GWJ FBO: Flight Simulation Catch-all

I was gonna say two blocks, but you beat me to the punch.

Hopefully they've improved things, but during construction, if Term 1 was your destination.. Terminal 3 would be 20 minutes away.

Looks like Xplane is doing itself no favors with its launch of XP12. Would have been perfectly fine if not for MSFS now here, but basically its where MSFS was when it launched. Lots of stuff not working great, still bugs with weather and flight models. However at least MSFS had marketing and the eye candy to give to basically force it to the lead spot.

The current product certainly won't convince anyone to switch from MSFS who isn't already an Xplane fan.

Even more telling is that there's a rumored P3D update in the works. I honestly felt that product would be left for dead after MSFS, but clearly someone there sees an opportunity in the training/"hardcore" sim market that XP12 has failed to capture.

Ultimately I feel like Xplane 12 is probably going to end up where it is now.. a distant 2nd and more geared toward the training crowd. I personally have no problem with that, but that will likely impact the 3rd party developers who in nearly all cases are small if not one-person teams who have to choose how to allocate their time and resources.

Too bad... there was a great opportunity here for XP12 to gain some traction. It was never going to surpass MSFS in market share, but I'm not even sure its going to grow at this point. Some number of XP11 users have permanently switched to MSFS, and unless something dramatic changes, I have a hard time believing a new sim pilot who has only known MSFS is going to make the leap to XP12.

After a somewhat torrid (for me) pace of flights earlier in the year, I've only been able to fly about once per month over the summer & fall.

Between January and the Fourth of July, I flew 76 flights that covered from Worcester, Mass, a lot of time over northern New Jersey and Long Island, along the Appalachians to southern Florida (with stops in Huntsville, Birmingham, and Montgomery AL), then finally along the Caribbean islands to Martinique.

In the nearly five months since then, I've flown four times and finally reached South America, departing Port of Spain T&T landing at SVMG on the island of Margarita.

If you look closely you might still see Paul Caligiuri down there!

Assuming I get more flying time over the winter, I plan to fly along the northern coasts of Venezuela and Colombia, to Panama, then up Central America and Mexico to reach the western US.

Microsoft Flight Simulator celebrates 10 Million Pilots
10. Million. In a niche genre.

For those intersted, Xplane 12 is on sale for $40 on Steam.