Happy New Year

It's the start of a new year, so I thought it might be fun to look back 
on 2004 and recall some interesting FlightGear facts and events, and 
then look forward a bit to the upcoming year.

1. From June 1 through the end of the year, 103,201 copies of the 
windows version of FG were downloaded from the main FG ftp server.  (The 
logs only go back to June '04 ...)  I'm sure some of those are repeat 
customers or people that only tried running FG once or twice, but it 
makes me wonder how big the FlightGear user base might be ... (?)

2. In that same time period 9,043 copies of the FlightGear source code 
were downloaded.

3. In 2004 we raised $452 for charity from FlightGear CD sales.  I'd 
like to increase that to $1700 for 2005 including $500 right now to the 
tsunami relief efforts.

4. In April 2004 a FlightGear based simulator received a Level 3 FTD 
certification from the FAA.  See http://www.atcflightsim.com/ for more 
details.

5. In the last year we've had about 1.4 million visits to our main web 
site (and over 32 million 'hits'.)

6. In 2004 we added the Nasal scripting langauge, overhauled our 
autopilot system, added the ability to fetch live real weather on the 
fly, switched our audio subsystem to OpenAL, added support for SDL, 
built quite a few new aircraft, and improved just about all of the 
existing aircraft.

7. We were listed as Kim Komando's cool site of the day which increased 
our web traffic by 10 fold for a couple days and led to enough extra CD 
sales to allow us to send $500 to the tsunami relief efforts.

8. There are 491 people subscribed to the FlightGear-announce mailing 
list.  397 subscriberes to FlightGear-devel, and 571 subscribers to 
FlightGear-users.

I'm sure there are many things I am forgetting, but I just to make sure 
that everyone knew that 2004 was a very good year for FlightGear, and 
2005 looks like it will be even better.

Good work everyone; it's amazing what we can accomplish when we all work 
together!

Looking forward to 2005 there are a few things I hope we can accomplish.

1. I'd really like to do a version 1.0 release.

2. As mentioned earlier, my goal is to raise $1700 for charity through 
FG CD sales, I'd love to exceed that.

3. I will be involved in at least 3 more FlightGear based commercial 
simulator projects this year; another single, a light twin, and a twin 
turboprop.  At least two of these will receive some kind of FAA 
certification (either Level 3 FTD or the newer/easier Advanced ATD.)

4. I know FG will be used in many other academic, research, and 
commercial projects.  I'd love to hear about your efforts, please let me 
know what you are up to.

Best wishes to all of you, let's have a great 2005!

Curt.

-- 
Curtis Olson        http://www.flightgear.org/~curt
HumanFIRST Program  http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
FlightGear Project  http://www.flightgear.org
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