Good deal Mensa, sounds like fun. I haven't been above 18000 yet in anything big, might have to try that next.
Just flew a short sunset IFR hop from Santa Barbara Muni. to San Luis Obispo, about a 65 nm flight. Took the 208 Caravan. Santa Barbara had a live ATIS, tower, departure and approach control, it was pretty busy - a few guys were just doing touch & goes in the pattern in light singles. I held a few minutes waiting for my release and then was cleared as filed. Got into some crappy weather about half way there but the wx was good enough to fly the visual approach.
VATSIM makes it so much more immersive, I'm glad I finally gave it a try. I figured out the deal with the GPS flight planning. If you create a flight plan and save/load it in the default flight planner, it'll enter that route into the stock GPS, so that's pretty cool - breaks it down leg by leg with the headings/distances to fly and ETE.
Chalenge, I don't know how much fun that'd be to do ACM with the Aerosoft F-16, I tried it and it flys decently just cruising around, but once you get to racking it around it seems to fly a little odd, I'm too used to Falcon 4.0 I guess, heh. FSX seems to behave strangely when you get into the edges of the flight envelope.