Evan Reiter

This TFR is being posted in advance of our upcoming Virtual Fly-In and Airshow at New Braunfels Regional Airport (KBAZ). It restricts the airspace in a 10nm ring around KBAZ, up to 12,000' MSL, during the Airshow component of the event. More information about the event is posted on the Challenge page and in our forums. Issue Date: March 25, 2015 Location: New Braunfels Regional Airport (KBAZ) Beginning Date and Time: March 28, 2015 at 1510 ET Ending Date and Time: March 28, 2015 at 1830 ET Reason for NOTAM: Temporary Flight Restrictions for Airshow Type: Airshow Affected Area(s): Area A Airspace Definition: Center: On the San Antonio VORTAC (SAT) 073 degree radial at 22.0 nautical miles (Latitude N29°42.27', Longitude W98°2.53') - KBAZ Airport Radius: 10 nautical miles Altitude: From the surface to 12000ft MSL Effective Date(s) From March 28, 2015 at 1510 ET To March 28, 2015 at 1830 ET Operating Restrictions and Requirements: No pilots may operate an aircraft in the areas covered by this NOTAM except for performance aircraft in communication with Show Boss. Other Information ARTCC: ZHU Point of Contact: Boston Virtual ATC Administration

Thanks to the pilots and controllers for joining this event. I really enjoyed it! Great feedback all around from the guys on msFlights.

Correct; we'll be using the msFlights.net TeamSpeak server for voice/ATC.

This Friday (March 20), our controllers will be hosting a Regional Circuit at KMHT and KALB on the msFlights.net FSX server. Just like any other Regional Circuit event, ATC will be fully staffing both featured airports. The big difference: the event is held on another server! The event runs from 8-10pm ET on Friday, March 20 in the msFlights.net server. First, connect to TeamSpeak, at msflights.net Then, connect to the msFlights.net FSX multiplayer server at 23.255.207.47 We're running this event to give our controllers a chance to practice for the upcoming Cross-Community Flight without impacting our members. Seven controllers are currently on the roster to cover positions including Approach, Tower, and Ground at each featured airport. Rather than using FlightDesk, we'll be using this simplified flight plan form to submit flight plans. BVA members are welcome to attend the event and participate. Just connect to the msFlights.net server by 8pm ET, and use the flight plan form above to submit your flight plan. ATC will all be conducted in the TeamSpeak server, just like what will happen here during the Cross-Community Flight. For more information about the event, including preferred routes and downloads, please visit the msFlights.net forums: http://msflights.net/forum/calendar.php ... =2015-3-21. Please don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions about this event.

The New Braunfels Fly-In and Airshow is scheduled for Saturday, March 28, beginning at 1pm ET. From 1-3pm ET, BVA members will be able to arrive at KBAZ with a full roster of ATC. Like any of our other Pack The Pattern and GA Fly-In events, pilots are encouraged to fly VFR closed traffic or practice instrument approaches during the fly-in portion of this event. BVA members are encouraged to join the Member TeamSpeak server after they have parked their aircraft. We'll be watching our virtual airshow together in the Member TeamSpeak. The airshow itself begins at 3:30pm ET, with a fly-in from the FSX Thunderbirds. The full lineup of performers is: 3:30pm ET - FSX Thunderbirds Fly-In 3:50pm ET - Demonstration from BVA's Virtual Military 4:15pm ET - Matt Webber 4:30pm ET - Javi and Eddie in the P51 Mustang and F18 (Demos and Heritage Flight) 4:45pm ET - FSX Blue Angels Flyover 5:00pm ET - FSX Thunderbirds Demonstration (live stream) After this weekend's Landing Competition at KOSU, all of the details for our upcoming Fly-In and Airshow will be posted on the Challenge page.

