Hoping for some more current insight into the differences between BATC, SI, Pilot2ATC, and FSHud with respect to using Neofly and MSFS 2020 for mainly VFR flights. A lot of the posts here and on other sites are dated, going back 2-3 years in many cases, so I was looking for some more up to date info before making the purchase decision. Since Neofly starts you off with GA aircraft for the first several hours, I want ATC software that handles flying from uncontrolled to controlled and vice-versa, as the early Neofly missions are mainly cargo flights to fields and other small airports, but can also take you to large international airports as well.

Some info - I'm not using VR yet, though I have a Quest 3 and may in the future set that up - PC isn't top of the line, still working with a 3060, so the Sim looks fine in 2020, haven't made the jump to 2024 yet, and likely wont until I can upgrade the PC. To keep FPS stable, I dont use FSLTL or traffic injectors, although I'm not opposed to trying them out, I understand BATC and FSHud do traffic injection, where P2ATC does not.

Since the pricing model is subscription based, SI is the least appealing ATC software to me. FSHud and BATC are reasonable 1 time purchases, but do the same thing, so I don't want to have to purchase both to find out which one I prefer. It is a real shame BATC and FSHud do not have demo or trial versions. I have completed the 10-day trial of P2ATC and found it was very feature complete, even if the Microsoft voices were a bit robotic, that didnt bother me much at all. The Auto-Tune Radios is a must have feature, and its very nice to optionally choose to have my Co-Pilot handle the radios when I don't feel like talking. All of the ATC software seems to come with maps and some degree of in-game flight planning; I'll also add that I don't particularly like SimBrief - having to stop and fill out so much data between each flight really slows down your progress in Neofly, for flights less than 40NM in GA/VFR, it really takes you out of the experience. I enjoy that Neofly has Sim4Life in-game menus so there's very limited alt-tabbing and I can stay in the sim 90% of the time.

My only issue with P2ATC that's preventing me from purchasing is that it doesn't nicely sync AIRAC data with MSFS (as far as I can tell, Neofly is able to sync, or by coincidence is using the same AIRAC data as MSFS2020 Steam Edition). I did not need to configure Neofly to match airport and Runway data, it seems to line up correctly and hasn't sent me to any airports that don't exist in the game. Conversely, P2ATC seems to only have about 60% of the airports that are in MSFS current AIRAC. I was able to find an updated AIRAC file via google, but that was still many years/cycles behind the current AIRAC and I think P2ATC assumes you are paying for a Navigraph subscription and you'd be using that to keep it up to date with the sim. If someone can point me to a more current AIRAC or Navigraph file, that would be great; it would be nice to match 1:1 with MSFS and Neofly, but I'm not keen on paying monthly for Navigraph when I'm mainly flying VFR to smaller airports. When both the arrival and destination actually exist in P2ATC, the built in flight planner works excellently, and the software works perfectly - It's just very frustrating when I have a good mission set lined up on Neofly, but the destination airport doesn't exist for me to set up a flight plan, and I'm just flying without radios at that point, which isn't very fun 😞

I did see the video this week from BATC with their new VFR release in experimental branch - looks promising, but to access it, you need to pay the supporters pack rate, which is the same $ as P2ATC. I strongly suspect my choice is between these two, but maybe some FSHud or SI users can chime in with their experiences, I might be missing something there. Thanks in advance for any insight!

 

BeyondATC is recommended.

BATC

Since you want VFR, P2ATC and SayIntentions are it for the moment. BATC VFR is in early development and will probably be a bit limited for a while even if you pay for experimental version access.

P2ATC's main limitations are:

1. It's the only one of these ATC addons that still lacks NPC/AI traffic injection, so you won't ever hear other aircraft interacting with P2ATC. (Though P2ATC does see AI & multiplayer traffic in the sim if you have them by other means (such as the built-in MSFS settings) and will at least give you traffic alerts.)
2. It uses old-school Windows voice recognition instead of modern solutions, so isn't as good as understanding people. (Obviously won't matter to those who'd rather select by menu instead of talk.)

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Even though you emphasized VFR, I'd still like to bring up IFR for future reference: P2ATC is the only one of these ATC addons that allows you to file an IFR flight plan to/from any airport in the sim.

