By Tim Stone on December 6th, 2009 at 10:28 am.
While one wing of the flight sim community strives to keep aircraft as far apart as possible, another delights in putting them dangerously close. The Virtual Festival of Aerobatic Teams, now in its 5th year, is currently midway through a weekend of extraordinarily skilful formation flying displays. Catch the live Lock On-powered action here from 14.30 GMT.
06/12/2009 at 10:47 duel says:
haha! that so neat! ive never heard of virtual airshows before :D
06/12/2009 at 11:13 Marcinus says:
I love PC COMMUNITY’S ^^
06/12/2009 at 11:47 The Toastmonster says:
That’s pretty cool stuff. Last time I tried a flight-sim I couldn’t even release the brakes.
06/12/2009 at 12:18 monkehhh says:
I’m in that club too.. feet firmly on the ground and watching from a distance for me.
06/12/2009 at 12:34 panik says:
I want to be a virtual girly standing on a bi-plane’s wing.
06/12/2009 at 12:59 Transportdaemon says:
Impressive, wow, who would of thunk there are virtual airshows? It almost makes me want to do some flight-simming but like other people commenting here I suck and generally end up stuck on the ground or landing into the ground forgetting about things like flaps, wheels, speed etc.
How do they film this and package it into something the general public can watch?
06/12/2009 at 14:40 Larington says:
Someone was doing various fancy flying with an attack copter, he just managed to crash into a roll across tarmac, they’ve gone to a static poster image. Whoops.
06/12/2009 at 14:41 Larington says:
Oh hang on, chat feed saying crash was intentional. Heh.
06/12/2009 at 14:52 ruaidhri.k says:
it didn’t look intentional to me. but based on the quality displayed in the previous ten minutes it must have been.
06/12/2009 at 22:38 Iphigenia says:
The Virtual Blues Brothers just lost a Mirage. Shame, they were doing some nice stuff.
06/12/2009 at 22:56 Devan says:
That’s a nifty idea. I wonder what the future could hold for virtual performance. If the simulation requires the same skills needed to fly the real aircraft, then I don’t see why this couldn’t eventually become more prominent, mostly for reasons of practicality.
While viewing an air show in person is no doubt a more breathtaking experience, they are a really expensive way to entertain people. Then there’s all the pollution caused by the jet fuel, smoke trails and pyrotechnics. There’s a large international airshow near where I live, and every year the whole valley is choked with smog from the event.
Whether we like it or not, humans are going to have to start finding more sustainable pastimes like this VFAT event.
07/12/2009 at 00:12 Ifeten.u says:
What game are they using for all this?
07/12/2009 at 00:17 TotalBiscuit says:
If only it said that in the article…
07/12/2009 at 02:08 drcancerman says:
Lock-On; But with most Lock-on fans of today, Flaming Cliffs might be there as well.
and FSX, but it might as well be FS9 (flight Simulator)
07/12/2009 at 05:20 Bryan Peterson says:
Awesome Tim, thanks for bringing this to the forefront. There are still people out there that love simulations.
07/12/2009 at 09:01 Dustopedia says:
Do these games model the turbulence created by the engines on these planes? I bet that is a key consideration for formation stunt pilots in the real world.
07/12/2009 at 15:35 wqwewqaa says:
IIRC, Lock On does not simulate that since Black Shark doesn’t support it either. I don’t know about FSX, but its flight model is pretty crappy anyway so I doubt it.