Boeing's new 747-800 Intercontinental

Yesterday Feb 13th, Boeing premiered it's new airplane, the 747-800 Intercontinental. The event was also transmitted trough a webcast of which recording is still available on the official site.

The aircraft integrates a state of the art cockpit instruments from the 787 as well as the GEnx engines, being able to carry more passengers or cargo than previous versions, with lower noise and carbon emission level.

Free flight duration aeromodeling

Float Documentary Trailer from Phil Kibbe on Vimeo.

I came around this video trailer about segment of model aviation known as free flight and was very interested about the topic so I decided to share some details about it. 

Free flight is the original form of the aeromodeling hobby in which the aircraft have no need for any form of external control, like radio remote controller.  The aircrafts are built to be inherently stable in flight and if disturbed by a gust of wind or a thermal up-current they will return automatically to stable flight.As propulsion they can be powered by rubber bands, power sources (batteries, fuel, etc) or be without any means of propulsion (gliders).

Because building the aircraft can be done using basic supplies this hobby is quite accessible to everyone. It require a bit of knowledge and reading about aerodynamics and propulsion, but these days info is quite easy to find if you put your mind to it and have time.

I personally like the light rubber powered indoor models, which look as they are just floating in thin air. Amazingly these model aircrafts, even if they are powered by the turn of a rubber band, can be capable of quite long flight times. As you can see in this clip the flights can go beyond one hour mark.

If you want to read more about free flight here are some links:

• Free flight page on Wikipedia;
• Some details about how to build a rubber powered aircraft;
• Float Documentary home page;

Online ATC simulator game

ATC-SIM is a very realistic online ATC simulator, with and interface which resemble a real ATC screen, that can help you get rid of boredom.
It also has a scoring system implemented to see where you rank between the fellow controllers, and various airports you can control on.
The only downside I found is the fact that you need to learn all those text commands to control the aircraft, but if you print them and keep them on your desk, they are not that hard to memorize with time.

Weapon for FSX

Captain Sim launched a product that will turn your Flight Simulator X in a combat flight simulator. The ad don allows you to add weapons to any aircraft in the game, alongside other functionality like Radar and HUD. You can see more details about the product on the official page, or watch the presentation videos.

GE Flight Simulator - a flight simulator in your browser using Google Earth

I came around this website where you can play with a flight simulator based on Google Earth plugin, in your browser, and take off from everywhere in the world flying over the sattelite imagery. It can be even played multiplayer as you can see all the other players that connect trough the app. Very nice application to have fun from once in a while, and you can even use a joystick. Will be good to have a fast network connection to load the ground textures fast enough.

Updates and brand new screenshots from Microsoft Flight!

The development team behind upcoming Microsoft Flight title has released some brand new screenshots, as well as a news update communicating the fact that the game will contain an offline mode next to the online experience.

Read more details and enjoy the screenshots directly on the official site!

X-Plane 9 Mobile available for Android

In case you did not find out already, X-Plane 9 Mobile is now also available for Android OS.

The X-Plane 9 app includes the following aircraft:

• Cessna 172
• Columbia 400
• Piper Malibu
• Cirrus Vision
• Piaggio Avanti
• Beechcraft King Air
• Eclipse 500

and the following regions:

• Innsbruck, Austria
• Hawaii
• Boswell Bay, Alaska
• Southern California
• San Francisco, California
• Desert Sky, California

You can see more details about the app on it's official page.