Three members attended this show; Ruth McTighe wearing her VATSIM management and controller's hat, met Pete Allnutt and Tim Arnot, although unfortunately, Pete & Tim missed each other.

Pete said, "Hats off to the VATSIM crew who remained very
calm with the hotel network problems which prevented pilots getting on line (Tony Driver tried and failed). Lots of good stuff to see. Had a long chat with Mike Pike, who I thanked on behalf of the club for his controlling efforts on Tuesdays at Gloucestershire".

Tim added, "It was the first one I'd been to. The motion chair was interesting. One person really mucked up their landing, flipping the plane in the process. Double ouch! The initial thump of impact had everyone wincing, but the tumble that followed.... Rob Young's talk on the Real Air Marchetti was worth the trip alone :-) Aeros training here I come!!! Blew the month's flying budget on a GoFlight stack."

On Thursday 23rd June 2005, a brilliant CAVOK flying day, the real world G-GYAV visited Enstone Aero Club in Oxfordshire. On board were members Peter Dodds and Kevin Bryan. There they met up with member Tim Arnott, who flies Diamond Aircraft's exotic glass and carbon fibre in the real world. The three had not met before, as is often the way with on-line communities, and spent a very pleasant relaxing afternoon mooching around interesting aircraft, including the DA20 and DA40 which Tim flies, and talking aviation in all its guises.

Peter said "After the tight procedural world of Liverpool Airport, I found Enstone's relaxed atmosphere a delight once I had tuned into it. Tim took us to a delightful little Cotswold stone pub in Enstone village which reminded me that English summers are the best in the world".

The Australian arm of Vatsim, VATPAC, are planning to have ATC coverage for 29 hrs straight through from the 6th to the 7th May. This gives the UK members of the Club an ideal opportunity to fly at social hours and still get ATC
down here. Our Member David Humble, is likely be at the SY centre for most of the time. See: -
http://www.control-access14.com/~radsam/vatpac/thunder/

The Club held a small outing on Tuesday 5th April from Gloucestershire to Hawarden. Three of use were able to take part, with regular club flyer Tony Driver grounded with technical problems. Whilest waiting to leave Gloucestershire, we noticed a very strange aircraft parked on the apron. David Humble remarked on our Teamspeak channel "It's a paper aeroplane" - and so indeed it was. It seems that Squawkbox 3 generates this bizarre creature, (complete with red tail art) if it doesn't recognise an aircraft type. The "guilty party" (though it was hardly his fault), was a Jet Provost G-TWLJ.

We stopped for refreshments at Wellesbourne Mountford, and by chance, the outragious origami object joined us there. Cessna 172 G-BILL also arrived, having flown in from Biggin Hill. AFISO at Wellesbourne Mountford, and Club member Eliot Wassell commented "It's the most traffic I have ever had!"

We then flew on to Hawarden (without the paper Jet Provost), where Andy King gave us a warm welcome. Apart from Tim Arnot having a FS lockup en route, G-GYAV taxying up a blind alley at Hawarden, and David Humble having to leave swiftly to go to his antipodean work, it was a pleasant and uneventful outing.

The world of computers endlessly taxes the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. Here is a word which can mean a Hindu Deity, a ghost (temporary manifestation of a continuing entity) or an image representing a user in a virtual reality multi-user environment. I think we will go with the latter!

The Club now has its own avatar for use principally on the VATSIM Forum. You can edit your forum membership profile to add the avatar by pointing to the URL of its source, which is
http://www.cixvfrclub.org.uk/CVFRC_Avatar.gif. If you strongly identify with the Club as your main source of Flight Sim fun, this is how you can show the Vatsim world!

ukvrpv1.zip - all the official UK Visual Reference Points (VRPs). VRPs are used by ATC as reporting points for inbound and outbound traffic. In FS, these appear as barber's poles. they have lights on top for night flying. and will then display in FSNAV as named VRPs if you re-run the FSNAV database create program.Originally sourced from AVSIM, you will find it on the Scenery download page.

Servinfo UK Airfields. This is a text file to modify the contents of the Servinfo airfield data file 'Servinfo.dat' so that Servinfo displays all licensed UK airfields. A valuable addition to Servinfo for VFR pilots. You will find it on the Downloads External Links page.

We generally did our own thing, flying to and from Welshpool, Wolverhampton, & Hawarden, but all gathering back at Gloucestershire. Peter D was en route from Welshpool to Blackpool but they shut up shop before he got there. So he diverted into Hawarden, changed aircraft to a more speedy mount - the 160 knot Twin Otter, and made it back to Gloucesteshire before lights out.

Old hands gave a very warm welcome to several new members during the recent weeks. These include Full Members Georg Liigand and Simon Bird, and Associate members Colin Billing, Nick Axeworthy, Martin Leats, Paul Woods .

Colin, Martin and Nick have already joined in our events, and Georg, a very experienced virtual pilot flies in the UK quite often although he lives in Estonia. We hope they will all have a long and enjoyable time with the club.