BATC, SI, and FSHud all currently have limitations on what airports you can use in IFR flight plans. For BATC and SI, IFR requires creating a plan in SimBrief, which is missing most tiny little airstrips.

FShud doesn't require SimBrief, but unfortunately it has its own limitation of only allowing airports that have at least one parking spot and a taxiway connecting that parking spot to the runway, which again cuts out all of those little autogen airstrips in MSFS that don't have parking spaces. (Manually installing/creating new airport scenery can work around this, but you probably don't want to do that for every Neofly job.)

The reason this matters is because Neofly will generate lots of jobs for those little airstrips. 😄

You can choose to filter out those airstrips in Neofly by using the settings to only show you jobs with destinations to lighted runways or airports with a control tower, or such, but of course that will limit the number of available jobs. This won't matter when/if you upgrade to bigger faster planes later that you wouldn't take to those little airstrips anyway, but I ran into this issue a lot in my early days of Neofly trying to use ATC addons with it.

Having said that, BATC is implementing some additional ways to create flight plans besides SimBrief, first for VFR, but supposedly for IFR eventually, so in the future BATC may become the next ATC addon after P2ATC to let you IFR anywhere.

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SayIntentions is still my favorite at the moment for a couple of reasons, but BATC is slowly catching up to the features I personally care about. In another year or two I might not need my SayIntentions subscription anymore.

Thank you for the detailed insight, that certainly helps clear up some things I was wondering about those smaller airstrips not being in the current AIRAC. 

I decided to purchase the license for P2ATC and update the AIRAC to 2603 and still did not see some of the airstrips which must exist IRL as I can zoom into them on the P2ATC map, but they won't appear as a destination in the flight plan, it must be the taxi and parking structure. 

Its useful that P2ATC let's you still select an airport if it exists for only your destination or arrival so you can tune the tower and ask for approach clearance or departure runways and taxi instructions. I've been playing that way for the early VFR stages and its been enjoyable.

9 hours ago, Magenta Line said:

(Though P2ATC does see AI & multiplayer traffic in the sim if you have them by other means (such as the built-in MSFS settings) and will at least give you traffic alerts.)

There is FS-ATC Chatter, for 'immersion'. 

Say intentions has basically neo Fly integrated. Called skyops where you can choose from missions or create own 

On the fly i found Cargo, VIP, SAR, Search 

And there is also some kind of progression/career. And there are plenty of missions from small VFR Airfields 

Edited April 4Apr 4 by flieger28

4 hours ago, Kristofski said:

still did not see some of the airstrips which must exist IRL as I can zoom into them on the P2ATC map, but they won't appear as a destination in the flight plan, it must be the taxi and parking structure. 

The taxiway/parking requirement is for FShud

For P2ATC, I seem to have remembered it being more automatic than it was, but it looks like to get all of FS2020's airports into P2ATC, you'll need to use a program called MakeRwys (link is lower down on that page) to generate a database from FS2020 that P2ATC can then import (using the Import button on the Taxi tab in the Data Mnt function inside the Utilities tab in P2ATC's Settings). Unfortunately I don't have 2020 installed anymore so can't quickly test this process at the moment. (MakeRwys doesn't work with FS2024, though you can keep using the airports extracted from FS2020)

There's also a "display non-AIRAC airports" setting in Display settings but I think that's already on by default?

Edited April 4Apr 4 by Magenta Line
Added note about Display setting

I do have "Display Non-AIRAC airports" enabled, but still wouldn't get several of them appearing. Not 100% sure, but it seems like only TOWER controlled airports appear in P2ATC, and uncontrolled airstrips/fields do not.

Two work arounds I've found were to put the destination/arrival waypoint into the flight plan if it exists, and then not file the plan. Just leave it up, and use it to tune frequencies and see weather/runway info. If Departing from controlled airspace, you wont get VFR clearance without a filed flight plan, but you can still use Request Taxi and get instructions for the active runway and departure clearance. When Arriving at a controlled space from an uncontrolled departure airstrip, the ATC seems to function as expected, even if it would seem as though you just sort of showed up randomly lol. 

The second work around was to just filter out non-ATC controlled airports from the mission list in Neofly, now I only get sent to hard surface/controlled airports and everything works great!

I play with FSHud ATC