A new A300 aircraft add-on (payware) for FSX is about to be released. Next Level Simulations posted a few screenshots on their forum:

NLS A300B4-200 final pre-release screenshots

The add-on is for FSX only for now. A release date is not given yet.

The AVSIM main website is back online! The forums will be online soon, followed by the file library. It's nice to hear that at least all FS2004 and FSX files are intact. We'll keep an eye on it and replace the download links back to the AVSIM Library if possible.

Tom Allensworth has published a first in a series of narratives on what has transpired over the last 16 days. You can read it here.

Currenlty, we're working on the aircraft reviews section to provide new download locations. Since the AVSIM Library has been destroyed, there are many broken download links. This process may take some days.

Meanwhile, the AVSIM staff is working on an attempt to recover their data. Tom Allensworth stated that they will be back in the future. At the moment, it is unknown if the library will be back in their original form or perhaps an entirely new library.

According to Tom Allensworth, CEO and Publisher of AVSIM:

“We regret to inform the flight simulation community that on Tuesday, May 12, AVSIM was hacked and effectively destroyed. The method of the hack makes recovery difficult, if not impossible, to recover from. Both servers, that is the library / email and web site / forum servers were attacked. AVSIM is totally offline at this time and we expect to be so for some time to come. We are not able to predict when we will be back online, if we can come back at all. We will post more news as we are able to in the coming days and weeks.

Some have asked whether or not we had back ups. Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers. The hacker took out both servers, destroying our ability to use one or the other back up to remedy the situation."

This is very bad news for the whole flightsim community. The AVSIM Library was the biggest file archive of add-ons and mods for various flight simulators, including Microsofts Train Simulator.

Tom Allensworth has posted more info on myalbemarle.org:

"I want to provide everyone with a non-technical view of what took place yesterday and last night so that some of the rumors that are already starting to spread are corrected.

During the early evening yesterday, we noticed that some alarming things were starting to happen on our servers. The first sign of an issue was that some functionality disappeared on our web server. That progressed to not being able to access the web server via FTP or SSH. Finally, the web/forum server tripped offline. Next the library/email server started to exhibit issues. We went in to reboot it, and that is when it failed entirely. The partitions on both of the servers had been removed. We shut down both servers until we can get a technical member up to our Network Operations Center (NOC), and do a comprehensive inspection of the damage.

I have seen some rumors and speculation already on the various forums in the community, and I would like to make sure that everyone knows the facts. Here are some:

Early in the evening, I sent out a bulk email to all forum members letting them know that we anticipate shutting down the Web/Forum server for a period of time. About a third of the way through the process of sending that email to all 60,000 forum members, the hacker succeeded in bringing the server down. The email was did not get sent to everyone. The reason I sent the email, based on what we knew at that time, was because that a minimum, we would need to shut the web/forum server down to inspect the unit and do repairs. At the time the email was sent, we were unaware that a hack was in progress and that our system would be taken offline entirely. There were no hoaxes involved, as some have asserted."

The new forum is online. All forum users should have an email with the link to our new forum.