Zack Millar

Hmmm. It's a thought, certainly, longer-term. I was more wondering for a one-off experience for now!

Looks cool - just a pity they only let you at the controls for 15 minutes for your money!

Hello all! I'm wanting to have a go in one of these full-size cockpit flight simulators of airliners that you see. I'm having a little trouble in my research, though. The trouble is that, if you want a full-motion one, they seem to be eye-wateringly expensive (in the region of £660 per hour, according to Virtual Aviation in Heathrow and Gatwick and so forth). However, I wonder if a fixed-base one (the likes of which iPilot in Westfield Shopping Centre runs for £160 per hour) will be very realistic, or will it not seem altogether different from flying my desk, cockpit instrumentation aside? So, my question is this - have any of you flown full-size flight sims around London, and which do you think is best? Is full-motion worth the extra money, or is fixed-base also great fun? Thanks!

Hello all. So I'm trying to teach somebody the basics of flying using the shared cockpit feature of FSX, and we keep hitting a problem. The first problems are loading times - his system took an hour and a half (I exaggerate not) to load the flight. Is this because he lives in the United States and I live in the United Kingdom, or is there an underlying problem? Apparently it never took anything LIKE that length of time offline. The other problem was an interesting and curious one. After this extortionate wait, the cockpit flashed onto screen briefly for him, maybe for a few seconds, then it went back to loading textures (i.e. black screen, white progress box, etc). Granted, it went an awful lot quicker - maybe a couple of minutes. Then, it seemed to hang at 99% every time (sending FSX unresponsive and so forth). The curious bit is that as soon as his cockpit flashed onto the screen, I got the notification that he'd joined my aircraft, and when his thing started loading, nothing changed for me. Are we doing something weird? Is HE doing something weird? Is it all too much to ask of FSX to achieve this over such a long distance? We are doing this through Gamespy, by the way. Would doing it through the direct IP method make any difference? Thanks very much!

Hello all. I'm looking for some photorealistic scenery add-ons for the UK for FSX. I mainly want this to aid VFR navigation at low levels (2000 feet, etc.) My first inclination was to go for the traditional GEX/UTX pairing, as this was the popular choice, but then others tell me it isn't a huge improvement for the UK. Anybody got any suggestions as to what I should go for? One other suggestion was UK2000 - thoughts? I'm quite happy to invest in payware, but if there's any good freeware around then even better! Oh, and whilst you're here, any thoughts on the UK2000 airports packs, too? Thanks very much!

Hello all. I'm looking for some photorealistic scenery add-ons for the UK for FSX. I mainly want this to aid VFR navigation at low levels (2000 feet, etc.) My first inclination was to go for the traditional GEX/UTX pairing, as this was the popular choice, but then others tell me it isn't a huge improvement for the UK. Anybody got any suggestions as to what I should go for? One other suggestion was UK2000 - thoughts? I'm quite happy to invest in payware, but if there's any good freeware around then even better! Oh, and whilst you're here, any thoughts on the UK2000 airports packs, too? Thanks very much!

Onebob - thanks, I have downloaded the drivers package and we'll see what happens. GHD - thanks for the tip. I suppose that's step one for me. Virtuali - oh, I see! That probably explains why, when I upgraded my memory from 4GB to 16GB on the Mac and I put Parallels to 8GB, there was no noticeable performance increase in FSX anyway! Thanks very much for this - I will give Bootcamp a try. Bootcamp Assistant, here I come!!!

Bob - I'm running an ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB (but as I say, Parallels is only able to give Windows XP 256MB of that). Can I ask what CCC is? Thanks.

Hello all. I posted a wee while back in the CTD forum about problems with blurring textures, disappearing system text and CTDs, but I didn't have any screenshots to show what's going on. Unfortunately, I still don't have a screenshot to show the colours appearing, but this is a screenshot of the Wilco A319 with the disappearing text problem:Re the colours thing, it happened briefly last night when I was flying over open countryside in England. Basically, these rectangles or columns seem to randomly spawn from the ground and shoot up into the sky, not appearing to stop anywhere. They can be any colour in the spectrum, but usually browns, purples and greys, although it has been known to put up blues, yellows, etc.By the way, I'm running on Windows XP through Parallels Desktop 6.0 for Mac, which is giving XP 8GB of RAM, 2 CPU cores of the four on my i7 chip, 256MB of video cache and an automatically expanding hard drive. It should be more than enough to run FSX, right? If trying to run too high graphics, what graphics levels do you recommend for me?Thanks!

No, I didn't do 1 or 3, but I did do 2. It doesn't actually give me any more info on the CTD other than 'Flight Simulator X has stopped working'. Had it given me an error code, I might've got somewhere lol!

Hi everybody.I've been using FSX for a good couple of years now, starting on Windows XP SP2 and, more recently, upgrading to Windows 7. The only add-ons I've got for it is a FeelThere Wilco Airbus Evolution package, and FS2Crew to interface with the package. I also have FSUIPC and FSInn for VATSIM flights. My problem is that, practically every session at some point, one of four things happens:1 - all system-generated text disappears, replaced by vertical bars similar to a barcode.2 - as above, but replaced with nothing. All that's left are the small underscores under words that would signify hotkeys.3 - vertical lines and rectangles appear in 3D space all around me, outside cockpit and inside cockpit alike. These are usually solid, random colours.4 - a combination of the three above.Note that, when 1 and 2 occur, when you open the ATC window, all text appears very momentarily - only a flash - and then disappears again. This happens whenever you'd open and close it. The funny thing is that when using the Messages window in a mission, the messages text appears fine, but the title bar doesn't!There seems to be no pattern to this whatsoever. It can occur with system aircraft, complex or not, add-on aircraft, anywhere, any weather conditions, etc.Now, you may be wondering why I've put this in the CTD forum. That's mainly because I can get a CTD error sometimes, too, if the whole thing just freezes up for no apparent reason.Also note that this can happen in Windows XP or in 7 (I have both running on Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac).Any ideas? I'm worried about this because I've made a considerable investment in control gear and the Wilco add-ons, and I hope to add scenery add-ons such as REX, GEX, UTX, etc. Is this caused by any of the add-ons I've got?In case you're wondering, my system specs are:2.93GHz Intel Core i716GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAMATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB graphics card2TB hard drive with plenty of space still on itTwo 27" monitorsThanks very much.