As of this morning, the website migration should be completed for most users. There may be a few people for whom the DNS needs to still update, but based on feedback most users are now on the new website. All known issues have been resolved, so please let us know (either via this thread or email) if you notice anything that doesn't look or work correctly. --- In the interest of transparency, and for those who are interested, I'd like to share a bit more information about what has been happening over the past few weeks. As I mentioned in a previous post, BVA uses 'shared hosting' rather than a dedicated machine for our website and forums. We do this in order to reduce costs for the community's donors. Shared hosting means that we are paying for a portion of a server computer. To help maintain the efficiency of shared computers, most hosts apply various restrictions to what shared hosting customers can have. For example, GoDaddy restricts shared hosting customers to an MSSQL database size of 200 MB, which isn't enough for us. Our former ISP allowed us only 1 each of MySQL and MSSQL databases, which was a manageable challenge. Given the size of our website, forums, and the applications that run on them, shared hosting is really not the right solution. However, we are creative in the way we design our website and applications to make the solution work for us. As a result, we pay less than $10 per month in web hosting costs. There are alternatives (e.g., hosting the website on someone's personal computer or on our FSX host). However, in the interest of redundancy, stability, and security, our administration believes that the shared hosting approach offers the best balance of cost and quality. We have been with our current provider since February 2011, and have generally been very satisfied with the service and support received. However, for the past year, we've noticed that service and support has declined. Website and forum outages weren't uncommon, and we would receive no notification of an outage; in most cases, I would find out about a website outage from a member. I would then have to speak with the ISP, who would find out about the outage from me. There were several other issues we had with them, including recently when they delayed the launch of the FSXMultiplayer.com website for a month because of their own ineptitude. The last straw for us was the migration that I first posted about on February 23. We found out on February 23 that a 4-day outage was to occur beginning on February 26. As you know, we scrambled to find an alternative solution and continue to host the files needed for our Getaway event. Almost three days later, they decided to cancel the migration due to inclement weather, and returned the servers to the original location. Once again, we were given no notification the servers were back online (I happened to notice the website working again). Furthermore, they STILL have not communicated when they plan to reschedule the migration. There's no doubt that will still be happening, and based on our past experiences, customers will get almost no notice. Before the end of the migration, we began a search for a new provider that would meet our requirements. Personally, this was a tough time for our administrators to be involved in a migration. However, we didn't feel we could afford to wait for another outage. Over the course of several phone calls and quite a bit of online research, we found the provider to which we've just switched our services. It's early, but thus far we've been happy with the support and service received. I want to clarify the extent of effort required to migrate a website as it's something I wasn't aware of before I was involved with the first one we did back in 2011. At a very high level, migrating a website means: Moving all of the files from one provider to another; in our case, this is over 20GB of data. Backing up, transferring, and restoring databases. Configuring specific settings and permissions; every ISP has a different panel, so there's a learning curve associated with this. Setting up things like FTP accounts, subdomains (e.g., informer.bostonvirtualatc.com), etc. Doing as much testing as possible, and fixing as many issues as possible, before any domain names are transferred. Transferring the domain nameservers from our old provider to the new one, which takes between 1-24 hours for everyone. Testing and correcting any final issues. Remembering that this had to be done for both Boston Virtual ATC and FSX Multiplayer, I'm estimating the total effort of about 40 hours, spread between about 10 volunteer administrators. Website migrations are one of the most frustrating things to be spending time on as volunteers because at the end of the day you get a product that looks exactly like what you had, and if we've done it right, end users won't notice the difference! Because we're still on a shared hosting plan at our new provider, outages and issues are inevitable. However, we believe we'll have much more stability and reliability than we have experienced recently, and particularly than we have experienced in the past year. Prices at the new provider are comparable to what we have been paying (actually, a bit lower). As always, none of this would be possible without an exceptional team of volunteers. The A-Team as a whole has been closely involved with the migration by helping in the decision-making process and testing. Not surprisingly, this project was led by our website administrator Phil ('Ferrari308guy'), who did all of the heavy lifting despite a busy schedule. However, I also want to highlight the involvement of Zac ('zploch'), who spent several hours yesterday testing and checking every single website page to ensure that it loaded and to try to find as many glitches and bugs as possible. Luke ('shyflyguy') donated a server computer to us that was vital to us as a testing platform. Finally, I'd like to highlight the efforts of Bostjan ('bostjanlaba'), who helped us set up his donated server to be used as a temporary website during the first outage. Without that, we wouldn't have been able to run our Getaway. We have done our best to complete the migration with minimal interruption to our services, and we're especially happy to say that our FSX server hasn't been down for a single second throughout the entire migration. As always, thank you -- our members -- for the patience and understanding you show. It's what motivates us as administrators to do what we do. Hopefully this is the last post about website outages/issues that we have to write for a while!

