editor, Lenidcamper's ObjectGen, Arno Gerretsen's ScenProc and ModelConverterX, Chrispy136's Scenproc scripts, Trespassers and Vogel69 for explaining how it all works and a few others that I can't remember off hand.
Another important area of contribution are the aircraft repainters. The list is long and distinguished, but GACSavannah stands out in the crowd with near professional level innovative and custom repaints.
But, IMHO, none of this would have advanced to this level without the expert leadership of Rodeo with all his creative additions and tutorials and TomSimMuc for putting it all together and working day and night and constantly introducing new items. Major contributions are Vogel69's French Islands and much more, ZoSoChili's custom 3D structures and night lighting, ryansumei's total design airports, Kenventions for all our trees and towers, flightXtreme's Czech Republic and Islands, brunnobellic's islands, drassaud's autogen, edpatino's airports, Gasy24's Spain and France, USSIowa's artwork, ApfelFlieger's ship mods, IZOJUB's 25 hour days editing the large area sceneries of Germany, Finland, Ireland, and more, PMB for keeping the links updated, and so, so many others.
Just thought we should give some recognition to these outstanding individual efforts.