11-29-2025

Merry Christmas Pilots,

As the snow falls outside my window this morning, Christmas is literally in the air. In a few days the plane on our homepage will be replaced by Santa making his present deliveries. With winter here my outdoor bicycle riding has come to an end, giving me more time for working on our airline.

I've been working on our SPAACARS for a few days, and will have a new release shortly. Version 17 corrects error messages on flight plan loading with MSFS2024. With a new developer taking over JoinFS Multiplayer addon and making it functional with MSFS2024, we can now fly multiplayer with other sim users. I also discovered that MSFS2024 now allows you to select a keyboard option with the old FSX/P3d and MSFS2020 shortcuts that most of us were familiar with. This "look and feel" of simulators we're used to makes the learning curve of MSFS2024 a bit easier.

I expect that when SPAACARS 17 is released, I will be allowing a short grace period for pilots to upgrade to that version before I make it a required version. This will prevent pilots from using older versions with problems - like the version 15 flight time issue caused when pausing the sim. Regardless, I strongly encourage pilots to update to the latest versions (including 16) when they become available. The FlightGear version is unchanged and no updating for that SPAACARS version is needed.

I've been dabbling with MSFS2024 scenery again. My latest effort was quite modest - adding the NDB to an airport on the latest Crash Investigation flight offering. I hope to do more with MSFS2024 projects - additional Action Pack flights. Unfortunately, it doesn't offer the rich effects generator that made the FSX/P3d adventures so much fun. Also, the animations are more complex - or at least different from the earlier sims, so that will take some new software and learning for me to start doing things with that. I'll start with simpler things that don't require scenery downloads...at least not the ones that I make.

Happy flying,

John