We are currently in the process of migrating our website to a new hosting provider. In this way, we will be able to avoid the 4-day outage that was scheduled (and then re-scheduled) by our previous provider, with almost no notice. While we have worked as hard as possible to minimize downtime, there are some issues that can only be addressed after our domains are pointing to the new web hosting provider. Over the next few hours and into tonight, we will be working to resolve a few issues on our website and forums. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we do so. Once we have stabilized the website, forums, and the many applications that run on our website, we'll provide an update here. It is our hope that the new provider is able to provide more reliable service than our previous provider.

Earlier today, our ISP informed us that as a result of inclement weather, the intended migration would not be practical this weekend. As a result, they have brought our website's server computer back online in its original location. Why it took them almost two full days of down time to make that determination remains a mystery. At some point -- they have yet to decide when -- they will re-attempt the migration (which presumably would mean another several days of outage for us). Clearly all of this is unacceptable and we are taking actions on our end to ensure that any additional work our ISP might do won't have an impact on the services that we as members depend on. The work that we are doing may result in additional outages over the next few days and/or weeks, and we'll certainly keep everyone informed of anything we have planned. For now, we expect our website to be stable and fully accessible. If there is anything on the website that doesn't appear to be working, please let us know. I'd like to again express and re-iterate that this type of service is not something that we as BVA administrators expect or allow, nor is it something we will continue to put up with. It is worth noting that BVA pays for shared hosting. This means that we use a portion of a web server to support our various websites, forums, and other applications. Typically, a web presence of our size would require a Virtual Private Server or even a Dedicated Server. In fact, that's the type of server we use to host FSX. As we are a lean organization that survives on donations, we have decided to use shared hosting despite the reduced performance and reliability of shared hosting providers. In doing so, we save a substantial amount of money over what it would cost for us to run two dedicated servers. Finding our current shared hosting provider required quite a bit of effort and research, as most of the large shared hosting providers (e.g., GoDaddy) wouldn't be able to support our requirements. Considering the expenses, the performance of our current ISP has generally been acceptable until recently.

The website is temporarily online. We are continuing to work on various elements of the website, and that work could result in additional outages. We will provide an update by Sunday, March 1 with more information.

Tom, I couldn't agree more. We are paying the going rate for shared hosting (about $8 a month, I believe) so it's not much but enough that this type of thing isn't acceptable. Giving us just 4 days to do something about it is even worse...that's obviously not enough time to make a move. Perhaps that was their thinking. It's too bad because for the first few years they were an amazing provider with good service and high reliability. For about the past 12 months, it's been nothing but bad surprises and worsening performance. We have a fair amount of specific requirements that make some shared hosting plans difficult (we're trying to squeeze a pretty large website into a low-budget hosting solution to save our members money). That being said, the hunt is on, and I'm hopeful we'll be able to provide members more reliable service moving forward.

Our website and forums will be offline from Thursday, February 26 at 6pm ET until the morning of Monday, March 2. The FSX server, including FlightDesk, Live ATIS and TeamSpeak, will not be affected. Our ISP informed us (today!) that they are migrating our server to a new location, and that migration is expected to take most of next weekend. Given the short notice, there is nothing that we as administrators are able to do to maintain service. We will do our best to provide a temporary landing page but most of the features of the website, as well as the forums, will be offline until the migration is complete. We do not have any reason to anticipate any changes to the operation or look of the website once service is restored on Monday.

