BenW

I must admit I'd find hand flying a fully manual raw data VOR radial intercept into Heathrow in the default 737 a bit too much of a challenge these days. In fact, I don't even know where I'd get started if I had to learn it all over again in the default stuff - no TOPCAT to tell me how much fuel to put on and what the speeds are, no speed tape to tell me when to bring up the flaps, no SIDS, no STARS, no FMC to follow, crappy autopilot, no way to navigate other than using VORS, acres of planning needed to try to figure out the route, no Vroute etc. In the real thing you just plug it all into the autopilot and off you go and at the other end you follow the vectors to the field. It's not difficult. But learning how to use all the stuff that makes your life easier is the challenge. The sad thing is that apart from the takeoff up to 1000 feet AGL, you could fly a 737 (a decent one, NGX or iFly) by just using the keyboard all the way down cancelling reverse on landing roll!

A great Airbus seems to be elusive for FS. Aerosoft's looks great but beneath the posh frock it's pretty much just the default Airbus and we all know how poor that is, Airsimmer died trying, PMDG chucked in the towel before starting, FS Labs are understandably being cautious in their announcements and the PSS and Wilco efforts are hopelessly outdated against the newer iron. Fingers crossed that Aerosoft are going to nail this.

Looks great. I guess the point that I was making is that X Plane has always been playing catchup in terms of systems fidelity and detail to Flight Simulator but this might change the game. Interesting stuff.

Looks great. As a Mac user (only keep Windoze around for FSX/FS9) it'd be great to consolidate on one OS for my simming needs. But we still haven't seen any big iron yet for X Plane that comes close to even the stuff that FS9 had 6 years ago (LDS 767, PMDG etc) and I won't be making the leap until there is. Fingers crossed eh?

Looks great. Pity all the benchmark FS9 add-ons (PMDG, LDS, iFly) are too big to get in there. I think I'll have to dig the F1 ATR out, but it would be nice to have a go in a jet. Could you get a 737-600 into EGLC?

Nice vid and demonstrates how immersive PFE can be on the ground with all the other traffic around you. Your vid did highlight the frustrations of ai though in that crossing the runway you came face to face with another aircraft which of course would just come barrelling towards you. I'm also pretty sure that had you not got rolling when you did then the ai 747 you missed would have taxied straight in front of you, Tenerife '77 style.

I too have been spending a lot of time getting my head around this thing. Last night I tried a Geneva - Paris CDG and although all went well out of Geneva (was great to be in an Air France plane with a French pilot) I ran into some issues during the flight. PFE erased my waypoint near CDG, so the only waypoint I had after leaving GVA was at Dijon. I got vectors all the way from Dijon into CDG - hardly realistic. Also the automated ATIS gave me a runway in use that the AI was using, but I was vectored onto the opposite one and ended up face to face with a 777 using my arrival runway as a taxiway!I did forget to refresh the ai in ASE so that might be the problem. Anyone know how can I force back into the flightplan the waypoints that PFE has deleted?

