I just received this stunning, disturbing press release from the CEO and Publisher of AVSIM.com. I'm publishing it here not only to reach my direct audience, but to ensure that it is picked up on MSDN as well. My thoughts are with Tom and my many other friends on the AVSIM staff as they regroup and consider their options.

PRESS RELEASE:

AVSIM Hacked

Tom Allensworth, CEO and Publisher of AVSIM, today issued the following announcement; “We regret to inform the flight simulation community that on Tuesday, May 12, AVSIM was hacked and effectively destroyed. The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from. Both servers, that is the library / email and web site / forum servers were attacked. AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. We will post more news as we are able to in the coming days and weeks.

More proof that the smartest thing we (Microsoft) ever did while building the Flight Simulator series was to build it as a platform, enabling third-party developers to build things like this.

Or at least do our best to stay out of their way ... enjoy this utterly stunning before and after footage of a virtual Austraila.

(And watch for the blink-or-you'll-miss-it Rapide!)

I'm not normally a big fan of writing something here just to tell you to go look over there, but in this case, I'm happy to make an exception. My friend and esteemed once-and-future* colleague Mike Singer has written two great pieces that deserve all the attention they can get. In the aftermath of the closure of our studio at Microsoft and the fact that our jobs "went kablooee", as he so eloquently put it, Mike offers some fantastic perspective.

First, he reminds us what every pilot needs to remember when faced with a crisis: Fly the Airplane. When things go bad, you have to prioritize, and his insights are a wonderful and I daresay inspirational refresher course.

In his follow-up, It’s a game, it’s a simulation, it’s a … platform!, he offers the best and most concise encapsulation of what this whole Flight Simulator thing has been about for the past 27+ years that I've come across.

With both of these articles, it's as if Mike took the words right out of my mouth. Then, after taking them out of my mouth, it's as if he dried them off, looked them over, replaced them with good ones in a different order and then published them.

Do give them a read if you haven't seen them already.

*-Mike and I have too much fun scheming about things for this to be the end of our professional collaboration!

Earlier this morning (and, by "earlier", I mean "much earlier than I would have liked") I had trouble sleeping. (It seems there's a lot of that going around lately.) Because of the way my mind works (and, by "works" I mean ... well, I don't really know what I mean) trying to get (back) to sleep is usually an uphill battle between a body that wants to crash and a brain that wants to go sprinting off in every direction at once like a dog chasing a swarm of bees. This isn't always a bad thing, as I get a lot of ideas this way.  Unfortunately, this is also when I tend to do my best worrying, with visions of unemployment and dead franchises dancing in my head.

So, I have a number of revolving strategies that, if they don't actually keep my mind in check, at least restrain it from getting too wildly unchecked. These usually involve math problems of some kind, my current favorite being stepping through the Fibonacci sequence in my head, which works fairly well: there seems to be about a one in three chance that I'll start dozing by 4181 or so. This morning, though, it was more like 0,1,1,2,3, how am I going to pay the mortgage in March, 5,8, what was the number of that truck driving school, 13, 21, do places actually buy blood, 21, no, wait I did that one, blast, 0,1,1, etc.

Clearly, it was time for plan B: external distraction. Television wasn't an option - my eyes were too tired, and there's only so many times I can stand hearing people say "Sham-wow!" before I run the risk of believing it. So I grabbed my AT&T Fuze / HTC Touch Pro Windows Mobile Phone (I hear WinMo is hiring!), fired up the RSS reader and decided to listen to a podcast - in this case, it was today's Aero-Cast special feature from Aero-News. 

And what I heard was ... me.

In the wake of all of the things that have been euphemistically going on lately, they decided to air an interview that my colleagues Brett Schnepf and Mike Singer and I did with ANN back in 'Ought Six. So, instead of an interesting story that would distract the front of my mind (while the back of it snuck up from behind, threw a bag over its head, and smacked it until they both dozed off), I listened to myself. (And the other guys, of course, but that wasn't nearly as weird ...)

It is perhaps needless to say that I didn't go back to sleep,  but maybe you will. Click the banner image just south of here if you'd like to give it a listen, and enjoy the sounds of three of us waxing optimistic back in what we had no idea were the good old days:

Or, if "Star Trek" is more your cuppa ... "All Good Things ..."

AirVenture, Day Last +1

Driving south on 41 from the Super 8, I took my last look for the year at the few remaining bits of AirVenture detritus that are left at the airport. Most of what used to be camp grounds, beer gardens, parking lots, chair rentals, even a movie theater is quickly resurfacing as the rolling green grass that is roughly my 17th favorite thing about the Badger State.

