Posted this in the comparison thread between P2ATC, BATC and SI, but for my first flight with BATC :

 

 

Did one flight ESSA / ESMS. ESSA is a default airport, while ESMS is a bought one. 
Setup was easy and you can switch between basic and premium voices during the flight very easily. 

How did it do:

• IFR Clearance was straightforward but it didn't give me an initial climb altitude - i did get this right after takeoff
• It couldn't give me any taxi instructions because data is missing - taxiways are also missing when looking at ESSA in little navmap so it handled this nicely by telling me that data is missing and taxi is at my own discretion
• After takeoff everything went smoothly, i got incremental altitudes (just 2) and handed me around nicely. 
• Initial descent was fine and it went nicely until around 8000ft. SayIntentions had screwed up at this point by telling me to climb while I was descending and just giving me random altitudes. This went fine. 
• It did leave me at 8000ft for too long though and then it gave me a radar vector slightly to the right even though the runway was pretty much straight-on
• It did give me clearance to descend further but I was too high to land at this point. I declared a missed approach but it didn't understand. I declared a go-around and it told me to climb to 15000ft which was odd. 
• It did pick me back up at 12000ft and vectored me in nicely for an ILS landing with no issues from here onwards. 
• It assigned me a gate and gave me correct taxi instructions.

Some other stuff:

• Voice recognition was fine throughout the flight, although there were moments when it didn't understand me
  • It did not understand me reading back some frequency changes, but i'm not a native english speaker so we'll see how this progresses
• Premium voice was really good, maaaybe even better than SayIntentions ?
• Basic voice is more than ok, far above P2ATC, carries no extra cost so very worth it.
• UI is nice, showing you the active instructions clearly, and it can switch radios and even readback automatically, which is helpful when you have high workload.
• I really appreciated the SayIntentions background chatter, this has none. I fixed this by tuning into the area radar real ATC radio for extra immersion. 

So far, for IFR flights, I think this was better than SayIntentions, main difference being the descent stage, which was handled better by BATC even though both were wrong.

I need a few more flights with this, I need to figure out how often it screws up on the approach, but so far, if it can vector me in ok on most flights, I can say that the 30USD price tag is worth it even with the occasional hiccup (at least you practice your go-arounds).

Flight number two for me from Abu Dhabi to Dammam in Saudi Arabia and impressed again. Arabic accented voices were spot on and less shouty than some of the English accents I’ve heard. Got handovers to Bahrain and Jeddah FIRs at exactly the right spots and then some slightly weird vectors that left me quite low but it did work out in the end. I’m not sure whether it was trying to fix my not very optimal descent planning but we made it.

My meh payware Dammam didn’t have the required taxiway layout for instructions but no big surprise there. 

All in all, nice job 👍🏻 

Greetings all, I just wanted to drop a few things after scrolling through this thread😁. When I'm not slipping the surly bonds, I do my secondary job as a product manager doing software development internally within a company. I would say about 80% of my customers are internal and 20% are external. One thing that I have learned during software development in an agile fashion is that it is very customer based. The customer is at the center of development. Product(me), the customer and engineering all walk down the road of development hand in hand.

Now, when we start talking about large purchases(hundreds of thousands to millions), they normally would fall into a waterfall flow. You pay up front, and then you will see/receive your product at some point at the end. For example, one company I flew for purchased four Gulfstream 550s. Like most, we paid upfront and would not see the first jet for over year. A lot of cases in waterfall, there is a disagreement about the used requirements on delivery. You know, the old, this isn't what I asked for situation.

Compared to waterfall, this is the beauty of agile development/delivery. You put the customer at the center, they drive it and it's very likely they get exactly what they wanted because they were part of development. In fact, as an agile customer, you are both an investor and visionary. In agile, you are also delivering pieces of the development on a schedule. This piece by piece development allows and embraces changes and enhancements along the way. It's not faster than waterfall, but breaks the delivery up into smaller manageable chunks, which ensures on time delivery.

I have sat in some meetings where we discuss releasing software and updates when there are bugs or if there wasn't enough time to get an item into the next release. These meetings are still customer and value focused. At times you push forward with software with minor bugs because it still generates value for the customer. As long as the bugs or delayed capability does not create a bad user experience, you push forward. There are times when I am shocked because I am pushing for a delay and the customer responds, that's fine. We need feature X right now and we need you to push it right now! This is the same situation we find when we are trying to be first to market. Does picture taking cell phones ring a bell? Remember, you would send a photo and the receiver would get a text requesting that they go download the photo from the network because, there was no solid way to send a photo. That was a first to market venture.

