Carenado has released a Baron 350i King Air. I have a great friend who flies one of these for a living … in fact, he’s the buddy who helped me build the sim on construction weekend. I like Coronado’s aircraft (and have the Cessna 182 and Cessna 177 Cardinal), and I’m VERY tempted to give this a try (and long for the day when this blog will be popular enough that I’ll be asked to demo or beta these kinds of things).

At last week’s FlightSimCon the Creative Director for Dovetail Games’ Flight School and forthcoming Flight Simulator gave a presentation on their design vision. Interesting stuff, and here’s the full thing. Notable that he’s been in the world of flight sim for 18 months. Both strengths and weaknesses in that, I’m sure.

I’ve been away from the simulator for a bit more than a week, but as always have been keeping up with the community online. Two things that got my attention this week are upcoming weather applications from REX and HiFi Technologies. Both have teaser videos online, and they look fantastic. I’m particularly excited about the prospect of real-time texture updates in Active Sky Next. Today Active Sky Next and REX Texture Direct / Soft Clouds play very well together, as ASN can inject the weather and REX can provide the textures. Folks aren’t quite certain, and you can’t tell from these videos, if these products will now compete with each other. But one thing is certain: with innovation like this simmers can only win.

Here are the videos …