Unexpectedly starting the season 12-0 and able to keep up the form all season, the seemingly invincible Cleveland Cavaliers have come out of nowhere to rock the basketball world as they charge into the playoffs as the team to beat in the east. The last time the Cavs were this good was the title era of LBRON and KYRIE; could it finally be Cleveland's year again a decade on?
But the quest for the banner will be perilous: the title-dearth yet sports-loving Cleveland crowd has numerous foes yet to face. Many good teams in the east have made the postseason, none-the-least the technically gifted Celtics present an immense stoneworks in defense of their title along the path to the finals, where dastardly opposition like the dangerous Thunder or star-studded Lakers might await to joust over the title. Only the bravest knights and their aerial steeds may apply as retainers to the kings on the court as they aid the hunt for their crown.

Look
If you had one shot,
One opportunity
To seize all the traffic you ever wanted
In one moment,
Would you capture it?
Or just let is slip?


Starring Detroit's own Wayne County Metropolitan, featuring supporting performances from Coleman Young, Willow Run, and Oakland County; the Cleveland ARTCC directs the story of EMNEM's VATSIM debut: an airport from a tough corner of the NAS struggles with its status and identity as a class B; striving to bring in enough traffic to make ends meet for its facility, it embarks on a quest to capture the rhythm a busy TRACON needs to survive and thrive in the competetive air traffic environment, where success is your only option: failure is not.


His palms are sweaty, radio weak, control colummn heavy,
There's butter on his runway already, mom's spaghetti
He's nervous, to take it to the surface, but he looks calm and ready,
To drop flaps, let's not keep on forgetting
When to go down, the whole freq goes so loud,
He opens his throttles, but the thrust won't come out
He's flamin', out? Everybody's jokin' now,
The lift's run out, nose up, power, blaow!

Snap back from virtuality, ope, there goes gravity
Ope, there goes Delta, he bounced, he's so mad,
But he won't give up that easy, no, he won't have it,
He knows his whole tail's to the wind, it don't matter
He floats, he knows that, he stalls, the air so stagnant,
He knows when he goes back to his downwind leg, that's when it's,
Back to the sim again, yo, this old rhapsody
Better go capture this glideslope and hope it don't pass him

You better lose yourself in the clouds,
And the crosswind, you own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance, TO/GA!
These minimums only come once in an approach,
Yea you better lose yourself in the clouds,
And the crosswind, you own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance, TO/GA!
These minimums only come once in an approach, yea

Winter is (almost) here, oh lord—It’s been a year or more since the world’s greatest arena rock band has come home to South(west) Detroit! They say the sky ain’t a place to raise a family, so we’ve sent our love along the wire and invited everyone to turn through Metro Airport for a Friday night Journey reunion, featuring the original lineup! Don’t stop believing, smalltown girls and city boys: you just have to hold on a little longer for Steve Perry’s golden voice to sing you to sleep on the center frequency. Our controllers have a setlist to last from when the lights go down on the city, to the sunrise on the lake; all night (all night, oh every night,) we’ll be serving up approaches any way you want it (that’s the way I need it,) and takeoff runs into the midnight sun, until it’s time we went our separate ways aboard the midnight plane going anywhere, when the band reunites next year to ask who’s flying now…

Tonight, the wheels in the sky keep on turning through Detroit. Do you know where you’ll be tomorrow?

Recommended Scenery:
MSFS (payware:) IniBuilds https://inibuilds.com/products/inibuilds-detroit-kdtw-msfs
MSFS (freeware:) https://flightsim.to/file/25649/kdtw-detroit-metro-wayne-dev-0-1
XPlane (freeware:) https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/71763-kdtw-detroit-metro/

Still feeling the heat down in the big city? The air in the orchards up north growing the Empire State’s finest produce is as crisp at the fruit still barely clinging to the trees; it’s just the right time for your picking pleasure.
Say no to Gotham and join the Boston, Cleveland, and New York ARTCCs for a bushel of fun as we light up all the approach controls in Upstate New York, where the Big Apples actually grow!

