Greetings all,

I'll start with the question. Is there any possibility to have a push to talk feature for the copilot. I'll explain why I ask.

First, before everyone brings out the pitchforks and torches standby. I have read responses saying it isn't realistic, but let me explain some personal experience.

My first beloved aircraft assigned, the mighty C-141B had a noisy flight deck. Once you get above 250kts, there was the roar of the air moving along the skin and windshield. We used a dual action yoke switch to talk. We flew with the Davey clark's mic on the lower lip to be heard clearly. You push the yoke switch forward to transmit outside the aircraft and pulled it aft to transmit on interphone to the crew. We did have hotmic, but reserved it as a discrete channel for training, evaluations and private convo. Last thing you wanted to hear was the flight engineer and his/her instructor going on for hours over the ocean about systems and procedures unless you liked it as I did. I would use it when training or evaluating a new pilot. But, checklists and crew interaction was done over the interphone with push to talk. In the Gulfstream 5/550 which I currently fly, we use PTT as a secondary channel. The flight deck is quiet, but you need to be facing each other to communicate effectively. If I'm heads down on instruments or looking at my yoke iPad briefing a departure/approach, you wouldn't hear as well due to avionics fans and airconditioning outlets. Normally hotmic is up, but you use interphone push to talk for the flight attendant and when wearing the O2 mask. Other wise you will hear Darth Vader breathing which drives you nuts. The DC10 was the only jet I flew where we could have a convo naturally. We had the operator style headsets that we used for PTT when talking on the radios, PA system and to ground crew. We could hear each other clearly with takeoff power set.

Why? My unique problem revolves around P3D ATC and background noise. Even when I select mute on the MCE panel, the copilot will resume listening requiring me to constantly cycle the mute feature. I have had IRSs shut off during puchback, engines shut down during taxi/flight and the sim rate increased. It gets very annoying when this happens. Yes, I can start wearing my expensive vice grip headset with crappy mic or not use the internal ATC. But I enjoy my light cheap headset and my surround sound on my office computer. I have seen this topic come up before. I just ask for a feature to PTT or have the mute button totally freeze the copilot and it's actions. I even installed a file posted in the forum, which actually muted the copilot, but after a moment, the copilot is doing random things responding to ATC banter.

Rick        

Great post and request (to go along with a great program that mce is).   As a crj driver I use the ppt up toggle on the yoke for intercom as a courtesy to the other pilot who does not need to hear me breath, sneeze, and chew food 😆😆🤣🤣.

For the simm this option would be a great addition as well for getting closer to rw opps and help with limitations of the computer speech recon system.  

Thanks!.    

I consider this an interesting suggestion. We could have separate buttons to talk to ATC, FO, Ground and Cabin Crew. Maybe these can even be connected to the respective real buttons of the aircraft (INT, CAB), if an addon aircraft supports those.

So we would have four "channels" of speech recognition which would probably even decrease the recognition error rate because MCE would only have to look for the command in that specific "channel".

Of course there must be a way then to assign our voxkey commands to one of these "channels".

 

Apart from that it would already help a lot if the mute button would work properly again.

Additionally every critical action like turning off all IRS or the engines should only be executed after an affirmation. That is not the case now. Like the OP I had the FO turn off all IRS or the engines during taxi several times (I reported that before in some other thread I think).

 

Edited November 1, 20196 yr by RALF9636

6 minutes ago, RALF9636 said:

Additionally every critical action like turning off all IRS or the engines should only be executed after an affirmation. That is not the case now. Like the OP I had the FO turn off all IRS or the engines during taxi several times (I reported that before in some other thread I think).

 

These IRS and engine shutdown operations are definitely protected against accidental trigger.

The only explanation, either Prepar3D.exe (or fsx.exe) not running as admin, or maybe on the aircraft you're using, MCE not seeing engines running for some reason.

Except of course when commands are part of a flow in which case they are assumed as intended and there would be no prompt.

