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FSWeekend 2026

event

by Gijs

In the weekend of 28-29 March, FlightGear was once again represented at the annual international FlightSimWeekend at Lelystad Airport (EHLE), the Netherlands. Nearly 5,000 visitors strolled around the Aviodrome aviation museum, where they found many booths ranging from hobby clubs to major commercial sellers. The crew this year consisted of long-standing veterans Durk, Torsten, Henning (jsb) and János, as well as first-time attendees Nia, Chris, Skip and Ysop.

KLM Fokker 100 at the Aviodrome museum grounds

A KLM Fokker 100 on the grounds of the Aviodrome museum.

Although this year’s event appeared to be more commercially focused than previous ones, it was still a valuable opportunity to showcase our free, open-source flight simulator. Many visitors appreciated the low/zero cost as an alternative to the expensive products found throughout the venue. In true open-source spirit, Nia brought her homemade Airbus hardware (MCDU, EFIS and RMP) to show what can be achieved with a little ingenuity and creativity.

The setup consists of two tables arranged in an L shape, one behind it and one to the side where the side stick rests on. On the table in the back is a big monitor showing the simulator and a smaller one, showing the primary flight display and navigation display. In front of the monitors is a chair for the pilot flying, to the right of it is the DIY pedestal made out of many 3d printed panels with lots of buttons, knobs and switches. To the right of that is a second chair for a pilot monitoring. Behind the desk there are some boxes which were used to transport the sim as well as the PC running the simulation.

Nia’s hardware setup (photo from last year’s Chaos Communication Congress, 39c3). Licensed by Nia under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Another feat of ingenuity was Torsten’s browser-based panel, which attracted many people asking where they could find the documentation. Continuing the tradition that FSWeekend always sparks new ideas, this already lead to the birth of a new project for creating web panels: OpenAttitude. It is, of course, fully compatible with FlightGear, but can also be linked to other simulators.

A vendor that brought a new cyclic/collective device for helicopter simulation seemed impressed by how well it worked with FlightGear and by how valid the flight dynamics of the helicopter were modeled. This appreciation for FlightGear was seconded by an experienced flight instructor with a small two-seat European training plane. When flying its digital twin, he was impressed by how accurately the real plane had been simulated and by how easy it was to fine-tune the flight dynamics.

While visitors frequently mentioned that the quality of our scenery could be improved (compared to other sims), they were impressed with the preview of our new rendering pipeline (HDR/PBR). Its ongoing development suggests a bright future!