SHEVYs and BUIKKS and FORDZ, oh my! Get your HTROD craze on in the city that started it all!

Today marks 111 years since the Studebaker strike: regarded as the first major labor action in the auto industry. It's nearly unthinkable today that unionization was still prohibited at the time, with no legal protections against termination simply for trying to stand up for your rights with your fellow co-workers. Studebaker employees at their #3 plant on Jefferson Avenue had enough: thousands walked off during shift and marched on Studebaker's headquarters at the Piquette Avenue factory—the birthplace of the Model T—demanding 8-hour workdays, a restoration of weekly pay schedules, equitable pay rises, and other general improvements to working conditions.
Unfortunately for the strikers, Detroit had no shortage of people desperately in search of work at any wage, and within a few days Studebaker had replaced many strikers with new hires, as well as tempting some strikers back with marginal pay rises. Although generally considered a tactical failure for Studebaker's striking employees, it could be seen as something of a strategic victory for the labor movement at large: fearing further, more intense labor-dispute related disruption, Detroit's manufacturing firms—most notably Ford, the city's largest employer—would end up quickly implementing many of the strikers' demands: with Ford nearly doubling worker salaries, 8-hour workdays becoming industry-standard, and eventually, unions being able to negotiate directly with employers, setting the conditions right for the rise of the automobile in the interwar and post-World War 2 eras.

Join the Cleveland ARTCC after your shift in celebration of this major milestone in the Motor City's industrial heritage!


Recommended Scenery:
MSFS (payware:) IniBuilds https://inibuilds.com/products/inibuilds-detroit-kdtw-msfs
MSFS (freeware:) https://flightsim.to/file/25649/kdtw-detroit-metro-wayne-dev-0-1
XPlane (freeware:) https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/71763-kdtw-detroit-metro/

It’s been 50 years and umpire Nestor Chylak is still not in a kissing mood…

It wasn’t a great time back then in Cleveland. The city was gasping for air—literally as the Cuyahoga River burned—business, industry, jobs, and therefore residents fled the city en-masse. Just about the only thing left in the city was their truly terrible baseball team, today known as the Guardians (and like the city of Cleveland itself, in a much better state of affairs today than then.) Less than ten thousand fans—in a stadium that could seat over 74,000—would turn up to see their awful team lose, and the attendance figures were only going down: irrespective to win percentage. Something had to be done to bring in fans, or the team would have to be sold and leave the city as well…

Management came up with a promotion: they contracted Stroh’s brewery of Detroit to offer twelve ounce cups of their Bohemian-style Pilsner for only ten cents, with a limit on six cups per purchase. With no limit on the number of purchases…
Over 25 thousand thirsty Clevelanders—over double the highest attendance of the season so far—showed to the Tuesday night game versus the Texas Rangers—themselves recently relocated from Washington DC—and their ten cent cups of beer. With a rivalry brewing both on and off the field with the Rangers, this would go about as well as you can imagine…

Join Cleveland Center as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of one of the wildest baseball games of all time. While we don’t envision the takeoff queue to wrap around the outfield like the beer line, if traffic gets as bad as the demand for beer got, we won’t call the game forfeit in the bottom of the 9th.  Gates open 7:30PM EST
p.s: please return any stolen bases found to the CLE ATCT. Thank you.




Recommended scenery:
MSFS (payware:) PacSim https://www.islandsim.com/cleveland-hopkins-intl-msfs20.html
MSFS (freeware:) https://flightsim.to/file/26860/cleveland-hopkins-international-airport-version-2-0
XPlane (freeware:) https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/87276-kcle-cleveland-hopkins-by-tearweardesignsclefsdevhornetaircraft/

Oh the weather outside is frightful
And the de-ice queue is so delightful
so since we've no place to go...
Let it SNO, let it SNO, let it SNO!

Pay a visit to the (in)famous de-ice pads at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (KDTW) for a slathering of type IV, Saturday, February 17th, between 2359-0400z! We hope to see you all there!