Current Advisories - Valen Heavy Industries

As Of: Second Life version 1.23
The Second Life Server v.1.30 release appears to have broken the physics script in VVDE 4.5 aircraft. An updated version of the affected aircraft was published on 9/29/2009. Please contact Huns Valen if you have any trouble with the new version!
Sculpt LOD is set rather low, which can cause unpleasant loss of quality on sculpted hulls. If this is the case for you, it takes about 10 seconds to fix it! If you do not have an Advanced menu in your client, press ctrl+alt+shift+D. Go to Advanced -> Debug Settings and enter RenderVolumeLODFactor. Set this to 4 or 5.
Sim border crossings are getting better, but they still botch from time to time. The best way to make sure Linden Lab keeps working on improving this is to keep filing bug reports (Tools menu -> Report Bug).
If your vehicle has VHI X-Guard, make sure it's set to AUTO or ALWAYS.
If your vehicle does not have VHI X-Guard, flying at low speed when crossing borders seems to be the best way to handle the problem.
If you are carrying one or more passengers, flying slow becomes exponentially more important. Make sure you have everyone take off any AOs, HUDs, or other unnecessary scripted items.
A rolling restart on 2-1-2008 ~~broke~~ changed the behavior of llSensor, which confuses some aircraft into thinking the owner isn't around & subsequently causes the aircraft to shut down. Patched versions of the Accipiter, Archduke, F-16, and Nimbus have been released. To get the update, just rez your old version.

Vehicle-related issues that you can vote to have fixed

Go to http://jira.secondlife.com and log in, then come back here and click these links to see/vote for the issues:
Border crossing sucks
Banlines suck
Dual control of aircraft is broken
Entering mouselook "remembers" last mouselook angle rather than centering, causing problems with ML controlled vehicles
Users can freeze others' physical objects
Display banned areas on mini-map, and allow user to control ban line visibility in 3D space
If you find other bugs in JIRA that are relevant to vehicles, let me know and I will put them here.

Please report your experiences with these bugs to Linden Lab using the Tools -> Report Bug tool. They pay more attention to bugs that get more reports!

Ongoing Hazards

Use extreme caution while flying below 1,000 meters absolute. Hazards include no-delay ejection scripts (totally invisible), ban lines (mostly invisible - hazardous to 300 meters AGL), and skyboxes (tend not to rez until collision is unavoidable.) Security script owners are requested to utilize at least a 15-second delay to allow enroute avatars to clear the area.
Multi-seat vehicle operators are advised to slow down if passengers are dropped while crossing sim borders.

How to Minimize Sim Border Crossing Issues

Lay off the afterburners (or throttle >70% for the Baron) if you've got one or more passengers, or if you notice sim border crossings are particularly rough.
Don't wear script-heavy attachments, such as:

Animation overriders. These have rapidly firing timer events and can make it really rough to cross over a sim border. The vehicle has its own sitting animation anyway, so it's best to take off or disable your AO before getting in. Things that are not "specifically" AOs, such as certain shoes, purses, and furry avatars, may contain AOs. If you put it on and it changes the way you walk, jump, sit, run, fly, or stand, it's got an AO in it.

Anything that might have lots of scripts in it, although this is a lot better in recent times. (If those scripts have active timers, however, it's still a problem.)

High framerate and low ping are important.
Filesharing programs and other local servers can overload your upstream bandwidth. They usually have a "throttle" setting - make sure you are using this, or just disable them.
Avoid running other applications that compete with Second Life for CPU time. Folding@Home is not supposed to impact game performance, but it does, even at the low priority at which it runs. (Exception: Dual-core machines shouldn't have problems with this. P4s with hyperthreading ARE impacted by F@H, and I know this, because I used to run SL on one. Hyperthreading is nice but it's not the same thing as having multiple cores or CPUs.)
Your draw distance should be large enough to accommodate your speed. Draw distance effects how quickly your client connects to sims you are approaching (this is called a "child connection" until you have actually crossed in.) If the client does not connect to a sim before you cross into it (usually because the sim is very busy or because you are moving at very high speed), your avatar may not cross into the new sim at the same time as your aircraft. The aircraft will usually detect this and shut down, and you will most likely have to log off. If you connect to the sim before crossing into it, but just barely in time, the crossing may be very rough.

Miscellaneous

Cygnus II, Slipstream II, and Skylark owners: The HUD displays pitch, but calls it AOA (angle of attack). This is a misnomer. Pitch is the number of degrees the nose is pointing above or below the horizon. AOA is the angle of a wing relative to the air it is traveling through, which is not the same thing. I apologize for any confusion this may cause. On the other hand, it seems I'm not the only SL developer to have made this mistake - I see it all the time on other airplanes. (Maybe they saw me doing it and thought it was right?) I discovered my error in 2006. The Accipiter and everything newer (Summer 2006 on) use the correct terminology.