Who are we?

Early years

Simvol was originally created by Jacky Brouze in 1998 to allow French-speaking users of Microsoft Flight Simulator to pool their creations and distribute them for free. Over time, under the responsibility of Marc Schaub, several additional areas have appeared, including that dedicated to a new “civilian” simulator for the general public: Fly!. Marc Schaub asked René Birot, then a member of the group and user of Fly!, to take responsibility for supporting this new simulator.

The evolution is such that the "Flight Simulator" part, after failing to find volunteers to maintain it was closed in January 2004 after several years of unequalled succes (almost 4.500.000 visits in 7 years !). With it also disappears the funding of the website.

Fly!/Fly! II

Regarding the website dedicated to Fly!, it was founded on October 25th, 1999 and took the name of Simvol/Fly!. Several people worked on their own to improve this amazing simulator in numerous fields gathered around one person, René Birot (Pacha35). A group of creators was founded, the ROTW, to unite the developers of addons. This group will work full-scale; creation of 2D sceneries (tiles of realistic landscape), airports (database and 3D), planes and instruments like the GPS. The qualities of the addons will allow the group to become famous in the flight simulation community.

Following the decision to close permanently the Flight Simulator part, the group having no reason to give up, took the decision to go along on its own, and to get "subsidies" from advertisers and sponsors, created a non-profit whose object is to "promote flight simulator software, to distribute addons and to manage a website dedicated to its activities" and which is named Fly.Simvol.

Simvol was created during an inaugural general assembly (according to French law) on Saturday 13th December, 2003 in a room in the Montparnasse train station in Paris generously lent to Simvol (for its annual congress) by the West Department of the SNCF (French rail company). At the same time, the website changed its name to Fly.Simvol to be in accordance with the one of the non-profit

Fly! Legacy

In 2003, Chris Wallace and Simvol decided to create a free and open-source flight simulator which will be named Fly! Legacy. Unfortunately, the development of Fly! Legacy ended due to the lack of volunteers, whether on the developers' or users' side.

X-Plane 11

In 2017, X-Plane was released with beautiful screenshots, and to start to revive the passion among some members of the ROTW for the flight simulation. X-Plane seemed wonderful, was multi-platform and had a large community to allow it to make the simulator live for many years to come. Several email exchanges allowed to rebuild a small group with some members of the team with the desire to participate in this new adventure. Simvol and the ROTW have decided to switch to X-Plane 11 to continue their adventure and create new free and high-quality addons. Simvol attempted to create its first place for X-Plane 11, the biplan HATZ, but didn't succeed to find the necessary resources and motivation to complete the project. Nevertheless, several tutorals have been published but with limited success.

Flight Simulator 2020

In 2020, 14 years after the release of Flight Simulator X, Microsoft decided to release a new version of Flight Simulator. This new version offers an unequaled realism and a huge technological leap with the competition at the time (X-Plane and Prepar3D). Feeling the huge potential of this new version and willing to offer high-quality resources in French, Simvol has decided to take advantage of the release of this new version, on August 18th, 2020, to have a complete redesign and offered a website entierely dedicated to Flight Simulator 2020. This transition to Flight Simulator 2020 harkens back to the original, which we hope will satisfy the community of the flight simulation.