  What I am saying in a very long way is that you are seeing this agile flow with Beyond ATC and other developers. You can call it beta testing or what ever, but the fact remains that you as the customer get your hands on it right now and effect change with your feedback. When you are paying upfront, like my customers do, you are paying for a say/stake. It's easier to bring in ideas and changes while development is happening. When you wait till after delivery, it's too hard to stray from the base code that was implemented. This leads to a NEW development project.

I remember being in the USAF and we realized that we did not buy enough KC10s. The factory was closed and Micky D was long gone. We even looked for old DC10s that we could possibly modify, but imagine the cost of that, if any were usable. Of course, Boeing wanted to push us their 767. The thing that was great about the KC10 is that it carried a lot of fuel with it's addition of body tanks and that fuel could all be burned or offloaded. You could also switch from a boom platform to a drogue platform in under two minutes. You could send any receiver type to the KC10 all at the same time. When Boeing was asked if they could add body tanks similar to the 10, they responded that they would have to re-open the 767 line to re cut the wings. Of course that would be a nominal fee. So we are now stuck with the Frankenstein tanker, which is the KC46.  

At the end of the day, you can purchase and drive the change. Or......., you can wait till the final product and post what you don't like and wish it did. Then you are at the mercy of the developer as they decide if it's even worth pushing forward with the requested changes. I have watched this group and they seem serious and transparent from the start. They even polled their customers for the early release decision. As I recall, they even made a major decision to control and inject traffic based on feedback. I know some won't be happy regardless. I support developers that are pushing the envelope of realism in our hobby. 

2 hours ago, SAS274 said:

• Initial descent was fine and it went nicely until around 8000ft. SayIntentions had screwed up at this point by telling me to climb while I was descending and just giving me random altitudes. This went fine. 
• It did leave me at 8000ft for too long though and then it gave me a radar vector slightly to the right even though the runway was pretty much straight-on
• It did give me clearance to descend further but I was too high to land at this point.

Yeah I've had this issue with all my flights so far, leaving me at certain altitudes way too long on decent.

I've started ignoring it after the initial decent clearance and just following the flight plan down, ATC does not yell at you if you do that.

Looking at their discord, a quite a few people have this issue.

Edited May 6, 20242 yr by Tuskin38

I did two flights.  Klga to kmke.  Everything worked pretty good until i accidentally hit x and closed it out instead of minimizing it. Luckily it picked up right where i left off…. Well i thought it did but it didn't.  It picked back up just out of pa but just about 200 miles from milwaukee at pegee near grand rapids it told me to turn right 100.  So i just went to the menu and said.  I want to go to pegee and it told me no! Cant go to fixes while being vectored.   So back over Detroit and handing me off from Cleveland center it was obvious it was sending me back to laguardia.   But i was too far north. Once i got over ct and long island it vectored me out over the ocean and then went in circles.  No option could  break the vectoring. I closed the program and tried again.  And it finally told me to go to newel.  My first wpt after laguardia.  Thinking maybe it would take me to milwaukee.  It did not after newel it just stoped talking qnd got frustrated and got out.   Probably would have made it to mke had not closed the window but the window is my least favorite part of the program.  It doesn't run in msfs so you have to keep hitting windows key to get to it in the app tray.  You can use it minimized, you can talk to it and it will talk but you wont see the beyond atc window.  
 

The second flight was tus to phx.  I figure this is a nice easy flight no problems.  Clearance was good pushback good.  Now the wind was being reported as 200at15g 26.   Tus has a 12/30 and 22/4. Msfs and fsltl were in agreement the active runway was 12.   It was actually 30 but…we know this wind problem. So batc tells me taxi a7 d to runway 21.  Well there is no runway 21.   So this proves that if the afcad is goofed batc will be goofed as well.  So i go to runway 12 see if i can get an option. No option.  Demands i use 21.  So i try to slew to 21 hold point but this messes it up.  It thinks i have started my takeoff roll and says stop immediately.  Then says bad pilot.  So i ask for take off on 21. Taxi down to 12 take off and i have finally gotten that over.  I checked several times and both my simbrief and msfs fp were set for runway 12 so it just decided based on wind 21 was active.  Its really 22, so it’s wrong in bullfrog sim tus scenery.  The rest of the flight was ok. It was giving me hand offs a bit late.  It also made me climb above my cruising altitude because the pinng1 at hottt is 22000.  My cruise was supposed to be at 16000.  So it took that bad info from msfs. Every thing else was good until i landed.  It did not want to give me a gate i wanted no matter what i did.  It wanted to give me c11.  I wanted a or b, it would not give me either.  Thats when i realized Bmw amsim have the gates set up wrong in their “afcad” so if a developer has not done the “afcad” correctly gates,taxiways, runways.  It will screw up batc.  I think this is too early for early access.  But everyone couldn’t hold their horses so here we are.  
 

apologies for grammar im typing this on an i phone while i wait an inordinate amount of time at a restaurant for my food. 

