spesimen

hahha sorry man i'm guessing it's a pretty esoteric topic. i have no idea how to change the flash. i think if you want to reduce the sounds just picking out the cockpit ones would be a safe bet. they are all prefixed with a c instead of an x on my setup, like c1thun1b.wav, c1thun5a.wav, etc... not sure if there's simpler way than replacing the wav files with quieter ones. cheers -andy crosby

i do believe there are free-driving modes and custom scenarios in dovetail's train offerings. as you suggest, though, it's a train, it basically goes from point a to b haha, it is somewhat restricted by its nature. i find driving the train sim to be a very zen like and peaceful experience, especially with some of the easier scenarios that model a normal run. it can also get a little boring sometimes. probably not everyone's cup of tea. the 2017 release actually just came out today, i'm gonna try it out later this evening. i'm not sure what they've changed.. maybe not a lot since i understand they have a new sim, not an update, coming in another 4-6 months or something like that cheers -andy crosby

ah, that is interesting to hear. they should update their webpage because the FAQ seems to indicate that it just pulls the waypoints from the flightplan: "Does the product read any navdata with regards to SIDS, STARS and altitude restrictions? Pilot2ATC relies on your flight plan for altitude and nav info. You can import flight plans from pln or fms files from many planning sources or from FSX, P3D or X-Plane directly. If using SIDS and STARS, just import the same flight plan you are using to load your FMS and you'll be good to go." i would agree that right now it seems to have a lot of potential, an active dev is very nice to see cheers -andy crosby

the traffic management is indeed one of it's unique features that no other ATC really does. i would agree with tom, it might be worth waiting a bit to see what shakes out with the dev. there has been some talk that there is a new version7 in beta but i haven't seen any official word about it. i have personally been using pro-atc/x for a lot of my flights lately. but it has its own set of idiosyncrasies and is in a similar dev situation where they are pretty tight-lipped about any fixes or updates and they are extremely infrequent. as far as i know, besides VOX it is the only other package that supports dynamic assignment of sid/stars. it also has weaknesses related to vectoring and the voices are pretty uneven. although there is a user who has spearheaded efforts for improving voices it will still be a while before there is a wide variety. pfe3 has a wide array of voices and seems fairly polished. but for sid/stars you load the waypoints and setup the altitude restrictions by hand before the flight. i also found it somewhat difficult to use. instead of menus is has a huge array of hotkeys (so many that there is also a companion app just for showing you what keys to press depending on the situation.) i think with practice that's probably not a deal breaker. i have only used the demo so far, so i cannot comment exhaustively about it, i feel like i need to spend more time with it before i can fully judge it. radar contact is very polished and solid but pretty much ignores sid/stars completely, you basically tell the controller you want to fly a procedure and it lets you do it, there is no actual tracking of if you are actually flying the procedure though, and similarly it doesn't take the altitude restrictions into account or anything. i like that it has failure states if you set your transponder incorrectly or don't follow directions closely enough which doesn't seem to really be something other packages do. pilot2atc looks promising as it seems to be under very active development. but it also seems limited by only working with sid/stars that you directly add to your flight plan rather than treating them as actual parts of the control scheme. seems like it might be very good for vfr or ifr general aviation but i haven't tried it yet so i cannot comment about it very much either. it is somewhat unfortunate that nobody has really fully nailed the atc solution yet cheers -andy crosby

fascinating video.. it demonstrates the 'auto-GCAS' in recent model f-16s .. pilot loses consciousness at around 8g (about 19sec in after the turn) and it recovers out of the dive automatically. cheers -andy crosby

