The VATSIM Convention 2003 is already history. I hope all of you have returned to home safely without any hassles. Behind us are four wonderful days at Frankfurt, which I will never forget. It was a terrific experience to meet you all in person, and to share our dedication to this hobby together. At every time during the convention the "spirit of VATSIM" was among us, and everyone who participated could feel that.

First of all, I´d like to thank the Convention sponsors for their generous donations, both materially and financially. During the lottery at the banquet we were able to draw not less than 60 different prizes, with the main price being a full-featured ITRA NavStack worth 1700 Euros! Please honor our sponsors by visiting their sites and taking their products into consideration.

In detail, the following companies have contributed to the convention:

ITRA GmbH, by donating the first and thir prize to the lottery as well as for the presentation about home cockpit building.

Aerosoft GmbH, by donating the second prize, dozens of additional products to the lottery and doing the presenation of FS2004.

FlightXPress Magazine, by donating subscriptions to the magazine as well as other software titles

The Simflight Network, by contributing several software titles to the lottery.

In addition, we received lottery donations from the PC Pilots Club of Ireland, the Canadian Virtual Airline and Microsoft Germany. Also, many thanks to you for making the donations!

I also want to thank all speakers for the hard work in preparing and doing their presentations. There was a lot of new stuff for everybody to learn, and we all left the convention with a bunch of interesting new information about online flying. The presentations prepeared by the speakers should soon be available for download from our convention webpage. Take a look at them, they contain very useful information!

A special "thank you" has to go out to Horst Klement, our "official" convention photographer, who has dedicated a lot of free time and ressources to take professional pictures during the convention. We will make a CD-ROM available shortly for all of you with loads of pictures from Horst and other photographers so all of you can experience how terrific this event was.

The first pictures from the convention are already available, I ´m happy to share the links to these reports with you:

airsim.net 1
(in portugiese language)
airsim.net 2
(in portugiese language)
Pictures by Michael Mrak
(in english language)
simflight.de 1
(in german language)
simflight.de 2
(in german language)
Pictures by Peter Felix
(with may spotting photo´s from Frankfurt airport)

And last, but not least I want to express my deepest thanks to Dieter Brugger, my fellow colleague and VACC-SAG director for his hard work and support for the convention. Dieter was the first one at SAG who supported the idea of bringing the convention to Frankfurt, an he was always there when I was in doubt about doing the right thing. Without his work and dedication to the project there would have never been a convention in Frankfurt at all. Dieter, it has been a great pleasure for me to accomplish that task together with you! Thank you again!

But all these efforts would have been worthless without YOU, the participats, who came in from not less than 17 different countries to share the spirit of VATSIM. You made the convention what it really was: A great, a marvelous experience, four wonderful days which I will never forget. Thank you all for visiting Frankfurt and the convention!!!

Blue skies to all of you - and see you next year on the VATSIM Convention 2004!!!

Martin Georg