With proper descent planning, you can fly the whole approach without flaps, all the while slowing airspeed by reducing throttle and maintaining level flight.  The aircraft will naturally reduce airspeed as drag gradually overcomes thrust.  Flaps increase lift produced by the wing increasing the angle of attack of the wing, this is also why your stall speed increases with each knotch of flaps.  Your FMS will calculate the apppropriate approach speed depending on which flap setting you wish to use.

If you look on a traditional airspeed indicator, you'll see that the bottom of the white arc (stall speed in the landing configuration) is LOWER than the bottom of the green arc (stall speed in the cruise configuration).

It is not true that the stall speed increases with the addition of flaps.

Scott, gotcha.  "Runway selection at a non-towered field" is not something that is part of our program.  We do cover IFR ops in/out of non-towered fields, but that's that extent of the non-towered ops.

That truly is an amazing accomplishment, great job guys.

I am sure the pilots appreciated having guaranteed ATC presence. It's a concept with which I am fond

And the glory rolls on....I don't know how to help ya, Brad!

Thanks Rahul.  I saw that his signature had been updated with a reference to ZAU, so I suspected that might be the case.  Good luck, it sounds like an interesting initiative!

I suspect the challenging part will be finding the resources to staff the TS server with willing participants to handle the load.   I had considered something similar for ZLA when crafting the pilot cert program there, but quickly decided to use a mode of operation where controllers would simply continue doing what they do today, which is providing ATC services on the network.   Under the TS scheme, a controller will either be providing ATC service, OR he will be in TS handling testing.

Given enough resources, it's not out of the question, but my long-term experience with vatsim leads me to believe that you will be resource-constrained in this endeavor. I would be happy to be proven wrong, though!

Hi, I'm confused. Isn't ZJX and ZLA both parts of VATUSA? For that matter, don't they both fall under VATSIM? Does VATSIM prefer one or the other or is it kind of like any group can do whatever they want?

Bill, the ZLA program pre-dates the release of VATSIM's pilot training initiative.  VATSIM's global initiative, still in development, will allow for individual organizations to provide training and issue ratings on VATSIM's behalf.

I would recommend that pilots evaluate any given training program to see if it provides value for them, and then opt to participate or not, regardless of whether it will result in the issuance of a globally recognized rating, or just an entry on a local roster.