After the "Cleveland Disaster" of last night, I finally flew my first RC3.0 flight tonight -- from Houston to Dallas Love as CoExp 3734 (JetLink 3734). My flight went very smoothly and the ride for the passengers at FL240 was excellent. We arrived at KDAL Gate 27 five minutes early -- which for a flight scheduled for only 1:00 is pretty good, huh? ;) My critique suggested that I must be a rated pilot, which I'm not but, hey, at least I didn't go see Mr. Bill! :-lol :-lol :-lol First impressions: 1) I tried the AI thing but my F$ ATIS was so much louder than the RC ATIS that I cancelled the AI and F$ ATC completely. I'm having trouble figuring out how to do the dual ATC thing described in the manual and have a bad history with AI anyway. 2) The runway choices in RC2.2 seemed much better in that you could choose which runways to include & exclude up front. I was sent to KIAH r/w 33L -- which is the little, bitty GA runway next to the BIG OLE 11,000 ft 33R at KIAH! OUCH. (I left from 33R anyway and ATC didn't catch me) :~P I suppose I should have requested a different r/w -- (33R). 3) The 1" X 1" AdvDisp box actually needs to be about 3" X 3". I have a screen shot I took which I'll send anyone who wants to see it. I couldn't figure out why the box only showed the next 2 waypoints and "(2) Leave freq for Weather". I undocked and expanded the AdvDisp and there were all the other choices. I had the font set to Arial 8 pt and that's as little as it gets. :-hmmm 4) There were no V1, V2, or Vr calls by my FO. Are they included? My ERJ lifted off at 134 kias. 5) The waypoint "ding" caused an ATC chatter exchange to just stop in mid-sentence. 6) The altimeter was set as we decended through 18,000 ft by my FO who was flying the decent. Neat! :-cool 7) I didn't have any problem with stutters or slow speech from my ATC. I have a SBLive sound card. I had to ditch the onboard sound system some time ago because it was causing FS2002 to crash. All in all, very good! I'd give it a 9 out of 10!!!! :D Steve KCLE

Steve,Glad you had a good flight - 9 out of 10, very nice!1. In one of the Sound Settings menu in FS, there's a option to turn down FSATC's volume along with Environmental voluve, Engine Sound volume etc. Play and set those to you liking so the contrast volume from RC is appropriate.2. RC cannot tell which runway is which if they are parallel. TWR will know if you are on the runway if you are within +/- 15

Steve,9 out of 10? Ouch!4) - There's a reason the V speeds were removed. John, even John (if you can imagine) got became weary of trying to please everyone. We first shot for 'hard' preset numbers respect to aircraft type (Heavy, Jet, Tprop, Prop). Naturally, given varying aircraft weights, wx conditions etc, they were never correct.We considered "boxes" where users could input their own V speeds, but given there's an inherent delay after pressing keys (time depends on machine, and what's going on in that machine at a given time), that too'd be unreliable. We guessed a 30% accuracy rate. With the numbers preset, the calls were always early/late. If you weren't paying close attention, you'd miss the ONE time they'd be on the $.Seriously, the V speeds were in RCv3 for a long time. Well, a man can take just so much of "this doesn't work" :-grr, before he's had enough. I suspect John figured, given we have less than a dozen betas and there was so much "it's not right" coming in, he didn't even want to think about what'd happen when a db of users got 'hold of it.I know John better than anyone, and I'll tell you... it's going to take many many LOUD shouts to get him to attempt this again :-lol.My personal opinon... I never paid THAT close attention to perfect accuracy. I thought they were nice to hear and added to things. Others don't feel that way though, and afterall - we ARE shooting for ultimate realism. Can we have a 10 now :-)?

v speeds won't happen.

Steve,If you want flight crew calls I'd highly recommend Flight Deck Companion for that and let RCv3 do what it does best, ATC! :-)FDC is very flexible in that you can create your own custom aircraft performance and checklist files. So far I've created files for the 737-300 based on all my real world data. I hand entered the entire speed book for the -300 and now I get correct and accurate V-Speed callouts for the entire weight range.RCv3 and FDC work very well together now and between the two you get a very realistic environment. High workload, but very realistic! :7Mike Collierhttp://jdtllc.com/images/RCbeta.jpg

OK, I can live without the V-speeds. I thought it rather odd that they weren't given in v3.0 and were in v2.2.On #3: The AdvDisp box, even using Arial 8 pt is much larger than I expected. Is there a scroll down feature? I can't find it in the instructions. Attached, I hope, is a screen shot showing the AdvDisp expanded to show everything that was in it. With the box showing about 1" high X 1-1/2" wide only the two way points, and the runway info was visible.

you will get two checkpoints in the window when the distance to the next checkpoint is 5 miles or less. when you progress, the number 2 checkpoint will move upyou see the runway information because you either got weather from the arrival airports' atis, or that was the runway approach assigned you, or that was the runway you requested.normally, you would only see 1 checkpoint, and then the menus.there is no scroll down.if you want more menus scroll left and righttry a different font than arial. you can also type in 6 or 7, you don't have to pick a font size from the selection box

That's all you're supposed to see on the menu. You use 8 and 9 to move to the previous and next pages and 0 for the main page. Sidney Schwartz [KPDX]Horizon Pilot--flight plans and scenery for FS2002http://sidneyschwartz.homestead.com/index.htmlhttp://jdtllc.com/images/RCsupporter.jpg