1. yeah i think if you just file IPL it will give you the border7 or poggi5 . i don't think it will complain if the PGY is in there, in fact if you file some or all the points of a sid or a star i think it assumes you want to force it to choose that one, it's been a while so i can't say 100% i recall how that behaves. 2. yeah i think if your flightplan is just HEC then it should pick the sid and star as appropriate to the winds which would most likely match the common ones shown in flightaware. 3. i can't speak authoritatively about real life, but it's many factors that influence what you would get, not just traffic but also the way the control normally works there, weather, types of approaches, etc. also consider that it varies between usa and europe and elsewhere in terms of what is more common. for example usa flightplans frequently file the expected star where in europe they don't, partly because in europe stars tend to map much more to the transitions on a one-to-one basis so only the transition is filed .. it's a pretty complicated topic and i am just a novice also 4. i should mention that retirednavy is correct that you do need navdata for the sid/star stuff to be fully working and ideally you'd have the same cycle as you're using for your planes.., i'm not sure if voxatc ships with an old cycle of the data or not, i can't remember, if it doesn't seem to be fully using that stuff correctly that could be part of the issue. cheers -andy crosby

HYDRR is the final waypoint of that star. if you want a star assigned, you have to end your flightplan with one of the transitions into the star, not at the end. in this case you already had it with HOGGZ. by adding that extra waypoint at the end, you are telling it that you want to fly direct from HOGGZ to HYDRR instead of saying that you to fly the star. just remove that last waypoint and end your flightplan on HOGGZ (or BLH, or SALOM for example would also work) the "no vectors" box should be checked if you intend to fly the star all the way, otherwise it will give vectors once you reach around 30nm from the airport no matter what. unfortunately this will override getting vectors from STARS that are supposed to end in vectors so it's a mixed bag but i don't think any of the other ATC packages really handle this case properly either. :/ cheers -andy crosby

yep

if the order is correct in your library, in theory your custom ones should override ones below them. however we all know this isn't always the case that it works as it should. if you want to be more thorough, you should be able to prevent any potential issues from duplicates by simply removing/renaming the relevant files. i think they are all installed to \FSX\ORBX\FTX_GLOBAL\FTX_FTXG_AIRPORTS\Scenery i'd advise renaming to .off rather than deleting incase you find some reason to need them later. you might have to re-do this step whenever a new update to the airport pack is released also, not really sure cheers -andy crosby

what cooler are you using to get 5ghz? welcome aboard cheers, -andy crosby

settings->display->aircraft there should be a checkbox there "show cockpit tooltips" cheers -andy crosby

i 100% agree that's not really an airbus or boeing thing. but just to clarify, they didn't land at the wrong runway. they entered the wrong gps coordinates during initialization and then somehow ignored all of the warnings and inconsistencies that were going on with that and decided to takeoff anyway. when they were unable to rectify this issue while flying, they were diverted to a different airport due to weather conditions deteriorating from where they had started. so they did technically end up at a different spot than they were intending, but it's not quite the same thing as landing at the wrong place. cheers -andy crosby

that airport didn't exist when fsx was released. p3d is just using those same default airports so there isn't one in the sim. although navigraph gives airport information to the FMC it does not include scenery. there are a couple sceneries for OTHH in the avsim library though. this one looks like the newest: http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?DLID=180003 cheers -andy crosby

crash on exit happened to me once also. i also got a hang when hitting 'update' from the load manager. it seemed to update things correctly despite the hang, as it loads in cold and dark now, so who knows.. i will keep an eye on the exit crash thing, i have only done 2 flights with this current version so not much of a sample to work with. i do wonder if there is an issue with AS2016 instead of ASN. turning on the md wx switch drops my frames from 30ish down to the low teens (even in clear weather). i didn't get a chance to test it very much or check how it looks in an area with heavy precipitation. i would be surprised if hifhi made any changes to the API but who knows... the pmdg737 radar doesn't look quite the same with as2016 either so maybe t's something funky on their end one other question i'm not sure about is that it seemed like using the cruise detent got me a speed in the .87 to .89 mach range on both flights. i thought switching the mode from FULL PERF to pilot would let me set a slower cruise like .85 or .82 but it seems like the cruise detent wasn't really following those numbers plugged in the FMC... in a quick look i couldn't find anything in the manual specific to that page's settings but i need to dig deeper. i guess i'm not sure if is it normal for a slower cruise to pop the throttle out of the detent? cheers -andy crosby

did you try checking the "write procedures" box in the "save as.." dialog for the type you are saving. cheers -andy crosby