BenW

Just to give you an update as the OP of this thread I actually use PFE most of the time now without incident. Some things that I do that seem to help give uneventful flights: - set all the initial waypoints to the cruise altitude. - turn off STARS and take vectors to the ILS (most realistic to real life) - after getting pushback I turn the PIC to 'handles all comms and flies' and he looks after the radios and sets the altitude, speed and headings to the correct values. I make sure that the AP modes are correct. - I also edit the afcad for my departure airport to allow takeoffs only on the runway I've set up in the pre flight. This stops you getting set up for a departure and then contacting ground and being offered totally the wrong one, and usually in the direction you've not pushed back for! It occasionally does weird things but these days I'd say 90% of PFE flights work fine.

It's a very impressive add-on. I'd go so far as to say better than the iFly 737, which was my previous fave. I just hope some TOPCAT and VRoute support for it come along soon.

I have Rex and ASV6. I've spent a lot of time tweaking mine but I'd be interested to compare with your settings if you'd share?

Yep you're right. I just did a quick Newcastle-Belfast hop to see what's what and there is a lot of new stuff going on. Great to have ground power and air supplied via the FMC now, lots more FMC options, terrain on the ND and of course RNP and ANP which fly the profile nicely but need to read up on as it nearly stuffed me into the grass at Belfast! User error that one, I'm sure. I was in a mild grump last night as the FP broke my active camera install and also messed up all the repaints. You'll probably be aware that there are lots of different textures that users have created since the 737 came out and my two favourites 'photoreal hood' and 'dirty' VC textures don't play nicely with the FP. A couple of users have reported FPS issues if you don't use the new VC textures and from my brief flight over the Irish Sea I can also say that something going on in front of me was hitting the frames hard in a way I've never seen in the iFly as it was smooth as silk before. I'm going to delete the whole iFLY package and start again with a fresh install and then install the repaints again one by one. Hopefully the original creators of the photoreal textures will upgrade them to be compatible with the new VC texture set. Either way a bit of user effort required to get back to where you were before the FP came along but well worth it. Good work iFLY!

I've only just installed it and it's nice to have the digital standby artificial horizon, so no more of the clacking sound you get with the old analogue one. The 737 is nice and quiet now. Apart from that, not much else leaps out at me, apart from the fact that I've got to reinstall all my repaints. I'm a huge fan of iFly but my only bugbear is that there's a lot of user tweaking to do with copying and pasting textures between folders for add-on liveries and the worn VC textures etc. That's something I like about PMDG, you just run the installer and bam, your add-on livery is installed, with no copying and pasting and potentially ballsing up your install. I'm off to have another go, will report back.

I got it yesterday and I'm blown away. Mostly because I've had a chance to use UK2000's excellent London City scenery which had pretty much lain unused as the only other aircraft in my hangar that could get in there was the ATR72 and I'm more of a jet guy - now I can fly into there all the time! Suffice to say, none of my arrivals at EGLC have been very pretty, but I've not managed to run off into the river yet! It's definitely an approach to focus your mind as you need to wind out the airbrake all the way from GS intercept as the steep approach builds up a lot of speed otherwise. One astonishing thing is the effectiveness of the brakes - the RJ doesn't (as far as I can see) have any autobrake so us regular Boeing pilots who are not used to braking the aircraft from high speed will probably end up thrown through the windscreen the first couple of times. Even with a late (and rough) touchdown I still was able to stop before the turning pad which is some distance from the end of the runway. I must point out I was no huge fan of QW's 757 as I found it hard on frames, the 'lite' panel didn't do much for me, I wasn't blown away by the VC and I found the flight model very 'pitchy' and hard to fly smoothly. After a few flights it was parked in the desert of my hard drive. I'm glad to report that the 146 is streets ahead in all respects. The sounds, the attention to detail and systems fidelity is certainly enough for even the hardest of hardcore simmers. As reported above, if you can find your way round a 737 then nothing here will frighten you too much. I'm not entirely sure of some of the systems that should be on/off at the gate or for start up, but I've always taxied with no warning lights and nothing disastrous has happened yet. Make sure you set the pitch correctly or you'll stall on departure as the first segment climb performance is a bit of an eye-opener if you're used to the pocket rocket 737NG. There's little thrust available to get you out of trouble. Setting V speeds is a bit of a crapshoot. Having been plugging all the info in from TOPCAT for so long, I was a bit lost initially but it seems that the speed placard gives you the rotate and V2 speeds for each given weight so plucking a V1 figure a few knots under Vr should do the trick. Long runways you can derate but you've nothing to go by so the figure is a stab in the dark. If it's a shortish runway I just TOGA Max as full TOGA in the 146 is some way from the same thing in a light 737 where full power is a handful. So in summary, this is on the A-list of FS9 add-ons for me, up there with the Queen of the Skies, the iFly 737 and the LDS 767. I got carried away so not much time for photos, but here's one on approach to LCY.....

I run XP but plenty of mac bods run Win 7 in both flavours with no issues.

Never had a problem with F1. The oft-maligned simmarket is also somewhere I usually get stuff from as all my purchases and download links and serials are kept in one handy place.

You could find the sounds in the FS9 sound folder and edit them, as one solution. Bear in mind though that the real 737 has a very noisy flight deck and the sounds are pretty true to life. In the real thing you'd have a headset on to talk to ATC.

