coma

Normally we keep it serious, flying at towered airports, working with ATC, the whole nine yards. This time, though, we just blew off some steam at a non-towered airport (actually, a private strip, to boot)

There's always room for fun & games, listen to this one of a 747 out of LAX that calls for takeoff clearance when he still has 1/2 mile of taxiing to do...(an Aussie pilot and a pseudo-Australian controller). Don't worry, he doesn't control much anymore. http://assets.pilotedge.net/recordings/archive/early_takeoff.mp3 (from 10 secs to 1min 39secs)

Failures are fine as long as you handle them in a realistic fashion. 747 going GPS direct from LAX to SFO with a 4 engine-out emergency screaming "mayday mayday!!" is not welcome. Realistic emergencies are fine and do not require coordination or permission. The PE plugin for xplane, as an example, monitors bus voltage. If it drops below a certain value, your radio is toast. So, if you're on a flight and the alternator goes offline, you need to do what you'd do in real world, shed load and come up with a plan, particularly if you're in IMC. Those are great emergencies. We also have the technology to check your gear state (though the controllers haven't been trained on that yet) so if you suspect there's a gear problem, you can do a low approach at a towered airport and they'll be able to check it out. Those are all fine. We can actually trigger failures in X-Plane from the scope, a feature we currently reserve for commercial clients but will eventually make available for retail customers as well. Here's a great video of one of our users (who has agreed to let us trigger failures on him without notice for testing). I was watching him stream his flight live on twitch, hopped on the scope as an observer and triggered a bird strike. This is the result: That wasn't what I was referring to when I mentioned dynamic events, though. I actually meant things as simple as, "ground, is Alpha the 2nd left or this one right here?" "Ground, can we pull over here on Alpha for a moment? We need to check something out, should take about 90 seconds." Those simple examples will result in "say again" from any synthetic system. Regarding your concern for beginners, we have pretty thorough training programs to take you through a detailed series of flights with plenty of resources to make sure you're prepared for each flight (cockpit videos, transcripts, etc).

BeechPapa, here's a link to some of the exchanges that took place on the combined radar position during the opening hour of service on PilotEdge today: http://assets.pilotedge.net/recordings/hourly/2015-1-22_8_17510.mp3 How do feel about the clarity and readability there? Note: this link will not work in 3 months from now, that's how long the recordings are kept for QA purposes. And that, right there, is why synthetic ATC systems are going to struggle to gain acceptance among real world pilots. If it's all you've ever used, it's probably ok, but once you've spoken to a real controller and realized that they understand just about everything you say, no matter how you say it, it's very, very hard to accept anything else. There are also many non-standard things that can happen during a flight, whether it's requesting an approach other than the one in use, negotiating shortcuts or practice approaches, asking for weather at other fields, or receiving interesting vectors behind other live traffic, ATC is fundamentally dynamic. This is my beef with synthetic systems, they miss this nuances...and ultimately, once you get passed the basics of IFR clearances, taxi, takeoff and landing, what's left is the interesting, dynamic stuff. $20MM Level D full motion flight simulators are often equipped with synthetic ATC systems. At most places, they simply turn off the ATC and have the instructor pilot pretend to be ATC (badly). There really aren't any synthetic systems out there, afaik, where pilots walk out of a sim saying, "boy, that ATC was amazing, just like the real thing." They sound like what they are...a computer attempting to impersonate a person. Great for stock standard exchanges, but they fall short when the going gets tough.

kama2004, thanks for the kind words. PilotEdge traffic for Dec and Jan was up 40% compared to the average for the rest of 2014. The traffic is considerably heavier than it used to be. That said, since we cover 40 towered airports, the chances of having multiple aircraft in the pattern are small unless you've arranged something in the Fly WIth Me forum. Another exception would be SNA, which almost always has aircraft inbound or outbound there because of the various training programs. I'm happy to say that we are looking closely at our first network expansion for later this year. The planning and funding are in the works as we speak. I think 737, 757 and CRJ pilots are going to be very happy with the result.

The live workshops at PilotEdge haven't been scheduled for a while. The recordings of the previous workshops have been posted, though.

Gregg, regarding PE, have you visited every airport and flown every approach in ZLA? If so, you would be the first person I've met who's done that To keep things fresh, I've added FSEconomy into the mix with PilotEdge as well as starting to tinker with helicopters. Between those things, I've found plenty of life even out of areas that I've flown into hundreds of times.

