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)
“I was a countryman and a father before I was a writer on political subjects.... Born and bred up in the sweet air myself, I was resolved that [my children] should be bred up in it too.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“To treat a “big” subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening’s traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“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)
“Parents need all the help they can get. The strongest as well as the most fragile family requires a vital network of social supports.”
—Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)