VATSIM, or Virtual Air Traffic Simulation Network, is a non-profit organization operating a dedicated, worldwide, Internet-based flight-simulation network. Users can connect to the network to either fly online as a pilot using flight simulation software, or direct traffic as an air traffic controller (ATC) and participate in what has been described as a close approximation of real-life aviation procedures. The organization has achieved notability for its very high level of participation and realism, that has seen it in use as part of Federal Aviation Administration funded research projects. This notability resulted in the organization being featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal in 2006. It is considered the largest online flight simulation network in the world with over 209,000 registered members as of 3 September 2009, with hundreds of participants online at any one time.
Read more about Virtual Air Traffic Simulation Network: Overview, History, Reception, Software, Membership and Training, Events
Famous quotes containing the words virtual, air, traffic, simulation and/or network:
“Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary.... He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plow the rolling sea,
To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.”
—Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)
“There was a girl who was running the traffic desk, and there was a woman who was on the overnight for radio as a producer, and my desk assistant was a woman. So when the world came to an end, we took over.”
—Marya McLaughlin, U.S. television newswoman. As quoted in Women in Television News, ch. 3, by Judith S. Gelfman (1976)
“Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey’s fits and starts, rehearses life’s own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)