This issue has been corrected with a new file, just posted. All textures and buildings should be appearing by both day and night. If you experience any issues, please let us know!

I don't think we need one...do we?

We just noticed that the texture for the new Tower at KBOS is missing from the installation. The Tower itself is there, but appears as an untextured shape. You may wish to wait on the re-download (given file size) until we've posted a patched installer.

Thanks John! The issue with spawning while online was actually a problem with our server. Would you mind giving that another test and let me know if it works more normally now? Regarding the issues in single player, we'll take a look with our own crash detection settings on to see whether we can replicate that.

My version is definitely not doing that! Seems like there are some missing files, maybe textures or just BGLs. Obvious question: could you check your scenery library to see whether you might still have the old version of KBOS activated? If not, could you try to re-install? If that doesn't help, please upload some screenshots of which files are located in each of the 'scenery' and 'texture' folders for the new scenery. C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft GamesMicrosoft Flight Simulator XAddon SceneryBVABVA_KBOS Cody: One other thing to check this weekend is whether you might be running "Preview DirectX 10". If you are, could you try disabling that?

Great! Sorry about the inconvenience. By all means, please let us know if you have any trouble getting the update set up and installed.

It might be a browser caching issue. I think by refreshing the page, the download should work. Could you please: 1. Navigate to the "Required Software" page: http://www.bostonvirtualatc.com/AllMemb ... tware.aspx 2. Click F5 a few times to refresh the page 3. Try the link for the Boston Airport Scenery Enhancement again Let me know if you have any success with that. If not, I can email you the direct link to the .exe file.

Just spawned in the Tower to check the height and it looks the same as previous to me. I imagine that that would happen when we work on Terminals B/C, which is scheduled for a future release. Dan would be able to comment further on that.

My version is definitely not doing that! Seems like there are some missing files, maybe textures or just BGLs. Obvious question: could you check your scenery library to see whether you might still have the old version of KBOS activated? If not, could you try to re-install? If that doesn't help, please upload some screenshots of which files are located in each of the 'scenery' and 'texture' folders for the new scenery. C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft GamesMicrosoft Flight Simulator XAddon SceneryBVABVA_KBOS

Welcome to Version 4.6 of Boston Virtual ATC's Boston Airport Enhancement. This version of KBOS updates Terminal A of the airport to match current charts and provides several visual enhancements to KBOS and the surrounding area, including spot numbers on the "Delta ramp", GSX compatibility (Terminal A), and a visual depiction of the lighthouses surrounding the airport. It is part of a series of releases to improve the look and accuracy of Boston Airport. Included with this update is an automated installer that will help make future updates much easier. However, there is a one-time manual step for those who have a current version of KBOS installed (most/all of us). If this is your first installation of KBOS, there are no special requirements. Simply run the installer. The installer will automatically install the scenery files and add/activate a scenery area to your library. Please allow some time for the download; with photoreal textures included, the file is over 300 MB. If you have the previous version of KBOS installed, please manually remove/de-activate the area prior to installing the new update. To do so: [*]Open FSX [*]Click Settings > Scenery Library [*]Select the area called "BVATC_KBOS" and click "Delete Area" [*]Click OK; once the progress bar completes, close FSX [*]Manually delete the files associated with the previous version. To do so, navigate to the directory the files for BVATC_KBOS are located in. For most users, this will be: C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft GamesMicrosoft Flight Simulator XAddon Scenery [*]Delete the entire "BVATC_KBOS" folder from your hard drive Once the previous version of KBOS is removed, run the automated installer from our website. The scenery will be activated automatically with no need for you to take any additional action. Please note that you may need to refresh the "Required Software" page in order to access the new link. Please feel free to post on this thread or to email [email protected] with questions or requests for assistance with this installation. The following enhancements are included as part of this version: [*]NEW: photoreal day/night/seasonal ground textures [*]NEW: Terminal A [*]NEW: South Cargo buildings [*]NEW: South fire station [*]NEW: Delta ramp spot numbers [*]NEW: Lighthouses [*]ADDS GSX compatability to Terminal A* (see note below) [*]Enhanced coastal terrain between Lynn, MA and Cohasset, MA [*]Improved land cover between Lynn, MA and Cohasset, MA One easy way to know if the installation has worked correctly is to spawn at any Terminal A gate (e.g., "A6") and see the new spot numbers painted on the ramp: [sizeimg=750:1ikr855h]http://oi59.tinypic.com/r8cmeu.jpg[/sizeimg:1ikr855h] * BETA GSX Compatibility for Terminal A This version of KBOS includes compatibility with GSX at Terminal A. Based on feedback from users on the use of GSX at Terminal A, GSX compatibility will be expanded to other sections of the airport. BVA has assigned airlines per real-world gate assignments at KBOS; please let us know if you see vehicles/handling by the appropriate airline while spawned at Terminal A.

