It’s that time of year again where we bid farewell to the year behind us and greetings to the year that is about to come. 2023 has been a year with plenty of ups and downs but fortunately it is now past us and the year 2024 beckons. But before I get to goals for the next year I want to take a moment and wishing everyone a happy new year! Let’s talk flight simming goals for 2024!
Thank you message
Before I get to the goals I want to send out a general thank you message to everyone. So many of you have brought your enthusiasm, kind hardheartedness, and good humour to Stormbirds through your comments, shares, and readership. We all share a love of aviation and flight simulation and its my continued pleasure to be able to share the news, tell flight simming stories, and hopefully make your experience a better one.
I’d be here all day typing out a long list of personalized thank you highlights so I think at this point I just want to send out this general thank you. So many of you have been immensely helpful and supportive over the last year so thank you.
I do want to send out a very special thanks to the Stormbirds Patreon supporters. You help keep the site going thanks to your contributions. If that was you at any point during the year or in years past… thank you! Your support is incredibly meaningful to keeping this all going.
Goals for the next year
I like goal setting when it comes to doing new things. Flight simming is such a wide and deep hobby that you can easily go on learning new things for decades at a time. In 2023 I set five goals and I managed to achieve some of them.
One of my goals was to get to helicopters in a bigger way. This year I spent quite a bit of time flying and learning the DCS: Mi-24P Hind. I also started to do a bit on the DCS: AH-64D, however, I did less on X-Plane and MSFS than I had planned and so for 2024 I intend to do more civil aviation simming with helicopters. HPG’s H160 is high on my list to check out but not only! Another helicopter that is high on my list for the new year is the DCS: SA342 Gazelle which saw some major updates this past year.
Another goal for 2023 was to get back to airliners and learn airliner operations in a way that I had not done yet. I dove into this goal in a big way and found a lot to learn and a lot to like about this kind of flight simming. I made a lot of mistakes, I had to learn a lot of things, but I’m now at a point where I can get through most flights and handle many situations without serious incident across multiple airplane types.
For 2024 my goal is to keep on going as there’s more to learn, more to understand, and more flight sim experiences to have. One airliner I have yet to master is PMDG’s 737-600. It was the first one that I bought but it ended up being the one that stayed in the hangar the most – not because there’s anything wrong with it but just because I haven’t yet clicked with the way it works. Instead, I spent a lot of time in the ATR, E170/175, A310, CRJ and some fun with FlyByWire’s A320neo.
One goal that I didn’t really hit in the last year was Cold War jets. My military flight simming has needed to be scaled back thanks to an ongoing neck issue and twisting my neck around looking for bandits has just not been good for me. I hope to eventually get over this issue and get back to my combat simming instead of the smaller doses that I’m allowing myself right now. Jets like the Mirage F1, MiG-19 and even the F-86 are high on my list to spend more time with.
There’s also new content that I’d like to check out. Single player campaigns for the DCS:F-14, the Wings over Caen Typhoon campaign for IL-2 Battle of Normandy and the Overlord campaign for the same title – content on that last one is coming very soon and a review a bit further off.
An area that I had to neglect through the year was WWI content. Between my scaled back combat flight simming and busy schedule I just haven’t had the chance to tackle this area but with Flying Circus Vol 2 and Vol 3 out and whole new experiences on hand I very much want to make sure I get back to that. And soon!
Of course there will be many more breaking news items, weekly status updates, and flight journals to share with all of you. I’ve got some hardware reviews on the way including my follow-ups to my look at the VKB STECS throttle system so look for those early in 2024. This year I also hope to get back to FSExpo in Las Vegas for the 2024 edition of the expo and cover some other special events as the year goes on. Stay tuned for all of that!
Happy New Year to all of you!
Stormbirds 
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