The second annual Sturmovikfest has ended and I wanted to take a few moments and thank people and organizations for helping to make the second annual festival happen both on the stage and behind the scenes.

Thank you all around

A virtual festival like this doesn’t happen on its own. A lot of people are involved to make things like this happen and I want to send out as many thank you messages as possible.

So in no particular order I would like to thank a variety of people and organizations. Let’s start with JimTM for making two mass formation events happen thanks to his superb organizational skills. I want to thank the Dedicated Bomber Squad (DBS) for organizing some really fun events featuring dogfighting He111’s and IL-2 Tag.

Thanks to the IL2 League and Top Dog events for hosting their 2v2 event during the festival.

A huge round of applause and thanks to server owners and operators such as Red Flight and the Combat Box Team (for their regular server as well as hosting Friday Night Flights, Saturday Encore, Project R, ‘War Elephants,’ and IL-2 Tag!), the Finnish Virtual Pilots and their excellent and popular Dynamic War server, Jasta5 and the Flugpark server, The Unprofessionals server team, as well as the team at Advance and Secure, and the team at Air Attack Tactical Combat server.

I didn’t get a chance to check all of it out but I know TJ3 Gaming, Wolfpack345, Waffles69 and Requiem from the Air Combat Tutorial Library all streamed content during the festival. If you were also streaming but I didn’t see your stream, I appreciate your hard work nonetheless!

Thanks to Raptorattacker who once again stepped up and did two superb festival skins with the Tempest Mark V and Fw190D-9 being the festival aircraft of this year and joining the superb P-51D Mustang an Bf109K-4 skins that he did last year. I want to hank Haluter, Blackhellhound1 and Alonzo for the amazing HSD skin downloader for hosting the festival skins as well!

I also want to thank =RS=Funkie, Wolfpack345, Crewen and another anonymous donor and friend of the blog for making aircraft, an AAA tank, and two copies of Flying Circus Vol 1 available for giveaway. We’ve now completed the giveaway process and all of these prizes are in the hands of members of the community!

I want to thank everyone who participated, supported, and cheered on the event. Your positive attitude helps make this community as great as it is and I really appreciate everyone for taking part in whatever way you could.

No matter where I went or what I was doing this past week, I saw a lot of people working together, flying together, and having fun with one of the best flight simulators and air combat simulators that I’ve ever seen. This week I saw IL-2: Great Battles at it’s best and being pushed to do things that the sim may not have even been designed to do and it did it admirably. So… my final thanks goes to the team at 1C Game Studios for their outstanding efforts over the years. The series only continues to get better.

And if I somehow forgot about your contribution this year, thank you! My head is swimming with the number of people who made this happen.

Recapping the week of events

Here are some highlights from the week of events that you might enjoy!

Mass formation #1

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Starting with the mass formation flight organized by JimTM. This was an incredible event this year as we conducted over an hour of different formations and different kinds of fly-pasts. I got a chance to fly with a real world aerobatic pilot and learned a ton from just about everyone there about how to do this type of flying. What a rush!

Flying Circus fly-in

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The Flying Circus fly-in happened three times over the course of the festival with the Jasta5 Flugpark server seeing plenty of pitched dogfights and fun times. It gave me an opportunity to work with the new Nieuport N.28 from Flying Circus Vol 2 and let me have a lot of fun with friends. Excellent!

Tank battles and contests on Advance and Secure

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Advance and Secure server ran a couple of events and a prize giveaway during the festival. I was only able to attend to just one of the events but it was fun. Fighting in a valley town with tanks and aircraft all around was incredibly fun. The server also ran a contest with winners picking up the new Collector Vehicles and some winning Tank Crew itself. Awesome!

Moving the frontline on Air Attack Tactical Combat

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Air Attack Tactical Combat server was just starting up as the festival hit and the organizers of the server reached out to see if they could be a part of it. I said of course! And the rest is history. Their unique real time moving frontline system, fast paced dogfighting, and smaller scale battles should be ideal for newbie player and experienced veteran alike. Check them out!

Project R air racing

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Hosted by Combat Box, Project R is a special air racing setup run on one of their secondary servers. I got a short opportunity to get onto some of the racetracks that were setup and had an incredible time of it! Racing between pylons and dodging other players as incredibly fun!

I know there was a special event that I couldn’t attend but I hope all of the racers had a great time!

IL-2 Tag by DBS

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Organized by the folks at the Dedicated Bomber Squad, IL-2 tag was a special event hosted by the Combat Box team server (who jumped in at the last minute when the original server host was unavailable). The rules were simple. Take one of several available aircraft, stay within the area near the airdrome, and try and shoot down the person with their lights on. Once shot down, the last person to do damage becomes it and they turn their lights on. This resulted in about 45 minutes of chasing aircraft around an aerodrome on the Kuban map with a lot of laughs and a ton of fun had by all!

‘WAR ELEPHANTS’ by DBS

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Ever wanted to have a dogfight in a He111? Well I have and Dedicated Bomber Squadron made it happen with this other special event (once again hosted by Combat Box). Two teams of two He111’s made up mostly of human pilots and gunners, the aircraft dueled each other in one of the awkwardest dogfights that you’ve ever seen. It amounted to a series of jousts, tight turns, missed opportunities as guns reloaded, and general hilarity until the bombers had crashed.

Mass formation #2

To end out the special events, JimTM once again hosted a mass formation event and we had an even bigger turn out from the first one. Dedicated fighter and bomber teams flew in massed formations of close to two dozen aircraft all flying together, performing formation loops and rolls, and more.

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