Just as the airport came into view, the Who's classic Baba O'Riley came over the rented van's stereo. Normally, this drive is quiet and nostalgic, and I look to the big bands to get me through it. This morning, though, after a week of (a) hard labor of love, the lyrics struck me as fitting:

Out here in the fields
I fight for my meals
I get my back into my living.

I don't need to fight
To prove I'm right
I don't need to be forgiven

The relevance stumbles a bit in the next few lines - the area is a bit of a wasteland, but it's hardly teenage, and I don't know anyone named Sally ...

Don't cry
Don't raise your eye
It's only teenage wasteland

Sally take my hand
We'll travel south cross land
Put out the fire and
Don't look past my shoulder

The exodus is here
The happy ones are near
Let's get together
Before we get much older

The exodus is here, indeed, though I can't say that I was quite ready to flee the Pharaohs of the EAA. 

AirVenture, Day Last

Today was unusually quiet, though you'd never have known it by looking at me, zipping around on the golf cart, hauling boxes off to a shipping vendor, making last minute stops to see friends and business partners (usually both) one last time, and wondering why it was I couldn't find a t-shirt I liked this year.

The aircraft camping areas (the North 40, and its counterpart, the aptly named South 40) were extremely thin when I got to the grounds this morning, and the display areas, especially the warbirds and vintage spots, were nearly barren. Even Jerry and his One Man Band were gone today, postponing until next year my plans to buy a CD chock full of accordion-synth-polka goodness - thank goodness I have that excuse to come back. For a while, I thought that even that one guy was gone, since he was 90 minutes late getting to the booth. Turned out to be nothing more sinister or mature than a nasty hangover.

I was dismayed to learn that the pilot lost in Friday's crash was a close friend of two dear friends of mine, Tom and Laurel Lippert. Anything more than about one degree of separation among old airplane people (that is, people who like old airplanes) is uncommon - still, it was a bit startling to realize the close connection we had in common. Laurel wrote a great story about how they'd met a couple of years ago - I remembered the story well, but just hadn't recalled the name. You can read Laurel's story here - there's a freebie membership required, but it's painless and worth it. I'm glad to point to it here, even if only as a memorial.

I had a good chat with "Snort", who made a special trip to the booth to say goodbye. I ended up seeing him again later in the day, pulling up along side his P-51 in my not-quite-as-impressive golf cart as he was launching for his Heritage flight display with the F-22 Raptor. As always, he flew a flawless routine, and then left the area to take the Mustang home.

As the day wound down, I got all eleventeen of my boxes packed and handed off to DHL, while the rest of the group concentrated on uninstalling the FSX: Acceleration add-on ... and then using retail copies of FSX to repair the installation. It seems the uninstall routine in the build of FSX:A that we brought conveniently leaves FSX itself unusable. thankfully, this build was an Alpha (the one before Beta, or Male), and there's plenty of time to iron things out and polish it up.

I was a bit unsettled about the final teardown, since the computers and some of the monitors were going one place, the other monitors were going another place, and the crated booth structure itself was going ... one of two places, and we didn't know for sure exactly where, or when we'd know, and the guy who knew most of the things ended up running a bit late. Thankfully, he brought great news when he arrived just a few minutes later than expected: "You're done. We've got it from here." With that, we walked away at 5:59:07 PM Central Daylight Time, just under one hour after the official close of the exhibit hangar. This is a new record, one that I suspect will stand for some time, if for no other reason than that the thought of breaking it sounds utterly overwhelming.

Dinner part one found me honoring a tradition - burgers at Shepard's Drive In in Berlin (pronounced BER-lin), about 20 miles from Oshkosh. Berlin is a pitch-perfect take on the cliche of an idyllic middle-American town, but the joke's on the visitor, since it isn't a cliche at all. Dinner part two was a gift to my friend Brent, a rare opportunity, unavailable at home, to hit Taco John's and discuss the merits of Whiplash the Cowboy Monkey and his trusty steed, a dog called Ben.

This show is exhausting, even just as a spectator. It can be beastly hot, except during the occasional liquid insanity that they call rain in this part of the country, at which time it becomes beastly hot and wet. The crowds are thick, it can take forever to get anywhere, and the days are long - it's rare to leave the grounds after less than 12 hours. Even spoiled as we are as sponsors, with our golf carts, our VIP flightline passes, our access to special air conditioned havens of wi-fi and free lunch, just absorbing the event takes its toll, much less managing even our small slice of the logistical pie.

