For those of you who could not attend, here are some photos I took from the 2006 AVSIM Convention in Washington last weekend. Gary Dunne, Cameron Dunne, Jacques Abitan and myself all met at the convention and had a great time. Just wish more of our pilots from Air Source could have attended. The four of us were all pre-registered and since only 350 pre-registered, all of us will be receiving the new FSX Gold edition when it is released this fall, including Jacques cousin and my nephew, who looked at us like we were from some other planet when we started talking about flight-simming and Air Source. The exhibits on display were very impressive. I don't know how the others felt, but I was very impressed with what I saw with FSX. There are alot of little things which really makes this version stand out from the previous one. One thing which is really going to impact flight-simming will be the ability to create your own missions, since Microsoft has included the SDK tools with the software. For those of you wondering about upgrading your hardware, I talked with Mike Singer, who designed the missions for the new FSX and he told me the main pieces of hardware which will be critical will be the video card and enough memory to maintain decent framerates. However, since the DX10 cards will just start coming out, he suggested I wait a year until the price comes down on a 512 meg card. Don't worry, FSX will run on your DX9 cards, but when the new DX10 cards come out it will really fly.
And for those of you who want to replace Debbie, Laura, Stacey and Jean on the Active Air Source flight crew, I thought you would like to see what Laura looks like. Laura is on the right. (That was actually her name!)