Yesterday was April first and, as is tradition, flight sim creators and fans braced themselves for the inevitable bombardment of fake product announcements and nearly believable reveals. Here’s a round-up of some of the ones that I spotted through the day.
Otto shows us how its done at Veco Simulations
If you’ve been following DCS news recently, you’d know that Veco Simulations is a freeware developer building a T-38A for DCS World. The project appears to be coming along nicely.
In this faux “behind the scenes” video they take a humorous look at their development process and they do a “product reveal” that feels just a little familiar.
My first HOTAS?
VIRPIL gave us a laugh this year with the VIRPIL Controls “My First Throttle” reveal.
Join our pre-flight school and let your child’s imagination take off with the MongoosT-50CM3+ throttle!
With its bright colours, glowing lights, exciting sounds, and amusing switches and dials, your budding pilot can experience the fun of flying just like grown-ups!
Dominate the skies with your little one now!
Happy flying!
The product image is great and the throw-back 80s style feature list was worth a laugh or two!
F-20 Tigershark, not quite
This one is in the realm of “that’d be nice if it were real” but don’t be too taken away with this faux-product announcement. No DCS: F-20 Tigershark is coming but these “work in progress” images might have you believing otherwise.
What your virtual pilot really thinks
Got Friends had a particularly good one that weaves a tall tale of the life of your virtual pilot. Suffering through the stalls, the mistakes, the crashes and other anxiety causing moments with calm… until now.
Thanks to a slightly unhinged AI experiment (and some highly classified black box decoding), we’ve finally opened up a direct line of communication to the simulated pilot in the cockpit. But we’re not asking you to respond. That would require effort. So, we built an automatic messaging system—fully equipped to handle every outburst, every annoying question, fearful observation, surreal spiral, irrational demand, and bottled-up existential crisis they’ve been stewing in for years.
They’ve gone with the hilarious tag line of “Your sim pilot’s been losing their mind—and it’s kind of your fault.” And they’re right!
Check out the “product page” on the Got Friends website.
Dragons!
Classic Aircraft Simulations came out with this product announcement. Wyvern Mk.1 – a flyable winged reptile of mystical and legendary appeal!
Introducing the Wyvern Mk.1, the latest addition from Classic Aircraft Simulations—pushing the limits of plausibility and the MSFS flight model. Faithfully recreated from ancient scrolls, questionable folklore, and a generous serving of imagination, the Wyvern is a fully flyable winged reptile for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
The gag appears to be an actual thing that you can download and “fly” and its available via the Contrail webstore.
IndiaFoxtEcho
I think the one that nearly got me was IndiaFoxtEcho announcing a product shakeup and the cancellation of a couple of products due to quality concerns. I forgot what day it was for a moment and was thinking to myself, “wow, that’s a big shake-up.” I missed the other queues earlier in the post and then I got to the final line…
After a feral internal review, we have decided to cancel the F-16 and Eurofighter projects due to poor quality.
Unfortunately none of these two projects was shaping up as nicely as we wanted, and we have received some (well deserved) criticism from guys that “know a guy that knows those planes really well” and guys that “I am not an F-16 or Typhoon pilot but…”.
Moreover we could not get any real world pilot to swear that flying these in MSFS is 100% EXACTLY AS FLYING THEM IN REALITY, which is a prerequisite for the commercial success of any add-on.
While cancelling these projects is definitely not good news, this will help us focusing our resources on other projects, such as the DCS Aerogallo.
That’s a deep cut because IndiaFoxtEcho previously announced the Aerogallo in a prior April fools day gag.
What did you see?
Those are the gags that I spotted! What did you see during the April Fool’s Day “festivities.” Let me know in the comments!
Stormbirds 
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