But I absolutely hate to see it end. 

Somewhere around the second day of the show, when everything is setup, the things we remembered are working, and the things we forgot have been scrounged, and my routine is established, there's a sense of happy, if complacent luxury. "It's no problem, I'll be here for the entire show". Whether I say it aloud to someone I need to meet with, or just to myself as I choose where and with whom to spend my time, it means the same thing: There will be enough time.

I know better than that.

No matter how well I plan (and I was simultaneously much busier and dramatically more efficient this year than in year's past), there simply isn't any such thing as "enough time". By day 6, suddenly I'm Burgess Meredith at the end of the Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last", wandering around a barren landscape, no longer able to see the things I came for. In my case, though, I'm not stranded alone in a post-apocalyptic library with no reading glasses, but I do tend to mutter to myself and meander ineffectually.

It's an embarrassment of riches, so many interesting things to see and be surrounded by in one place. Even more important than that, so many dear friends, many of them I've known for years, a few I've known for days, all here, all accessible to me every day. The chances it affords to connect the dots between and among those friends who know me but not each other is a dream for a professional common denominator like me.

I dread the sight of the deflation of this temporary city (whose visitors outnumber the population of Seattle by about 1.5:1), watching friends scatter back to the four winds, and the sudden switch of my weekly admittance wristband and credentials, my parking pass, and the golf cart from priceless to useless.

No matter how bittersweet (and mostly bitter) the ending, for one week out of the year it turns out that something close to heaven isn't in Ray Kinsella's Iowa, it's up and to the right, just to the left of Lake Winnebago. (If you miss and hit Sheboygan, you've gone too far.)

And now, before I pass out and miss my flight from Milwaukee to Seattle via Minneapolis, some 21st Century digital imagery:

Even the constant aluminum clanging and "One for the Ages" amplified pitch of the Little Giant Ladder Guy is a comforting sound, a traditional bit of AirVenture background noise.	Dale and Hal swap goodbyes, part one. Not pictured: Hal's envy at what Dale flies, and the precision with which he does it.
Our friends from Flight One, including Jim Rhoads on the left, and a gentleman whose name stubbornly escapes me in my tired delirium, guaranteeing an embarrassment hangover tomorrow.	The EAA's tireless 80 year old Ford 4-AT trimotor (NC8407, which is coincidentally also noted in my logbook) salutes the Super 8 as we prepare to go.
Dale and Hal's goodbye, part two. Not pictured: Hal in the criminally empty seat behind Dale.	Dinner at Shepard's! From L to R: Roy McMillion, Brent Conklin, Dan Sallee, and Hal Bryan. Not Pictured: Deep Fried Cheese Curds.
On arrival in Berlin, I immediately called a town meeting and made with the pontificating. I can safely say that I was firm but fair.	Objects may be more enthusiastic than they appear.

AirVenture, Day 6

Today was yet another day that didn't seem to have a particular theme. I was only in the booth for a couple of hours, but did some very well received demos to a few of the seemingly limitless number of pilots who have no idea what Flight Simulator can do for them, or, in some cases, that it exists at all. I talked with someone and their publisher about something I can't talk about yet, and I met for a half hour with that guy who has that one airplane that's part of another project I can't talk about. He was very excited to help us out.

It's always remarkable to see assorted flavors of Flight Simulator running at so many other people's booths. There's at least half a dozen avionics manufacturers that you try their products while flying with ours. You'd think they'd at least say "thank you", but what are you going to do? It's not like we're the richest company in the world with an army of lawyers ... Oh, wait. Actually, we love to see FS on display like that. The closer we come to ubiquity in the aviation world, the happier I'll be. And, to paraphrase Ian Fleming, nothing ubiqs like ubiquity.

I had a wrap-up interview today with Sky Blue Radio, and, in it, I said something convoluted about how time seems to be a bit schizophrenic at AirVenture - suddenly, it's the eve of the last day, and I'm only just now getting started ... yet some part of me feels like I've been here for years. Regardless, tomorrow is the day when I get to clean up the mess I made, shipping all the stuff back to Redmond that I shipped out here before I left.

The thoughts of a lot of people here go out to the family of Gerald Beck, the pilot and builder of a scratch-built P-51A recreation that was killed in a formation landing collision with a P-51D in front of the crowd here yesterday. This was probably the only time in my life when I was glad not to see a Mustang. I heard the crash, and I've seen some pictures, and that's already too much. (The images aren't hard to find on the web - I can't bring myself to post any links here). There's supposed to be some solace in the fact that he died doing what he loved, and I hope that's the case for his friends and family. Doing the things we love to do, those rare and precious indulgences that nothing can keep us away from, these things are what give us life ... for me, there's something particularly terrible when, in the random flash of an instant, they take it all back.

