Rounding up the latest news from around the flight sim community. Here are some of the stories that I haven’t yet had a chance to report about. We have an update from Heatblur on some smaller items, Baltic Dragon talks more about “The Gamblers” campaign for DCS: F-16, A2A show off the Commanche for MSFS, there are some new free airports for MSFS, FBW announces that they will be at FSExpo this year, Asobo talks about how they built “the world” in MSFS, and more!
Heatblur and TARPS
Tactical Airborne Reconnaissance Pod System (TARPS) was a pod fitted underneath the F-14 that carried with it a variety of cameras for the reconnaissance role. It gave the F-14 a new role that included mapping, pre and post strike bomb damage assessment, and maritime ship surveillance.
Check out these early images of the pod in development for DCS: F-14! We also have a shot of the HGU-55 helmet option.
The Gamblers
An authentic campaign for DCS: F-16C and DCS: Syria are well underway thanks to the efforts of Baltic Dragon. In this tweet we learn a bit about one of the scenarios that virtual pilots will be tasked with over the course of the campaign.
A2A’s Comanche in the hands of beta testers
The aircraft makers at A2A have a reputation for building some impressively simulated aircraft and the Comanche 250 with their “Accu-Sim” technology is highly anticipated in some quarters of the flight sim community.
One tester commented that he felt like the Comanche was “alive” thanks to the depth of the simulation involved. Check it out!
New airports
The folks at Flight Simulation Association are highlighting new airports from Burning Blue Design. These are two new airports in Martha’s Vineyard and one of those airports is free. Free quality scenery is always a bonus!
FBW heads to FSExpo
Interested in chatting the FlyByWire team up in person? They have announced that they will be at FSExpo in Houston, Texas between June 23-25. There’s even a discount code if you decide to go.
How Asobo built “the world”
One of MSFS’ most impressive features has been how they managed to create a simulation of the world. This 100 page PDF is a slide deck and overview of how Asobo managed to pull it off and was part of a presentation made at GDC 2022 in March of 2022.
Sergio Costa from HeliSimmer.com pointed it out on Twitter and its worth a look if you’re interested in how some of these features came to be.
A220 in the works
Synaptic Simulations are busy building one of the newest airliners on the block – the Airbus A220. Based on the Bombardier C-series and sold to Airbus with a controlling stake in the project, the 220 is being worked on by a few sim developers these days. Synaptic have some particularly impressive renders of the airplane underway.
Worth keeping an eye on!
More about the Yawman Arrow
Several days ago the folks at Yawman unveiled their Arrow project. An Xbox/Playstation sized game controller that was optimized for flight simming. They tout the portable nature of the product and it certainly sounds cool.
A recent tweet includes an animation of the rudder controls in operation. It helped me understand better how that feature is intended to work on the production version. Very interested to see how this product plays out.
VSkyLabs and the SR-71
There’s mystique involved with flying high and fast with airplanes like the SR-71 Blackbird fully encapsulating that experience. VSkyLabs have announced that they are working on one of their “test pilot” projects that involves making an SR-71 for X-Plane 12.
As always, there’s so much news flying around the industry at any one time that its nearly impossible to document it all. These are some of the stories that caught my eye this week. What have you read about this week in the world of flight simulation? Let me know in the comments!
Stormbirds 
Good stuff. And I like the idea of the recon Tomcat.
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