BenW

+1 on world of ai. It's weird that no payware developer has come up with an ai program that matches the quality of the woai stuff that is free.

Im afraid to say you'd better get used to stuff not working properly as far as the Airsimmer is concerned. You'll be spending a lot of time trying to make it fly! It's a crying shame as the VC is absolutely amazing and the sound set is fantastic. It was so nearly a FS9 classic but I'm afraid with stuff from iFly, Level D, PMDG etc around which works out of the box and has great support I found that life was too short to try to work around the Airsimmer's many shortcomings. A real pity as we'll probably never see a proper Airbus for FS9.

It can be done but due to the way FS9 models ground friction and other variables then it's very difficult. In real life most jets will taxi happily on idle thrust only. In FS9 they won't so you need to give it lots of gas and doing that on one engine gives you huge amounts of yaw. It's doable but see-sawing down the taxiway with huge applications of thrust would be unacceptable in terms of passenger comfort and safety.

Very hard to taxi SE in FS9. I tried it in the ifly 737 (which has a decent ground handling model) and I needed almost takeoff levels of thrust to move the thing and then the yaw was almost uncontrollable. Thankfully the Jet A1 in FS is free!

FSX runs like crap on my iMac but it is a 2008 vintage 24" with a measly 256 MB ATI Radeon and a 2.8GHZ Core2Duo so hardly cut out for gaming. FS9 runs pretty well though and the screen is amazing, even if it runs a bit hot after a while!

My pet hate is when I forget to arm the approach mode on an otherwise perfect flight. It's amazing how quickly you over-run the GS and are unable to catch it again without a seriously unstable approach. Also I don't know how you can fly into default airports. I've even got to the point where they need to be up to UK2000 extreme level for me to even bother with!

FS Navigator is one of those add add-ons that I was absolutely lost without when I first installed FSX. As far as I can see, nothing even now comes close!

Oh dear. This is like watching a slow-mo car crash.

Yes default ATC is useless. Trying to make it work in any way like it happens in real life is pointless. I'd highly recommend Pro Flight Emulator. Each flight takes a bit of setting up but once you get your head around things it works really well. The accents are matched to the ATC regions and the airlines, so fly into Zurich and you'll hear a German or French accented controller, an Irish Aer Lingus pilot in the frequency and if you are flying an Olympic Airlines plane your Captain and copilot can both be Greek! Radar Contact is also very good and easier to use but is left behind in terms of immersion. There's also Vox ATC but I've never tried that.

I might try redownloading the FP and trying again. Yes 256 MB is pretty thin for gaming these days but the iMac is of course impossible to upgrade. Perhaps I need to do some PC shopping....

Now that the custom textures are available for the iFly 737 feature pack I've given it another try after suffering from really bad frame rates when I upgraded when it first came out a few weeks back. Sadly for me, it's still unflyable no matter how much I tweak. I run FS9 on an 24" iMac (256MB ATI Radeon/4GB RAM/Core2Duo 2.8GHz) which is hardly a stellar performer, but it's adequate given that I can't justify a whole new PC for gaming only as I'm strictly a Mac boy. With all the nice stuff running in the background (GEX, REX, UTE, ASv6.5, FS2Crew, PFE) I can get a steady 21fps from the old version of the 737NG on the ground at UK2000 airports. It's only with daft levels of ai and/or really heavy weather that things get a bit bogged down. With the feature pack installed the frame rate is all over the shop and even though it often *says* I'm locked at 21, it feels like 10! I'm downgrading and sad to leave behind the many improvements of the FP but it's either that or I'll never fly this bird. Just wondered how everyone else had got on?

Agreed. I'm grateful we have it at all!

I too have drifted away from the 146 back to the iFly 737 until they do something about the loss of power to the MCP and the comms panel when the engines are off. As I use PFE I need to tune the radios and having to start an engine at the gate to get power flowing was getting annoying. I also miss provision of TOPCAT support which makes planning a flight in the 737 a doddle. I have a fair amount of runway 'anxiety' in the 146 due to the crapshoot nature of selecting an assumed temperature for takeoff! That all said, the package as a whole is up there as an FS9 classic.

I feel rather sorry for the developers as they are asking users to 'spread the word' that the thing is fixed on their Facebook page after 'a lot of bad press' but they only have themselves to blame. It's one thing to have a couple of bugs that are ironed out with a patch in time but if the thing is unflyable out of the box then you're in for a world of pain and bad PR from what is essentially a very small community who frequent a very small patch of the internet. After the Airsimmer saga I know many of us won't be bitten again.