I suppose, however, that such is the risk of passion - the more we love something, the more power we give it to break our hearts.

Now that I've taken such a steep turn for the contemplative, I'm doing a lot more thinking than typing. Given that, I'll go ahead and offer up a few of my favorite pictures of the day (those taken by me, that is), then roll the dice and see if tonight's the night that I actually eke out more than 4 hours' sleep.

Flight Sim cockpits setup in the KidVenture hangar at Pioneer Airport. No, I don't have one of these at home, shut up.	The same sort of thing, but for bigger and wealthier kids - Redbird Simulations shows their nicely constructed and immersive cockpit.
It fits, and it matches my shirt, too.	I remembered today the first time I saw Jerry's One Man Band - I was 21, and thought his setup was spectacularly ridiculous. 18 years later, I realized just how much I count on him parked at the corner of Vern & Knapp, year after year. I'll probably buy one of his CD's tomorrow.
There's something so very promising about a biplane parked on the grass. Tailwheel airplanes have an optimistic stance and they sit literally looking up. That promise is somehow even richer at sunset: It isn't the bold "let's go, right now!" of a blue-gold sunny afternoon, but the warm aspirations of what's possible tomorrow.	Serenity.

AirVenture, Day 2.

I woke up across the room, having leapt there to answer the nerve-shattering wake-up call while still asleep. The calls are automated, rung with impertinent precision by some kind of PhoneBot, so my groggy attempts at "hello", "yes, I'm up, okay ... ", and "thank you, I've got to go get ready now" fell on ... well, no ears at all. Once I'd sorted out who I was and just what I stood for, the day began to improve.

I took the first hour off from the Flight Sim booth in order to see the ceremonial first use of a batch of computers that were donated to the EAA by our friends at Intel, with a bit of help from EAA's friends, us. The machines are setup in the EAA's Flight Simulator lab and are to be used to run FSX as part of a number of their educational programs for visiting students. Brett attended, as did Aces alum Roy McMillion, and we were joined before long by our friend Dale "Snort" Snodgrass, a consummate aviator whose bio makes me feel so terribly inadequate that I'm going to conveniently forget to mention it here. This will catch up with me shortly.

Here's a look at some of the PC's in action, being wrung out by a group of kids from all over the US who are attending the EAA Air Academy:

My time at the booth brought with it the usual series of conversations, questions, connections, interviews, and even a reunion or two. And then, having brought those things, it scampered off before anyone noticed.

In cruising around the grounds, we came across a newly-nearly-restored P-38 Lightning making it's official first AirVenture appearance. I say nearly-restored because the finishing touch - the application of the "Ruff Stuff" nose art commemorating the airplane flown in WWII by Wisconsin native Norbert Ruff, was taking place right there on the field, in front of an audience.

The tour of the grounds also found a lovely Australian Tiger Moth, about which I waxed authoritative and rhapsodic, while people whose room and board is being charged to my credit card did a credible job of feigning interest. You can see me in action on Roy's blog, specifically in this shot.

A bit later on we spent a couple of hours watching the airshow from the decadent comfort of the "flightline pavilion", a combination of air conditioned buildings, an outside seating area, free drinks, and two rows of chairs under an awning on top of a trailer. I stole about a half an hour from the show catching up and strategerizing with my friend Ron Kaplan, executive director of the National Aviation Hall of Fame. He apologized for the fact that my name was misspelled "Hall" in this year's program, and he felt doubly bad when I told him that the surplus "L" had happened last year, as well. I told him that I'd let him get away with it if he simply renamed his organization the National Aviation Hal of Fame. It wasn't all that funny then, either.