If you have a critical flow, make sure you secure it with option "Requires confirmation".

For instance, something like "shutdown flow" could get IRS and engines turned OFF.

Will double check.

15 minutes ago, FS++ said:

These IRS and engine shutdown operations are definitely protected against accidental trigger.

The only explanation, either Prepar3D.exe (or fsx.exe) not running as admin, or maybe on the aircraft you're using, MCE not seeing engines running for some reason.

Except of course when commands are part of a flow in which case they are assumed as intended and there would be no prompt.

If you have a critical flow, make sure you secure it with option "Requires confirmation".

For instance, something like "shutdown flow" could get IRS and engines turned OFF.

Will double check.

I am 100% positive on that, because we spoke about that before. It happened more than once without asking for confirmation (when I hadn't said anything at all). And of course not as part of a script. MCE and P3D running as admin also of course. Aircraft is the FSL Airbus.

I haven't reported it again because it seemed I was the only one having that problem. But I am not, obviously now.

Edited November 1, 20196 yr by RALF9636

2 hours ago, G550flyer said:

Greetings all,

I'll start with the question. Is there any possibility to have a push to talk feature for the copilot. I'll explain why I ask.

First, before everyone brings out the pitchforks and torches standby. I have read responses saying it isn't realistic, but let me explain some personal experience.

My first beloved aircraft assigned, the mighty C-141B had a noisy flight deck. Once you get above 250kts, there was the roar of the air moving along the skin and windshield. We used a dual action yoke switch to talk. We flew with the Davey clark's mic on the lower lip to be heard clearly. You push the yoke switch forward to transmit outside the aircraft and pulled it aft to transmit on interphone to the crew. We did have hotmic, but reserved it as a discrete channel for training, evaluations and private convo. Last thing you wanted to hear was the flight engineer and his/her instructor going on for hours over the ocean about systems and procedures unless you liked it as I did. I would use it when training or evaluating a new pilot. But, checklists and crew interaction was done over the interphone with push to talk. In the Gulfstream 5/550 which I currently fly, we use PTT as a secondary channel. The flight deck is quiet, but you need to be facing each other to communicate effectively. If I'm heads down on instruments or looking at my yoke iPad briefing a departure/approach, you wouldn't hear as well due to avionics fans and airconditioning outlets. Normally hotmic is up, but you use interphone push to talk for the flight attendant and when wearing the O2 mask. Other wise you will hear Darth Vader breathing which drives you nuts. The DC10 was the only jet I flew where we could have a convo naturally. We had the operator style headsets that we used for PTT when talking on the radios, PA system and to ground crew. We could hear each other clearly with takeoff power set.

Why? My unique problem revolves around P3D ATC and background noise. Even when I select mute on the MCE panel, the copilot will resume listening requiring me to constantly cycle the mute feature. I have had IRSs shut off during puchback, engines shut down during taxi/flight and the sim rate increased. It gets very annoying when this happens. Yes, I can start wearing my expensive vice grip headset with crappy mic or not use the internal ATC. But I enjoy my light cheap headset and my surround sound on my office computer. I have seen this topic come up before. I just ask for a feature to PTT or have the mute button totally freeze the copilot and it's actions. I even installed a file posted in the forum, which actually muted the copilot, but after a moment, the copilot is doing random things responding to ATC banter.

Rick        

Hi Rick.

Had a look at your simpit and perfectly understand why you would need the feature.

In fact every few years, someone suggests it.

The reason we never implemented it is purely technical.

Unlike hardware in a real plane, where you can start talking immediately, constantly waking up and putting the speech engine to sleep is fraught with danger and affects reliability of speech recognition.

It's impossible to tell how long it's going to take between the time you hit PTT and when speech engine wakes up and makes all speech commands available for recognition.

It could be a lucky 1 milliec one time, then it's half a second. Basically, although quite short, it is unpredictable.

As a result, if you start talking before the speech engine is ready, your speech won't make sense because only part of it went through.