I realize this is old, but you can use native multiplayer over the internet, too, you just have to make sure you can make a direct P2P connection between the two boxes. This usually involves port forwarding and firewall holes which is typically beyond the level of comfort for most people. You can spend a few hours trying to get that working, or, as others have suggested, you're probably better off with a client/server multiplayer model using the networks that have been suggested. Another suggestion would be to check out SmartCoPilot, a shared cockpit plugin for X-Plane. If you want to fly with a buddy, this is by far the most enjoyable way to do it. It allows you to fly a single airplane together. Here are some links to some videos of shared cockpit flights: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pilotedge+shared+cockpit

PilotEdge now has native support for P3D in the installer.

Might want to consider X-Plane, I find I can trim it just fine for hands off flight. As to whether it gets easier flying in the clouds, it absolutely does. I never really experienced the wild disorientation that you experienced, but by the time I flew in my first cloud in a GA airplane, I'd had been simming for 30 years prior and had built up decent scan and confidence in my ability to interpret what the instruments are telling me. The other thing to know is that if the plane was trimmed for hands off flight prior to going into the clouds, then barring any significant turbulence, you won't need to do much else to the plane, other than small pitch changes. The plane doesn't suddenly roll all over the place just because you're in a cloud :) I fly in a wide range of IFR conditions but I don't fly much more than 100 hours per year (most of that would be 6 hour roundtrips that are many weeks apart). Without the sim at home, there's no way I'd have the confidence to fly in the clouds. I'm on the sim once or twice a week at a minimum, doing full end to end flights (not just approaches).

Where is it written that you must have RNAV capability? Here's a shared cockpit flight on PilotEdge with the 737-200. We filed /A for the equipment suffix from SNA to SFO. The route was CHAN1.RZS J501 BSR.BSR2. The VOR transmission distances aren't quite accurate for some of the VOR's, but that can easily be tweaked in the nav.dat file to bring the transmission distance closer to real world levels, especially for the VORs that are used to define the high enroute structure (Jet airways). You hear two voices, plus the ATC. The british sounding guy is the pilot flying, the Canadian guy is the pilot not flying. He's providing me with basic instruction on the systems as it's my first time ever loading up the airplane. Takeoff is at about the 25min mark. Here's the video: It's entirely possible to fly online, and real world without RNAV. Btw, this plane is a must have. It flies very nicely and the avionics keep you engaged throughout the flight. While I do love flying the CRJ-200, the simple fact is that watching the airplane perfectly fly the route loaded into the FMS doesn't leave much to the imagination.

BARET4 arrival into SAN. "Cross 25nm NE of PGY at and maintain 12,000." For the landing west transition (which is the case 99% of the time), you're never going to make it to PGY. That said, it might be in the flight plan and would still be easily accessible. The only other "cross x miles east of [location]" instances that I know of have all occurred with fixes/VORs that are along the cleared route.

Xsquawkbox_VATSIM.xpl used to be the filename of XSquawkbox plugin. Perhaps that's changed now that they have 32 and 64-bit builds. It's probably moved to a 'fat' plugin architecture, in which case, check your Xplane plugins folder for a Xsquawkbox folder, or something along those lines. When you're ready to fly on PE, just move the XSB folder out of the plugins folder. Conversely, when you want to fly on VATSIM instead of PE, move the PE folder out of the plugins folder and put the XSB folder back into play. In short, only one of these plugins can be active at any given time because both of them share the same underlying multiplayer library, and as a result, both attempt to comandeer the Xplane multiplayer system, mainly so they can drive TCAS systems correctly.

Yeah, not too many people I wouldn't hurt to get a ride in that sim Jealous! You aren't kidding about a lot of the avionics being real, too. I was helping him troubleshoot some audio a while back and he was referring actual hardware from Boeing...neat stuff.

That's exactly how PilotEdge works, the controllers are paid to be there. That's why the network offers 15x7 coverage, and is also one of the reasons that we can't cover the entire country. Each facility would cost well over $8000/month to run 15x7 and with 20+ facilities in the US alone, the numbers simply don't work. Nobody is REALLY willing to pay the money that it would cost to cover the entire country, let alone the entire world, nor is there a large enough market to be able to populate the country (let alone the world) with meaningful levels of traffic. Consider that the US routinely has 5000+ IFR flights airborne at any given time, and thousands of VFR aircraft, too...yet there are vast expanses of airspace that are virtually empty. The dream of global 24x7 coverage is exactly that, a dream. The reality is that if you had it, you'd be quite lonely...and poor as a result of helping finance that venture. The solution is a smaller coverage area (it could be bigger than PE's current area, don't get me wrong) to have any hope of decent traffic levels. People need to compromise with the coverage area and accept that global guaranteed coverage isn't going to happen. People get all excited if they see "800 pilots online" on VATSIM, but 800 planes randomly spread all over the world might just as well be zero planes in terms of traffic density for any given area.