Here's a look at one of our designers, Brandon, and MVP Owen trying gamely to appear Very Important, as well as shot of the matching seating area just over from ours:

Later in the evening, after a premade-pulled-pork sandwich that actually had no discernible flavor whatsoever, we made our way to the so-called "Fly-In" theater, where the aforementioned "Snort" was going to be introducing the movie Top Gun. As it happens, Dale was an instructor at the titular school portrayed in the film (though, unlike Kelly McGillis' character, he was a fighter pilot not an astrophysicist, so he actually had some useful information to pass along), and some of the broad character sketches of Tom Cruise's Pete "Maverick" Mitchell character were based on him. We were sitting and waiting for the movie to start when Brett got a phone call, and ushered all of us into the VIP section of the screening. If you look closely at the picture, you can see that it was snapped during the scene when Goose ejects from the F-14 and, in a tragic miscalculation, is shot straight into the Sun:

From a practical standpoint, all this actually did was move us dramatically further from the screen, but the chairs were slightly more comfortable, and we were safely protected from the unwashed hordes of which we were so recently a part by a plastic picket fence. However, we were very well cared for and catered to, and I'm the first to admit that my vanity enjoys nothing so much as the chance to be on the other side of a fence from a lot of people. Besides, the company was good - Dale sat with us for a bit after he wrapped up his introduction of the film with a mention of the American Topgun Challenge, he gave a resounding plug for Flight Sim, and thanked us with considerable grace for attending. Getting a chance to talk to Francesco "Paco" Chierici and tell him exactly what we thought of his film Speed and Angels was an unexpected pleasure as well. (Note: we liked it.)

The contacts, the connections, the ideas, and the friendships continue to crackle and spark, and this was only day two, with five to go.

Oh, and a quick aside to Laurie Doering: In answer to your question, exactly what you'd think would happen at a Rubber Chicken party. And thanks for reading! :)

AirVenture, Day 1

I'm tired tonight, so I'll let the pictures earn their keep. The story behind the last one may be better left to the imagination anyway.

AirVenture, Day 0. 

The booth setup today was almost eerily uneventful - most of the heavy lifting was done in advance, so all we really had to do was install a few bits of software.  Even Flight Simulator X was loaded, configured, and activated, sparing us the 6 minutes per PC of activating by phone. Beyond that, we needed to work out some speaker issues and beg for some controllers to sit in for the ones we shipped that haven't found their way to us yet (thank you, once again, CH Products for filling in the gaps!).  

Then there was the small matter of the two 42" plasma monitors that we need for our display that, technically, none of us forgot to arrange for, since none of us ever even gave it the slightest thought in the first place. Thanks to the miracle of modern cellular telephone technology, and the brute force of a Microsoft Corporate American Express card, this problem was solved when a company in Madison, WI, rented us the last two they had. They brought them straight to the booth and mounted and configured them for us. I haven't seen the bill, and I've a feeling I'll wish I never did, but the show must go on ... the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd and all that.

The show has already renewed old friendships, and sparked a few new ones. Tomorrow, that process will accelerate dramatically, as more people arrive, and the gates officially open. There will be noise and action and rapid-fire conversations and things to see and questions to answer or deflect gracefully. A maelstrom of activity, paradoxically some of the greatest peace I know.

Tonight, though, was about finding something akin to quiet, about the closest I can come to the sort of contemplative relaxation that normal people find laying in silence on a beach. Far closer, perhaps, than the stolen title of this post suggests.

The afternoon and evening brought together a few of my very favorite things: a huge Midwestern sky with a great sunset, a golf cart full of good friends, miles of fully gawkable airplanes, and ... someone who'd never been here before. I take a peculiar pleasure in being the person who has been some place amazing who can then, in turn, show it to someone else. It makes me feel like the drummer in That Thing You Do - "I led you here, sir, for I am Spartacus." 

If any among the handful of pictures I took sum up a day-zero Oshkosh evening, I think it was this one. I'm resisting calling it the "picture o' the day", because I can't guarantee that there will be a picture tomorrow, or that there won't be another one in the middle of the night tonight. I'm just not ready for that kind of commitment. I'm resisting that, in fact, almost as hard as I've fought off the phrase "calm before the storm" in tonight's post, spraying my keyboard with Cliche'-be-Gone.

With that, then, here is the official "Picture of the Right Now, My Favorite of all of the Ones Inserted Here at the End, No Warranties Given or Implied".

Solace, indeed:

And to prove it, we're here ...

The Super 8 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin ... for one week every year, it is the second most desirable lodging in the world for pilots and aviation geeks as AirVenture begins.

My flight out from Sea-Tac was fairly uneventful - I had a three hour layover in the twin cities of Minneapolis & Not-Minneapolis. Dinner was a beer and a brisket sandwich, after which an enthusiastic waiter shook a bag of hot donuts at me for dessert. Two young kids played violin at the gate, having a very credible go at "Les Marseilles" - an odd choice, maybe, but it lent a certain ... I do not know what. After Minneapolis, I headed to Milwaukee (which, according to Alice Cooper, means "the good land" in Algonquin), seated next to a doctor who was angry because women can't give directions without discussing the way the elevators are decorated.

After landing and re-claiming (as opposed to simply claiming) my bag, I picked up the keys to my rental (a Grand Caravan with a Garmin glass cockpit, no less ... built, rather sadly, by Dodge) and set out through Milwaukee on the drive to Oshkosh, trying to decide if I was more of a schlemiel or a schlimazel.

I found Owen at the motel, and checked in ... before I'd said a word, one of the clerks said "You're Hal Bryan! I was told to place this directly in your hand ... " and handed me an official EAA tote bag that might as well (or mise well, if you prefer) have been the nuclear "football", given her dramatic timidity. I was flattered to be recognized, but, really, they're only happy to see me because I'm the one paying for all the rooms for the week.

Owen and I left and picked up Justin Lamb and Mike Lambert at the Appleton airport, then I came back to stuff exhibitor badges and lanyards and sponsor passes and all manner of other trade show flotsam into envelopes to be left at the front desk for the rest of our team.

That took longer than it should have, and I'm really tired, but for some reason I decided to write this instead of just going to sleep.

Tomorrow is setup day, but rumor has it the lion's share of the work is already done. All that really means is that the unforeseen disasters will have to be bigger than average in order to fill the available time.

Regardless, it is, as always, good to be back in America's Dairyland. Unlike mountain ranges and things that surround us at home in the Pacific Northwest (America's Barista), the terrain here is subtle, and just rolls along politely staying out of the way of the sky. It's beautiful in its way - lush and green, but, especially here, and especially now, the sky's the thing.

That seems like a half-pithy place to stop writing and go to sle

While I'm still not entirely sure how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall (or even how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Brand Tootsie Pop), I do know this: the newly re-re-launched FSInsider website is finally live!

Give it a look. Or don't!

All around the world ...

As I write this, a remarkable young man called Barrington Irving is on the first leg of a trip that will take him from Miami, Florida all the way to Miami, Florida, the long way, covering more than 21,000 miles in the process. His 5 week trip may not set any speed records, but he is set to be the youngest person in history to make this flight solo.

A number of us on the Flight Sim team have met with Barrington several times over the past year or so, but it was my good friend, colleague, and master of the pop-up Mike Singer who really figured out what Microsoft could do to help.

We're proud to provide his tracking info, and for our logo to make the trip with him. It's a rare pleasure to meet and do a small part to support the efforts of someone with a great idea, and the courage and dedication to follow through.

I've spent the last day and a half or so managing 3 FSX kiosks and offering demos and product info to attendees of this year's Microsoft Air Force Symposium. This event, just like every other symposium, conference, trade show, or seminar I've ever attended is whirlwind of contacts, acronym-ridden conversations, lanyards, credentials and swag.

Most of the event is focused on IT infrastructure, sharing best practices, shifting technologies and embracing new paradigms to leverage emergering methodolgies, maximizing efficiency while ... etc. There are a number of other vendors here, representing other Microsoft products, as well as third-party software and hardware, but the FSX stations are certainly among the most popular. Our traffic is surprisingly steady, even in the face of competition like the setup in the room next to me that says "Test Drive Windows Vista!"

While the number of current and former pilots that are stopping by is proportionally higher here than at a lot of shows, most of the questions are the same.

"What do I do?"

"What kind of computer do I need to run it?"

"It would be cool if you could use more than one monitor, or get rudder pedals or something."

"I used the first one, back in 2000." (For those not keeping score, Flight Sim 2000 was version 7.0)

"What happens if you crash?"

"If I buzz the White House, how come they don't shoot me down?"

As usual, I'm finding that real pilots will do very well at flying the sim, if I can get them to try it for more than about a minute or two. That seems to be how long it takes for them to think of the sim not as a toy to be messed about with, but to approach it as they would any new aircraft they'd evaluate, getting a feel for the controls, and establishing a basic input, analysis, decision, response cycle.

One pilot in particular, a square-jawed C-130 aircraft commander with steel hair and flinty eyes called - and I wish I were making this up - Colonel Manley, sat for more than 90 minutes, refusing to leave until he'd successfully flown our Red Bull time trial mission, and beaten the jet truck in the race.

When I asked him why it was that he kept crashing when trying to fly through Gate 5, he had this to say:

"Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.  I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I'd prefer you just said thank you and went on your way."

I might be paraphrasing, slightly. his actual quote was probably closer to "Because this joystick is so &*#@!! sensitive!"

Something like that, anyway.