Well chaps, I've been testing PFE pretty exhaustively over the weekend. I've got my head around it a bit more now and feel suitably qualified to give an informed opinion on it thus far. My initial thoughts on the immersion side still stand. I've only flown in the UK with it so far (apart from two flights to Dublin and Cork) so can't comment on foreign controllers but I am a big fan of the audio engine in PFE and the sounds are superbly done. Controller transmissions even contain hiss and squelch noise and the delivery is fluid and lifelike. I like the fact that each airline's pilot voices are the right nationality (it was nice to have a Pakistan Airways flight on the frequency, sounding exactly like they do in real life!) and some aircraft transmissions are faint and scratchy, simulating the flight being almost out of radio range for your aircraft despite the controller himself being loud and clear. Certainly from creating a realistic ATC environment around you point of view, there's nothing better. Users hopping over to this from RC, however, will find some aspects of PFE rather frustrating and clunky. First off with a single monitor you can't have the PFE display utility which shows you the various ATC selections available to you. Of course the selections change depending on whether you're tuned to tower, clearance, approach, centre etc so pressing '2' on one frequency won't help you on the next and of course you're trying to remember who you're tuned to - am I still on ground, or tower, or in the air approach, or centre, or tower? I know in real life you need to remember these things but It REALLY needs an interface within the sim to show these options. Secondly RC gives you manual control over getting the ATIS, clearance, push back clearance, taxi clearance and then departure clearance, via the numeric keys and selections available in the display window and once you're underway you can have the copilot look after everything and auto reply. PFE in its wisdom does a bit of both and it's a tad confusing to figure out when it does what where. For example you need to tune the ATIS yourself. Okay no problem. But then if you want to get your clearance and then push back clearance separately this involves changing your virtual co pilot mode to 'off' or when you tune for initial contact he rattles all the way through both, getting clearance and then calling for push and start whilst you've still got the jetway attached and the passengers are still trying to squeeze their luggage in the overhead bins. Changing the mode is apparently as simple as pressing control+shift+V, although (through lack of display showing it) I'm concerned that I won't know which mode he's in to get him back to the radios so I simply get everything ready for departure and AES hooked up before calling for the clearance and the push back. It's an annoyance, to be honest. In the real world your clearance comes some time before the actual push back. Anyhow once started up and pushed back you then have to tune yourself (what's the lazy assed copilot up to?) for taxi clearance (hope you remembered the frequency they gave you during the clearance!) and when it comes it's fast, so be on the ball for it. Thirdly, PFE does some weird stuff to your flight plan. It drops waypoints that are close together which is fine but I did a Bristol to Teesside flight and it dropped all the waypoints apart from BADIM, which is barely 10 miles to the north of Bristol. This meant that after BADIM I was given vectors all the way to Teesside, 150 miles to the north! Thankfully Teesside has an NDB that I could drop into the legs page to give me some situational awareness on the ND but it hardly made for a realistic flight. I also had to plug it manually into the FMC as the PFE route was different from the route originally given to me by Vroute. The beauty of RC is that you can drop in your flight plan from vRoute or FSBuild and away you go, the route you've plugged into it is the one you've got on your FMC. Another challenge came at Birmingham where PFE gave me the weirdest ever taxi instructions to runway 15. I've drawn a little picture so you can see it. Across the runway, past the cargo hub, up to the active, along the active and then left back along alpha to the runway! After this marathon I needed some more fuel! And PFE won't give you take off clearance until you've completed this little rally although googling the forum tells me that you can turn off the taxi guidance and then tune straight to the tower at the holding point and request take off. Although turning off taxi guidance involves....knowing which keys to press (which is dependent on who you're tuned to, of course) and there's no display to tell you, so you're trying to taxi and figure this out at the same time. Annoying. I must add though that a second flight from here using runway 33 gave me perfect taxi instructions! Once you're in the air it generally goes well. I flew the TNT4E SID all the way up to the SID height of 6000, before PFE came in to climb me to 7000. After TNT (the end of the SID) I was climbed to FL120 and then brought back down to 10,000 for the arrival into Teesside. There are no STARS at Teesside of course, so I was vectored for the final. The vectoring was nicely done and quite challenging to fly as you're asked to descend and slow down at the same time, initially to 240 knots, then 210, then 180 and 160. This adds a nice level of realism that RC doesn't do. I was turned onto base at about 15DME on the ILS and intercepted the LOC and GS at around 12DME, which worked out pretty well. The unpredictability of the speeds and vectors adds a bit of tension to the proceedings and that I liked. I'd already changed the settings so as not to be slowed down by PFE below 160 knots as out of the box it'll ask you to slow to 140 knots around 10 miles out, which is unrealistic and a tad dangerous in a heavy 737-800! Once on the ground your VCP will contact ground once you're clear of the active. You invariably are asked to hold position, so that gives you a few moments to clean up the aircraft whilst stopped. So PFE has a pretty steep learning curve and I'm still a novice with it, but on balance it's a huge step forward in creating a realistic ATC environment for FS and I must admit that on one particular flight from Bristol to Cork where I used AES, PFE, FDC for my own customised announcements and FS2Crew it all just came together in that way that FS sometimes does. Hearing Irish accented Aer Lingus pilots on frequency for Shannon control along with my own announcements in the back and the FS2Crew PNF doing his things with the checklist in the descent along with a lovely sunrise outside it all just felt wonderfully immersive and all the farting about that we do with this little game of ours seemed worth it. However, there are strange quirks about PFE and it's one of those annoying add ons whereby it seems the only way to get into it is to get it all wrong and swear at it a lot until you figure it all out, which is a bit of shame really. In an ideal world, we'd have something with RC's ease of use along with PFE's audio fidelity and features. That would get my credit card burning!

Ian I quite agree with you about FSUIPC. It seems to work by black magic and is undoubtedly one of the cleverest things for FS9, yet almost completely baffling to use. PFE is also proving to be rather similar right now!

Chaps, Bored waiting for Radar Contact v5, I've had a bash at Pro Flight Emulator. I was initially put off because it doesn't seem to be that widely used in the community and the few youtube videos that show it are pretty poor. I also for some reason expected the voices to be robotic and or computer generated. I have to say once I fired it up I was delighted with the level of immersion. There are a gazillion different voice sets so now for the first time you can have an Irish Ryanair pilot speaking to a Scottish tower controller in Edinburgh who is also controlling Lufthansa pilots who sound German, KLM pilots who sound Dutch and Monarch pilots that sound English. The voice playback is pretty darn impressive and comes with a convincing level of 'scratchiness' to sound real. Also the other big bonus for me is that there's support for ground operations so that you're not just cast out onto the taxiway with a 'taxy to the holding point' as you actually get specific taxiway instructions and a handy copilot that gives you directions, 'left onto taxiway uniform, steady, next right, left into the gate' etc. Very cool. The only thing is that it's rather hellishly complicated to get your head around out of the box. It installs with an out of date manual and you have to do a lot of searching about online to get the information needed to make it work. What this thing needs is a dufus-proof step by step tutorial, as there are various ones floating about but they're all concerned with different things. I'd like nothing more than a monster big long tutorial that I can print out and take bit by bit until I've nailed it. There are two parts to the program as it uses Proflight 2000 to build the flight plan and there's a lot of duplication between the two and I still haven't quite worked out what does what really. So I shall persevere. Has anyone else any experience of PFE? ETA I've just realised that there's been a Holy Thread Resurrection Batman about PFE. Perhaps I should have posted in there. Apologies all.