Yes I've tried to launch the PFE display utility but nothing happens. Weird. Anyway, sorry for going off topic....

With all these crashes, it's a good job they called it the 'blackbox' Airbus! I must admit I'm far from blown away by the screenies this far. The PSS A320 back in the day was brilliant, pity this one isn't off to the greatest start.

Sounds interesting. I'm still an FS9 guy but when I do finally give in to FSX, I might look at this. I have a rather love hate relationship with PFE currently, which matches comms up with the surrounding ai and has accents that match the airline and airspace. Occasionally though it does daft and annoying things and is not as user friendly because it lacks a menu to see which button does what. Looks like this might have the edge, if they get it nailed. I'll bookmark this one.

Just gave this a quick go and it's very cool. Approaching Bristol in the iFly 737 it announced 'approaching Zero 9', then gave me a 'too high' which was a little worrying as I was on the GS but ignore that. Then on touchdown I got a '1000 remaining', a '600 remaining' and a '300 remaining'. After vacating you also get a FSUIPC window opening which gives you your vertical speed at touchdown (461ft/min) centreline deviation (13ft in my case) and distance remaining (1321 feet). All in all very cool, and free! My only observation is that the landing report might be a bit of an interference if you're using FS Pax, Radar Contact, PFE etc as the only way I could get rid of it was to right click on the banner, which of course pauses the sim. Can you assign a key to close it? It might be a good revision if the developer includes the option to turn it off. I personally hate banners and pop ups in the VC as they are very distracting.

Got them and had a quick flight. To be honest, there's no hiding the fact that the textures away from your immediate eye line are from a product that's 7 years old. But - it certainly looks nice (especially at night) and this brings the 767 VC up to a standard that puts it back into my hangar. I've not flown this bird for so long, I'd forgotten how smoooooth it is and how it's a joy to fly. I've not fared well with the iFly 737 since the FP (crappy frame rates) and the QW 146 is great, but this is a proper grown up airliner and just for fluidity on my system alone it's back on the table. A true FS9 classic. It's a pity that Level D aren't still in the game. When you think that the 757 has essentially an identical flight deck, all they needed to do was build an external model and rework the flight characteristics for the narrowbody. It'll never happen for FS9 and the FSX guys have been waiting 7 years. I fear they might be waiting for another 7!

I think you missed my point Dillon. With the exception of Japan there aren't many 1 hour sectors in a 777 or 747. I haven't got time to do 9 hour sectors in flight simulator. I want short, busy 200-250NM sectors where you've just enough time in the cruise to sort out the arrival and get set up and you're on the way down. The heavies are not setup for this kind of flying.

In scenery terms I'd put FlyTampa, FSDT and UK2000 at the top of the tree. Without even looking you just know that anything from those guys will be top notch. Aerosoft is hit and miss, mostly down to the fact that they use different developers for their own branded products. Their Balearics scenery is superb but Barcelona for example for FS9 is almost unusable for me in terms of frame rates and the less said about their Schipol scenery the better, which brings my PC to it's knees. Ifly have raised the bar but I'm still getting performance issues post-FP so for the time being the QW146/RJ is the chariot of choice for me. This suits me fine as I usually choice city pairs that are around an hour apart. As much as I'd love the upcoming 747 and 777 from the likes of PMDG for FSX, I'm not sure where I'd fly it with any kind of realism.

Ok I'll give that a go. Thanks!

Anyone know how to turn on the VSD? I'm clearly missing something here....

Well I've never tried it into somewhere like Innsbruck (it's strictly an instrument only approach in real life anyhow, as I understand it) but certainly Geneva and Zurich haven't been an issue. I use Vroute which now includes SIDS and STARS so the route you plug into PFE includes the STAR waypoints anyway. PFE drops any waypoints which are too close together so the finished result won't be quite as it began life when you exported it from Vroute but it'll be in the ballpark. I then use Vroute to give me a flight profile and plug those altitudes into PFE alongside the respective waypoint. This always works pretty well. Then I'll start the approach by following the STAR as per the flight plan and then get vectored off it onto the LOC, which is pretty much what happens in real life in most places, in the UK at least. Using this combination of both STAR and vectoring the initial STAR altitudes generally keep you out of too much trouble in the early part of the approach and although once or twice I've been vectored over higher ground than I would have liked it's not killed me yet. If you're the nervous type you can turn on STARs in the initial planning page of PFE and then you'll be left alone to fly the whole approach as per the chart to the IAF whereupon you'll contact tower. I find those approaches a little less interesting though, personally.