I told you so. You were initially a little concerned about watering down the FSX: Adrenaline announcement by mentioning Service Pack 1 and the DirectX 10 update in the same breath.

You weren't wrong, of course - it isn't good marketing to dilute the message of a commercial product by trumpeting the interim arrival of something free. However, we knew what was going to happen - as soon as we announced an expansion pack, we'd be on the defensive, facing accusations of incompetence and conspiracy. Incompetence, because not every single person involved with the ongoing creation of Flight Simulator is focused on a service pack, and conspiracy because, well, pretty much anytime Micro$oft does or doesn't do anything, it's conspiratorial.

I even wrote a post here that went live at about the same time, oh-so-cleverly entitled "Prequently Asked Questions", to hopefully head off some concerns. No, this doesn't mean that SP1 or the DX10 update will be delayed, no this isn't an evil plot to make you buy Vista ... Granted, fewer people read this blog than read FSInsider, and, I suspect, fewer people read FSInsider than read AVSIM.

But still, we tried.

You, Marketing and PR, listened to us against your better judgment. We told you that some segment of our customer base would react negatively to the announcement, because they'd assume it meant we were taking resources away from the Service Pack and DirectX 10 updates we'd promised. We also told you that we needed to emphasize the fact that the Expansion Pack was intended for both XP and Vista, since we'd be accused of forcing people to upgrade.

What we didn't tell you was that it didn't matter how clearly we tried to get these key points across - some people would still say we were unethical liars, simultaneously too stupid to build a decent piece of software and smart enough to dupe our customers, surely a far-brighter-than-average demographic.

We also forget to mention that our latest bit of transparency would mean that somebody would compare us to Hitler. Sorry for the oversight, but, really, you should have known that announcing a series of updates to a piece of entertainment software really is just another flavor of National Socialism. That should have been obvious. Come on - bang the rocks together guys.

If you haven't seen the threads, check them out:

I don't want to sound ungrateful but ...

- and -

New Expansion pack from Microsoft later this year

When I'm not shaking my head, finally understanding the full meaning of one of my father's favorite words - incredulous - I'm especially grateful for the cooler heads that find their way to the surface. Friends I've met, like Geofa, and those unmet, like Ladamson. And even, in fact I daresay especially, those who are disappointed with FSX, genuinely anxious for some additional support, and who manage to express that without accusing us of being dead fascist dictators. Those are the customers I like to think we're working for.

And for the record - I'm a fan of Ground Environment Pro. If there's anyone reading this who doesn't know their stuff, go check it out. Their work is an example of why we build a platform, and not just a product.

Anyway, I wonder if it would have been worse had we announced the Expansion Pack with NO mention of the other updates? I have to think so, though one wonders.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go and lasciviously eye Poland.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, or, more to the point, the Adrenaline is out of the adrenal gland, I wanted to follow up a bit more informally here with answers to a few questions I suspect we'll be getting.

Q: Shouldn't everybody on the Flight Sim team be working on SP1 for FSX, fixing that and getting it released sooner, instead of worrying about something that you're going to sell, later?

A: No. Work on the Expansion Pack is not diverting people from work on Service Pack 1 or the DX10 update. All this means is that everybody is working on something new and interesting for FSX, which I think is great news.

Q: Does this mean that we have to buy the Expansion Pack to get the DX10 update?

A: No. The plans for the DX10 update haven't changed - that will be a free download as soon as it's finished.

Q: Since you're including some new aircraft and missions, aren't you competing with the third party community that has done so much for you and your customers?

A: No. The Expansion Pack will enhance the core FSX platform, and provide new functionality for the add-on community to build on. As always, we're just seeding the waters, to coin a pointless mixed metaphor.

Q: Won't the Expansion Pack require Vista, forcing us to upgrade?

A: No. Do we think it will look that much prettier on DX10 hardware (which does require Vista) and potentially encourage people to upgrade? Sure. But it will be a great value-add for customers using XP as well. Believe it or not, we can't actually force you to do anything.

Q: What is the capital of Nebraska?

A: The capital of Nebraska is Lincoln.

What's your major malfunction?

Some days, it's communication.

Any time you get a group of bright, enthusiastic, easily distracted people working together, it can create what we like to think of as a "dynamic workplace" - ideas popping like puffmais, and an electric sense of "get it done" tingeing the air like ozone in a thunderstorm. Every once in a while, however, "dynamic" becomes a Coveyesque synonym for "chaotic," and whatever that smells like, it isn't quite so pleasant.

