Pro ATC X Fly By (Part 2)

[bennyboy75 91]

Alan AKA Chock (where is the these days?) posted his thoughts about Pro ATC X on here in a thread that grew to a zillion posts. I thought I'd share some of my first impressions, having done a few flights with it now. 

 

The thing is, we NEED ATC in FSX. In the real world, you don't move an inch without ATC. Pretty much the whole job is about interacting with, anticipating and processing the instructions from ATC. We still don't have an ATC program that replicates the real world very well. I was keen to see how this newest (and the only one currently being developed, apart from VOX ATC perhaps?) add on got on. 

 

I've had RC4 and PFE. I looked at Vox ATC but I knew I'd never get on with the metal mickey voices and even the 'getting started' instruction manual hurt my brain so I left it there. 

RC4 is, hmm, ok. The fact that it nags you if you don't commence a descent or a turn within 3 nanoseconds of acknowledging the instruction annoys me, there aren't really enough voices and you can't separate them into regions. Nothing for me kills the immersion more than that bloke with a broad Yorkshire (a place in North of England, for our foreign readers) accent giving you descent instructions into Munich airport, or that woman from the Deep South of the USA giving it a bit of dixie on the radio as you take off from London Heathrow.

 

PFE does it better, in some ways. There are lots of voices, the AI talks with proper airline callsigns and the right accents (Lufty pilots are German, Emirates pilots are Arabic - good) and there are enough voices to give you German controllers coming out of Berlin, Dutch crossing the Netherlands and then UK controllers when crossing the channel. You can put in SIDS and STARS and when it works, it works nicely. But short flights are impossible because it drops all the waypoints in between, if you ask for a higher or lower flight level en route your descent clearance will never come, you need to do smart alec AFCAD things with runways in use or you'll likely end up face to face with AI, often it goes bonkers on arrival and leaves you too high or too low, vectors you to Mars or forgets about you altogether. Frustrating.

 

Pro ATC X then. It looks simple - just choose a departure, arrival and alternate airport, choose a flight level and then either let it calculate you a route or plug one in that you got from an external planner. Boom, you can see the SID, the enroute portion and the STAR. Of course, that's the EXPECTED SID and STAR - the real one might be different as it does it on the fly depending on runway use and the weather. OK, looks good, let's go fly - Liverpool to London Stansted in an A320.  MUCH simpler than PFE. Choose some voices - hmm, not a lot of choice, perhaps 6 or 7 different controllers in all. Some of them are pretty decent, some of them are barely comprehensible as there's so much processing on the voices to make them 'sound' like ATC. Only two Brit controllers, the rest are Euro or Yanks. Hmm, looks like we're going to be hearing some odd voices en route to London today.

 

In the flight deck you can pull up a transparent menu just like the default ATC and ask for clearance. I can't get it to read the ATIS to me, no matter what I prod and push. Doesn't matter, the controller will tell me which runway we need with the taxi clearance, I've planned for both. Clearance comes, NANTI2V, climb and maintain 6000 feet.  The chart says 4000 feet at NANTI but he's the controller so we'll do what he says. Ask for startup - all good, get taxi clearance with the correct taxiways to 09 for takeoff. The only problem with this is that the AI are using 27. Refresh AI. Still taxying to 27. The wind was 100 so the AI is wrong and PROATC/X is right, but that doesn't help me when I'm being faced down by an angry Ryanair 737 NG. Hmm. I reset the AI and scoot before any of them can taxy out again. 

 

Ask for clearance and told to line up 09. Given clearance for takeoff and 'maintain runway heading and climb and maintain 6000 feet'. Er, I thought we were on a NANTI2V? Oh well, he's the boss. Off we go. Once in the I air contact departure and am 'cleared for the NANTI2V departure, climb and maintain 6000 feet.' Make your mind up! Anyhow randomly I'm cleared along the airway (never heard that in the real world - do pilots even know what airway they're on at any given moment?) and given a few climbs up to cruise. Relax. Handed off to Manchester, then to London. So far, so good. TCAS alert over BHX - nothing from ATC. Reach the last waypoint in the flightplan, no word from ATC. Thankfully I've had a peek in the 'flight plan information' menu section and plugged it in, an ASKEY 5A to Rwy 04. Really you should be given the STAR before you get to the last waypoint. Make the first couple of turns of the STAR and given a couple of reasonable descent clearances along with the STAR (that I'm already on, but never mind), handed off to approach and then given a few odd instructions, such as 'cleared to the LUT NDB?, turn left 180'....Eh? LUT NDB? That's the Luton NDB, nothing to do with the approach to Stansted? Then a small while later I'm cleared to 'ISED66' for the ILS, given the ILS frequency (which is unusual) and told to contact tower at the marker. Whilst scratching my head wondering what ISED66 is I realise that ISED is the identifier for the RWY 04 ILS and that 66 must be the FAF at 6.6 DME, which it is. Very odd way to clear a flight for the localiser. Was given descent to 3000 on the local QNH (bit high, the FAF is 2500 feet but we made it) and intercepted at around 9 DME, which was a little tight for comfort. Cleared for landing, got down and was handed off to ground after taxying a fair distance from the active. The gate I'd plugged in at the planning stages was given, along with the correct taxiways. 

 

So my thoughts? Well it's got potential, although it's a bit of a mixed bag.

 

SIDs and STARs given on the fly leaps it above the competition, but to work it needs to leave you be to fly the SID and not give you odd clearances or change its mind and change it back again like this. It needs to stop with the weird clearances to intersections, airways, NDBs not on the flightplan or cryptic FMC-only waypoints on the localiser. I barely flew the STAR at Stansted before being vectored in a rather odd way, although to be fair I did end up lined up (just about) with the runway. The taxi instructions were accurate. Setup is simple. You can assign voices to particular regions, although there aren't enough currently to make it worth doing. Your co pilot can not only handle the radios but the gear, the flaps, the autopilot, call V speeds and do checklists, although the included ones are woefully inaccurate for the A320. You can edit them, although some of the real world checklist challenges for the A320 were missing from the drop down menu of items. Cabin crew calls are also included and play automatically. 

 

So it's a game of two halves as it stands. The 'added value' stuff like the copilot, checklists, cabin crew calls etc is pretty good and if you can live without the autopilot and panel specific capability of something like FS2Crew gives you a good sense of immersion of a team working together on the aircraft. The ATC side is getting there but still does odd things. I need to test more, but first impressions are mixed. If they could lick the ATC quirks and someone made a massive voice set covering the whole world, so you had PFE like coverage in terms of regional accents and talking AI (apparently planned for the next update) then this might just be it. Maybe.