I shall, cheers!

Hmm not sure. Is there a patch?

Does anyone else find this scenery very hard on frames?

I have both rudder pedals and a yoke from CH and they work fine out of the box. Enjoy!

Agree that the Airbus is long overdue for FS and it was a real pity that the Airsimmer fell at the last furlong as the sound package, exterior and VC model is absolutely superb. When I could actually get it in the air (not that often, due to the many bugs) it was a peach to hand fly - on landing you could just point it at the runway, leave it there and it'd hold the attitude perfectly all the way down. Airbus X again looks the biz but is really just the default A321 in a posh frock. My hopes are high for FS Labs - 3rd time lucky with an Airbus, perhaps?

XPax is a nice add on which fires announcements at various stages of the flight and you can customise the voices yourself. Well worth a look.

I wondered the same. Woai is simplicity in itself and works beautifully, isn't that enough?

Doesn't interest me really, to be honest. I'm to young to remember props as my first aeronautical experiences as a nipper were aboard Dan-Air BAC 1-11s and Britannia 737-200s so there's no big emotional pull there personally. I like to fire up stuff like PFE and FS2Crew and rely on the automation to be able to manage complex departures and arrivals with only me at the controls. The DC6 is going to be a real handful to fly and will undoubtedly require about half an hour just to get the damn thing started. Not for me, I'm afraid but it does look stunning, as one would expect from PMDG.

Don't really fly it much these days as it feels a bit old school alongside say the iFly 737 or the PMDG MD11 but it's a classic for FS9. You do need the Andre VC textures though as the stock VC looks very bland without them. Even today, however, it is unsurpassed in terms of functionality - as you'll find out from the ######ing hosties if you have the packs turned up too warm! Not even the NGX is *that* clever...

Nothing much to do with the flying experience itself but better functionality on the ground, i.e ability to fuel via the FMC, open doors individually, connect ground services, load different panel states quickly. The iFly's functionality in this respect is much more basic, although it is promised in the upcoming update so fingers crossed.

Cheers guys, all good advice. I've looked into the AI Zapper and have found the command in the FSUIPC settings but it doesn't seem to save. Can someone kindly give me a walk through on assigning it?

Yep you need to forget your Boeing training as the MD11 is actually a highly automated aircraft. It's fairly easy to get your head around however and after I'd watched a couple of tutorials I was away. It's from PDMG so as you'd expect, the attention to detail is obsessive and all the things that I wish the iFly 737 could do are there in the MD11. The only things I struggle with are the fairly high approach speeds (with a fairly narrow margin between stall speed and overspeeding the flaps, for added excitement) and the fact that the push/pull/rotate MCP click spots are a bit small and fiddly and are easy to miss in turbulence if you're using a bit of a active camera shake. The other thing you notice compared to the iFly 737 is how high up you sit, and how easy it is to taxi!

I run FS9 on a 24'' iMac and it runs pretty well. FSX is a washout though - slideshow central. The screen on the iMac is really nice and on a 27'' would be pretty awesome I'd imagine in terms of immersion. My FS9 is also heavily added to, with REX, UTX, GE Pro, ASE, Pro Flight Emulator and I only fly from good add on airports with AES in the iFly 737, PMDG 747 and MD11 from which I get a reasonably steady 20 fps.Downsides are that the top left corner where the video card sits does get very hot and occasionally I get OOM errors as the iMac is not a gaming machine by any stretch of the imagination. I'd imagine your hardware inside is probably a bit better than mine (512mb ATI, 4GB RAM, C2Duo 2.9Ghz) so yours will probably do a bit better. I love OSX and I'd never want to go back to Windows so I'll have to soldier on with FS9 for a while yet as I can't justify thousands on a top drawer Windows gaming rig that would never be used for anything else. Seeing as FSX looks like being the end of the line for Flight Sim on Windows with the anti-climax that is 'Flight' there might be an opportunity to look at X Plane in the future which I can install on a Mac Pro or something which would be better suited to gaming. PMDG are working on it, as are Aerosoft and others so I'm sure it'll only be a matter of time until we can say farewell to bootcamp!

I've been thinking about the things that annoy me most in FS9, the ones that really ruin my virtual pilot's day. So here they are:- Ai aircraft. Thanks to the wonderful folks at world of ai we have really nicely painted ai that blows socks off the payware stuff, but thanks to Microsoft negotiating your way round a busy airport is an absolute nightmare if you don't use the rubbish default ATC, as none of the add-on ATC programs have access to the full ai SDK. Try taxiing to the active at EHAM without a suicidal KLM aircraft cutting you up, ramming you or blocking the taxiway/and or runway, or taking off in the completely the wrong direction. For this reason I tend to stick with smaller airports as it's easier to make it into the air alive!- runway use. If you're a hardcore simmer then this is the most annoying ever as you've done the topcat report, got the charts, plugged in the sid and probably pushed back to face the right way for taxi and then you're given the other runway! You then have to alt tab out, redo topcat and rerun the sid, find the charts and turn yourself around on the ramp - argh! Ai is obviously a bit of a lost cause, but short of editing the afcad each time I fly or ramping up the wind, how does everyone else get on with planning and runway use?