hello folks out there im a newbie out there on line and i have three or four trips and i like it, but i feel alone out there most of the time unless you are at a busy airport but i do have two or three questions.1. am i suppose to see other planes out there if they are close to me, is that what the csl files is suppose to be for to allow you to see other planes(people on the net). i put the file in the fs9 aircraft folder and changed the file inside to aircraft.cfg.2. when you are about to take off and there is no controller , how do you request atis and how do you get it.3. when you are in route and you are at say 33000 feet, and you know it is time to descend and there is no controller, what determines how far to descend to, and is that when you will need an approach plate to know how to come in, and if so which runway if there is no controller.4. on the freq. unicom how far is the range and what good is it doing for me, what is that channel used for.im sorry for the dumb questions but i like this online flying and i really want to do it right.Thanks..........Robert

I'm a newbie here too -Kind of what bother's me is that landing at an airport - we don't get any uptodated weather info - like you would from plain 'ol MSFS2004. I can call up the weather on another computer hooked to the internet, but I agree - it's a pain not to have *anything* available if there is no controller. Is there a way around this?I am currently on assignment in Alaska for my VA and there are precious few airplanes, much less controllers out my way. And it *does* get kind of quiet in the sky.Senior Captain, Pier Glass Aviation

http://www.vatsim.net/Go to the "Pilot Resources - Pilot Resource center" on the left...then click on "Basic Pilot Training".Print all those PDF Documents..from the beginning to end... Follow it ...Its an awesome set documents for FSIM 2004/VATSIM. It answers all your Questions.BTW.. You need to register here using the VATSIM ID. The password here is different than your VATSIM Pwd.