**Minor update: 1.0.17.EA**

 

- SID selection process improved to reduce flight plan load errors.

 

- An error is displayed when airports only have runways and no parking. Runway starts not currently supported.

 

- Malmo Control changed to Sweden Control

 

- Fixed a bug where if you spoke "XX 8 Whiskey" the AI would interpret this as a food statement and change it to "ate whiskey" 😂 

 

- Fixed a bug with speaking runway 26 wouldn't be understood

 

- Fixed a bug where program would crash if you load an airport with no taxipoints whatsoever

 

- Made the auto respond character UK Male to be less kangaroo 🇦🇺 and more spot of tea 🇬🇧 (Voice sample still not updated, will be in next update)

 

- Removed old tooltip text from outdated version

 

- Updated road map to reflect no traffic in current version

 

- Stability fixes

Is anybody running this with ATC Chatter in the background? Seems like a good match…

17 hours ago, tup61 said:

The guy replied with NO and ATC then thought he wanted to go to a gate called N O. "Gate November Oscar does not exist". LOL

lol 😂

I just finished a flight in the Bonanza, and departing from Strasbourg (FranceVFR), ATC informed of missing taxiways, and that I should taxi to the runway at my on discretion. Or similar. Perhaps not a bad idea doing it this way, as I’m sure it’ll be like this with many airports. Something the FSHud dev has elaborated on recently. 

Edited May 6, 20242 yr by Cpt_Piett

41 minutes ago, thepilot said:

Is anybody running this with ATC Chatter in the background? Seems like a good match…

Yes it fills the gap!

Edited May 6, 20242 yr by roland_lfor

I am reading some good and honest reviews here. I do wonder though how long people will be saying 'it went well... despite a few problems'. The problems I am reading about I also encountered during the beta, nothing new here. And I also started off by saying 'it went rather well...' but after weeks and weeks of flights that didn't go well you stop saying that. I also warned the team when I noticed beta testers started to work around problems. Like Tuskin38 said: 'I've started ignoring it after the initial decent clearance'. A lot of beta testers got used to specific problems, learned how to work around them and then said 'BATC works well!' while it didn't. More and more beta testers started to report flights that were 'perfect' but they often were perfect because they learned how to prevent or avoid problems caused by BATC. I don't think paying customers will be as friendly as most beta testers were.

But well, we'll see how it goes. I am off to Discord now to see if there already is another payment method so I can give the EA a try myself.

Edited May 6, 20242 yr by tup61

10 hours ago, SAS274 said:

It couldn't give me any taxi instructions because data is missing - taxiways are also missing when looking at ESSA in little navmap so it handled this nicely by telling me that data is missing and taxi is at my own discretion

At ESSA that's realistic, even though in this case this caused by missing data. But in the real world you don't get taxi instructions at ESSA, they use standard taxi routes which you are supposed to follow.

1 hour ago, roland_lfor said:

Yes it fills the gap!

Which ATC chatter and how to implement please? I have stick and rudder but assuming real ATC is being used?

35 minutes ago, tup61 said:

I am reading some good and honest reviews here. I do wonder though how long people will be saying 'it went well... despite a few problems'. The problems I am reading about I also encountered during the beta, nothing new here. And I also started off by saying 'it went rather well...' but after weeks and weeks of flights that didn't go well you stop saying that. I also warned the team when I noticed beta testers started to work around problems. 

 

Don't forget that now the community is testing this product and reporting bugs.  And the dev released TWO updates within 24 hours.

17 minutes ago, MikeyOnTheFlightDeck said:

Which ATC chatter and how to implement please? I have stick and rudder but assuming real ATC is being used?

Yes. With LiveATC. Works only good in the U.S. 

In the EU they made it basically illegal anywhere to listen in.

24 minutes ago, MikeyOnTheFlightDeck said:

Which ATC chatter and how to implement please? I have stick and rudder but assuming real ATC is being used?

I use stick and rudder as well.

Edited May 6, 20242 yr by roland_lfor