Aviation Facebook covers

The cover image is the first thing your Facebook friends see when accesing your profile (timeline) page. It is also one of the key elements that you can customize to make your profile page stand out. For the aviation fans like myself, I assembled a list of some nice aviation Facebook covers available online. You can also read more about how to create a Facebook cover photo.


Cockpit instruments Facebook cover

 

View over airplane wing Facebook cover

Sunrise from the airplane Facebook cover



Airplane fuselage Facebook cover



Engine nacelle Facebook cover

 See more aviation Facebook covers !

Paragliding Simulator for Google Earth

I've found  this cool and free paragliding simulator plugin in Google Earth. It can also be easily embeded in web pages, allowing users a quick start for the flight. You will need the free Google Earth plugin to play with it. You will get a download link if you don't have it installed.

The simulator features quite a few locations around the world from where you can launch and a wide variety of gliders, both with motor and without.

Enjoy!




Direct link to the site.

Freeware Nemeth Design helicopters

Nemeth Design is offering a couple of their wonderful helicopters for free. Unfortunately they are only FS9 models, but if you are still using the sim and like helicopters it's a good opportunity to try them. I have flown the Sikorsky S76 and the EC120B and they are truly wonderful.

To see the free helicopters you will need to go their official site: http://www.nemethdesigns.com/freeware.html#pay01

Free airport and airline databases

I was working on a website project and was in need for a free open source database with airports and airlines. Here are a couple I could find:

Openflights
Provides two different csv databases, one with airports and the other with airlines. Airport database contains close to 6000 entries covering most of the big airports around the world. Airline database is quite big as well (over 9000 entries). Also the websites offers a route database. The OpenFlights Airport, Airline and Route Databases are made available under the Open Database License.

OurAirports
Largest public domain airports database I could find. Contains over 43000 airports from around the world. The files are released under public domain.

The Global Airport Database
Over 9000 airports under Common Public License.

Free aviation charts

If you need aeronautical navigation charts for use with flight simulator, here are a couple of places you can get some for free:

Skyvector.com
VFR charts for entire US, easy to use interface, flight planner.

FScharts.com
IFR charts for 22000 airports world wide, easy to use search function.

FSNordic links
Links to charts from various parts of the world

Eurocontrol
Real world up to date charts and notams for Europe. Registration is needed.

Free aviation photos

A couple of free high resolution aviation photos to use in your projects. They can be used for both free or commercial purposes.

Free aviation photos

(collection is being updated constantly)

Free flight simulators

Here is a list of some free flight simulator software available:

Flightgear
Available for multiple OS (windows, mac, linux), with multiple aircrafts and scenery for entire world. Good graphics. Quite realistic.

Aces High
Fighter simulation game. Online and offline modes. Community.

Where can I find free photos / images for my blog or website?

Many times we need some kind of picture to express what we write about on the internet, company newsletters, websites, blogs, etc.. As copyright is a serious matter these days and not many of us are willing to spend money to buy stock images from major websites, knowing websites with free images is pretty important. I will try to list a few below that I am using:

4 Free Photos - Hundreds of high quality stock images free of charge for both commercial and personal use. Very nice variety of pictures to choose from.

Image*After - Thousand of pictures for free use.

Stockvault.net - Share and download free stock photos for personal and educational usage.

Stock.xchng - A big collection of free images.