It seems to be extremely difficult to organize flight simulator events in the UK. After the demise of the Mark Silcock shows and the rather cozy RC Simulation fairs in Birmingham, now the Astrasim Cosford show has been canceled. This one too had been announced with a lot of fanfare, only to have its candles blown out before lighting them already. There is still the Fligth and Trains Simulation show on November 8th in Birmingham, but that one has received mixed reviews in the past and is held on the same day as the Dutch FS Weekend.
Although unfortunate for the British flightsim enthusiasts, there are still some good shows around in Europe, notably those in Milano, Lisbon, France (Le Bourget), Paderborn in Germany (Aerosoft), and of course by far the largest one, the FS Weekend in Holland !
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Maybe it will be a good idea make a global calender of all sim related events around europe ?
Thanks
Fabio
If you look just underneath the simFlight logo, atop of this page, you’ll see a little word: ‘calendar’.
So yes, we have already started doing that, but we are dependent upon submissions from organizers. Not everybody thinks of telling us about their events 😉
It’s not actually that difficult, the problem is that no-one wants to put the donkey work in to build a big show, they want to start big.
That would work, except that there aren’t that many people in the UK who would want to go to multiple shows a year, but that’s what people still keep trying to do.
If all the people who want to put on an FS show in the UK got together and said “right, let’s do one annual show, in a central location that’s easy to get to” then it would work… Lots of fragmented shows scattered around? You’re just splitting up the number of displays possible and the number of people able and willing to attend.
Not just Europe. The Avsim Fancon was recently cancelled for the 2nd year running. Hard times in the FS world.
What Avsim offers is totally different to most of the world’s shows, though. They do a three day event with evening functions, talks and presentations, meet and greets, etc. You get a lot more with the Avsim convention, but you pay a lot more for the privelage, especially compared to a one-off one day entry fee to what is effectively a trade show over this side of the Atlantic.
I had a conversation with someone a while ago who pointed out something very true, that all of the UK shows recently have set out with the single aim of making money, not being a flight sim community get together. If we did more of the latter, in a reasonable small venue (not the NEC, for example!) and people came expecting twenty or thirty stands, most of which are VAs or Flying Clubs rather than hundreds of stands or displays, you’d probably at least break even, but everyone is aiming to make a major profit from these things, which in this small community, in the current climate, isn’t going to happen.