Postby jwocky » Mon May 09, 2016 12:23 pm
Hi,
We had some amazing flights in nice company through an amazing landscape and from and to amazing designed airports. The "planned" part of the Festival went great and proved how those festivals are a big incentive to develop more airports and help the FlightGear community growing. The "unplanned" part as in all kinds of things, that come up during the festival and mini-games, military actions and just some fun actions aside of flying from A to B was still a bit small, even, thanks to the ORPF group, there was something extra and Lester tried hard, but alas, without too much success to get some water plane flights working.
Another aspect, the fly-ins, have taken a whole another dimension. While in Spain and Austria/Switzerland some few hardcore long haulers were the sole pilots coming in from overseas, this time, we had fly-ins from ORPF, Turbo came from Paris, I came this time only from Australia, a little bit a foul compromise on my end due to time restrictions.
The newest child of the FGMEMBERS family, TerraGit went through it's first real use test and it worked great, making sure, that the number of flights cancelled during approach because the scenery was not loaded, came down to a few cases, in which TerraSync was still used. TerraGit users had all the scenery and no problems at all, proving TerraGit is the way to go.
FGMEMBERS itself, the aircraft repository made it possible to fly all kinds of planes, just on a whim. No problems to find, no problems to load, just start your engines and ask the ATC for permission to taxi ... I flew from 747-8i down to a Lockheed Electra Model ten pretty much every category of planes and I saw even more planes flown by others. The variety of actual usable planes was much wider than it was in past festivals.
ATCs, yes, ATCs. I am not the best pilot when it comes to procedures, but controlled flying is one of the big things during the festivals. The ATCs gave us quite professional guidance, a polite and helpful experience and, this is something important from my point of view, were a poster appearance for controlled flying because they showed, air traffic control is actually helpful to pilots ... just like in real life. So, we got new ATCs in the game this time (Josh and Jim for example in Tokyo-Haneda) aside to old experienced ATC veterans like IAHM-COL and Elgaton and we got more pilots, who normally rarely fly controlled, into this kind of dense traffic scenarios. Noteworthy here is, that the ATCs all dealt with a lot of kind of hairy situations ... like JWOCKY, the other left ... or sometimes alittle bit of a flurry of communication ... or radical weather changes ... or even trolls ... and they never lost the nerves, never lost the politeness. ATCing is stress and they handled it like diamonds!
All together, Japan was a great experience and a great festival. It was made possible by the work of a handful of people who designed those airports, supplied systems that allowed to get users all the necessary scenery nice and smooth on their computers and last but not least by the fact, that FG 2016 is in general more reliable than 3.4 and the versions since were. Personally, I had over the whole festival three FG segfault crashes. In past festivals, I ended often up with three in an hour.
Nevertheless, after so much praise, there was a thing, that was a little sad. Basically, I saw pilots from the Free Speech forum, I saw some rather independent characters, I saw no pilots from the core group of Curtis' forum. Another opportunity to create common ground passed unused. Of course, the festivals are a community event, kind of from users for users, and users are, if we read some posts on Curtis' forum, something, God invented only to bother core devs. Still, seeing such an event that proved once more, FG is a living and vibrant community, without any participation from what considers itself the "official" world of FlightGear, it was once more a disappointing picture from that side. Still, the community worked and it worked well, and form where I stand, that made the weekend.
Free speech can never be achieved by dictatorial measures!