This TFR is being posted in advance of our upcoming landing competition at Ohio State University Airport (KOSU). More information about the event will be posted on the Challenge page after the completion of our upcoming PRP Challenge. Re-Issue Date: March 13, 2015 Location: Ohio State University Airport Beginning Date and Time: March 14, 2015 at 1300 EST Ending Date and Time: March 14, 2015 at 1700 EST Reason for NOTAM: Temporary Flight Restrictions for high volume traffic during landing competition event Type: Airshow Affected Area(s): Area A Airspace Definition: Center: On the Appleton VORTAC (APE) 265 degree radial at 22.7 nautical miles (Latitude N40°4.79', Longitude W83°4.55') Radius: 5 nautical miles' Altitude: From the surface to 2500ft MSL Effective Date(s) From March 14, 2015 at 1300 EST To March 14, 2015 at 1700 EST Area B Airspace Definition: Center: On the Appleton VORTAC (APE) 265 degree radial at 22.7 nautical miles (Latitude N40°4.79', Longitude W83°4.55') Radius: 10 nautical miles Altitude: From 2500ft MSL to 5000ft MSL Effective Dates(s) From March 14, 2015 at 1300 EST To March 14, 2015 at 1700 EST Operating Restrictions and Requirements: No pilots may operate an aircraft in the areas covered by this NOTAM (except as described). All aircraft operating in the vicinity of Ohio State University Airport shall establish and maintain two way radio communications with air traffic control, and continuously transmit an assigned transponder code. The TFR is in support of the virtual landing competition, and to protect aircraft that will be operating under special flight rules. Workload permitting, Air Traffic Control may authorize non-competitor aircraft to transit, depart, or arrive within the areas covered by this NOTAM. Other Information ARTCC: ZOB Point of Contact: Boston Virtual ATC Administration

We're happy to release an updated Live Map on our website! The new map allows website visitors and members to view and track flights on the server. Active air traffic controllers are also shown on the map (local controllers with a Tower icon, and radar controllers with shaded airspace sectors). Anyone can access the new Live Map from the "Live Session Info" tab of the website. I'd like to thank Riley ('RShannon') for his efforts in putting this together. Riley spent several months having to re-write code after a few initial challenges. I think the finished product clearly shows that the effort was worth it! Of course, nothing on the website would be possible without Phil, who helped out with a few fixes and implementation on the website itself. As always, please let us know if you experience any issues or bugs with the new map.

Looks like I signed out just at the right time!

A new "BBCode" tag has just been added to the forums. The "SizeImg" tag allows you to re-size an image by specifying a width in the tag. For example, the line: [sizeImg=1000]ImageURL[/sizeImg] Will re-size the image to 1,000px wide. It will automatically adjust the height to maintain proportions. Of course, you can still custom-size your image and add it using the "" tag as usual.