A couple of cases in point:

About a fortnight ago, I wrote a blog post about the upcoming Service Pack 1 release for Flight Simulator X. In this post, I took a stab at explaining why we hadn't said anything formally on our official website, and gathered together some of the blog posts a few of us had made representing what little info we've been comfortable hinting at so far. A while after that, some people on the team told me that I should repost this writeup as an article for the FSInsider site.

Hmm.

An article on our website ... explaining why there is no article on our website. There was something paradoxically perfect about that, so why not?

So, I took the original post, edited it slightly, and then asked a few people to sanity check it and make sure there was nothing that I'd said as Hal9000 that they weren't comfortable with me saying as Microsoft. As the PM (Program Manager) "driving" the Service Pack release, not to mention the blogger who has spoken the most publicly about it, I wanted Phil Taylor's signoff before releasing anything to the web, which I got. So, the article went live on Wednesday afternoon. Once it was out there, I did a quick read of some of the Flight Sim forums. The first hot topic I saw was an announcement of new information about the FSX Service Pack ... on Phil's blog. Clickety-click, and there it was - a whole new post, with greater detail, and a bunch of before-and-after screenshots, the first that anyone has released about the Service Pack, rendering the article that I'd just finished posting on FSInsider largely obsolete.

I didn't know exactly what he was doing, he didn't know exactly what I was doing - we both just forged ahead with our shared goal: give our customers whatever information we could as quickly as possible. In the end, no harm was done - I updated the article after the fact to point to his post. Frankly, if I could do only one pointless and irrelevant thing per day, I'd be way ahead of the game.

The second example came the very next day, as it happens.

The morning started very typically - I came in through the side door (so that Lumbergh wouldn't see me), and sat staring at my desk for an hour, making it look like I was working. Then, I got an interesting email from one of my people, my vast and global network of agents, this one codenamed Branta Canadensis. In this email was a link announcing a webcast about the future of Windows gaming, featuring FSX and DirectX 10, with our own Phil Taylor as a primary speaker. This was definitely the sort of thing we'd want to promote on the FSInsider site. The problem was, I only had about 20 minutes to get it done, before I had to head offsite for a meeting.

I drafted a quick blurb, borrowed the banner from the cohost's site, and spent a few minutes in Photoshop painting out a glaring grammatical error. I built the page using an HTML template, got it live on our test server, verified it, and adjusted the properties to ensure that it would be called out on the FSInsider home page and that it would expire and delete itself after the event. Next, I exported the package using our content management system, switched to a production server and imported the changes and we were live. After that, I went and posted a notice on several public forums, and sent a good-natured email gently chiding Phil for not having told us about this. All this happened in about 15 minutes.

A bit later on, I learned that there was a fairly strict log-on process required to access the webcast - it wasn't private, by any means, but the online form that had to be filled out implied that you needed to be a Microsoft partner or developer or have some other credentials beyond just being an interested party. This didn't seem to daunt too many people, but it would have been a good thing for me to have checked out and at least made note of in advance.

The best part, though, came when Phil replied to my email to tell me that it was my team that had set up the webcast in the first place ...

Oops.

Once again, not every hand knew what every other hand was up to. While it's certainly safe to say that the odd missteps like these are the exception, not the rule, especially when it comes to actually building software, as it turns out, even soulless corporate drones like us are people, too.

Anyway, as before, no harm was done - we got the word out, and the webcast went very well.

So why in the world would I bother posting this particular bit of lightly-soiled laundry? Two reasons:

A) We've set pretty clear goals around being more transparent to the community, and, from what I've read, transparency doesn't mean "only show good things", and 2) I want people to think of events like these the next time someone suggests that we're pulling the strings in any number of vast and complex conspiracies. We'd all have to spend a lot more time in the same room than we do now, plotting and scheming, in order to pull off anything even half-sinister.

Now I have to plug the USB cable back into my brain for an upgrade before I have to head downstairs - Friday is my day in the money room.

It seems like only 19 days ago that I announced that Flight Simulator X had been nominated for "Simulation Game of the Year" by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.

Well, we won!

And congrats to fellow MGS title Gears of War, the Dixie Chicks of console games, for winning no less than eight awards.

Take that, Meryl Streep.

Fresh from the editing software of someone called TPV71 comes this remarkable tour of FS2004 and FSX enhanced with some fantastic add-ons.

I have to agree with the person called ChrisMOd who says that this should be a commercial for FSX - or, more to the point, should be a commercial for what is possible when building on our platforms. Truly greater than the sum of their parts.