In actual use, you would need to be self conscious and have some kind of beep telling you, you can transmit now. Very frustrating, as you would have to repeat commands. And what about the odd unreliable joystick button that no longer cleanly makes contact and breaks it.

Around year 2010, Flight 1 had a speech reco app for default aircraft only  go out of business precisely for this reason.

Support team spent their time advising users to be patient and wait for the "tone" before speaking.

In fact we do have that functionality. We use it for ATC.

When you hold PTT down, MCE suspends all commands required for Fo interaction and enables those for ATC jargon.

The opposite happens when you release PTT.

And guess what, while most people are confident talking to FO (with open mike), they find it a bit more challenging when talking to ATC.

Granted, in some cases it's because the user isn't familiar with ATC jargon or NATO Alphabet, but most of the time, they either start transmitting too early (when ATC commands aren't ready), or release PTT before the entire message has gone through. As a result, nothing is recognized and transmission must be repeated.

Having said that, be aware MCE listens to the <END> keyboard key.

When it sees it down, it assumes you're talking on Vatsim or other network and suspend all MCE speech reco until you release it.

Perhaps you have FSUIPC and a spare joystick button that can be programmed to send those two messages <END key down> and <END key up> and you'll have your PTT, while being aware of the pitfalls.

You do that on a Demo and it could spell disaster.

Another thing you could consider.

Create a brand new speech profile, call it "simpit" and make it active.

Record ambient noise conditions in your simpit, then play the audio in a loop and train the new speech profile with that background noise in.

Might see some improvement, as the new speech profile can filter out the background noise.

Sorry, it's not really lack of will. It's just not reliable enough as things stand.

 

got it, makes sense. Thanks for the explanation and listening.

Rick

Edited November 1, 20196 yr by G550flyer
1

3 hours ago, wwslk said:

Great post and request (to go along with a great program that mce is).   As a crj driver I use the ppt up toggle on the yoke for intercom as a courtesy to the other pilot who does not need to hear me breath, sneeze, and chew food 😆😆🤣🤣.

For the simm this option would be a great addition as well for getting closer to rw opps and help with limitations of the computer speech recon system.  

Thanks!.    

Yeah, drives me nuts hearing someone do that lol. I'm like, yo, adjust your mic.

Another way to do this now is using a freeware program called AutoHotKey.

For the past 15 years I have flown over 8000 hours in Shared Cockpit (Airliners), a great deal of which was on VATSIM.  The problem is flying shared cockpit on VATSIM is that when one of the pilots speaks to ATC (or to other people who may be in a group voice server), the other pilot hears the person twice... once over the voice client used for Flight Deck communications and then 1/2 second later over the VATSIM frequency - which most people find to be VERY disorientating or at least really annoying.

So we programmed an AutoHotKey script to mute the voice client for flight deck communications anytime the push to talk key was pressed (it's a Push to Mute, but just for the voice client, not for VATSIM).  It works PERFECTLY, and since there is a mute function in MCE it should be really easy to do.  It's an extremely small script which doesn't take any system resources to run and we've never had it fail.

I hope this has been helpful!

Best wishes.

 

Edited November 1, 20196 yr by DaveCT2003

Thanks Dave for this idea.   I will look into it and report back.  By the way the Aerosoft CRJ and MCE are a great match!  

2 minutes ago, wwslk said:

Thanks Dave for this idea.   I will look into it and report back.  By the way the Aerosoft CRJ and MCE are a great match!  

Hey, if you love the CRJ, just wait until you see the CRJ Professional. It is truly amazing, and provides two additional CRJs including the 1000! We have screen shots in our CRJ Professional Preview forum.

Let know you if you need a hand building the AutoHotKey script, I can give you the ones I made and help you edit them for your system.

 

On 11/1/2019 at 5:58 PM, G550flyer said:

I'll start with the question. Is there any possibility to have a push to talk feature for the copilot. I'll explain why I ask.

 

 Take a look here: