Jarkko

Just to add my 2 cents even though I have yet to purchase the 777: On approach to EFHK with ASN SP1b, the weather was too much for the A319 auto thrust system to handle. IAS was jumping +/- 15kts. I had to manually fly her in. I'm willing to guess, that PMDG has put much more effort into getting the auto throttle system right, that Aerosoft, but for me it seems that most reporters on this thread are using the latest version of ASN. Pure coincidence?

The above still stands. Testing is going on as we speak.

To be honest, I don't remember. I have never needed to request a DIR further than my next waypoint (or the one after) and that has worked well for me.

As far as I know, the ground interaction has been one of the most difficult parts of the update to implement. This is due to the fact, that an external ATC program has very little possibilities to effect/control the FSX generated traffic. ProATC uses it's own voice packs, that are user/developer generated. A new voice recording tool is in the making to make it easier for users to generate their own voice packs.

It has similar menu driven approach as the default FSX ATC, but a bit different. Once airborne, I let the ProATC co-pilot handle the radios and confirm ATC's instructions. By doing so, I don't have to click any buttons or open any menus (unless I want a different approach than the cleared one and so on).

The latest news is, that a glitch was found during last minute testing. The good news: it will be fixed before release. The bad news: The release will be delayed.

Thanks! I managed to solve it on my own. I deleted all FSX flight plans (.fpl) and PMDG flight plans (.rte). I had about 800 of these files on my system from 3 year of flying. Now the MD11 flies again!

Ok, Anyone been able to solve this problem? My MD11 is no longer working after I tried to do a flight from LEPA to EDDF. No any airport combination crashes FSX during INIT.

I tried to say, that the bug was in ProATC and now fixed. Only effected couple of airports.

Hello! Just wanted to stop by and relay latest info from the forum. The release is planned for today evening/tomorrow morning based on the timezone where you are located. As always, there is an if. I and many others are currently doing testing for the final version. If there is a MAJOR problem. The release will be postponed. @Daveo: BTW we found a bug in ProATC's ASN integration during testing and it should be fixed in the release version.

Hello Steve. Thank you for the info. Sorry for going of topic, but I had to mention something. The DX10 is the best thing that has hit my system in a very long time. Excellent product!

I have to say, that I'm just the opposite, so it's good that PFPX caters for both ways of flying. I only fly with current real world weather. If it's night time in Europe and I want to do a day time flight, the I'll do a flight in US or Canada. I get tired of winter during winter, then I will fly somewhere where it's summer season.

And with 99% probability you have never used PFPX (or you have, but used on 1% of it's available feature set). Out of interest, could you please post a feature comparison between PFPX and SimBrief?

Absolutelu true and I should have been more specific By validation, I didn't mean to validate against AIRAC. The minimum requirement for any generated route is that it is using airways and waypoints that are included in the navdata. The validation that I was talking about is the Eurocontrol CFMU validation (for European routes). This is where things get though. You have a route that is "valid" based on AIRAC, but based on Eurocontrol rules, you are only allowed to fly it on mondays and only after 2200Z (and so on). Also there are cases where you are not allowed to use an airway unless your origin is X and your destionation is Y. The list goes on and on and on. This is what you get, when you have so many countries in such a small place

Thanks for pointing that out! Post is now fixed

I use both for generating the flight documentation and also FSBuild. I love them all for this particular job. As mentioned before, the comparison between PFPX is apples to oranges. I'll try to explain why by this example based on my workflow: Step 1: I will find/generate (and validate) the route Step 2: I will do fuel and performance calculation Step 3: (Once plannign is done) I will monitor my aircraft's flight on a moving map (and also online traffic and ATC) 1.1 finding a route. Here is where I will look for ready made routes (in order of preference): - flightaware.com - eurofpl.eu - vroute 1.2 If there is no ready made routes. I will generate one with (in order of preference): - rfinder paid version (has a built in validator) - eurofpl.eu (has a built in validator) - PFPX (has a built in validator) - FsBuild - FSCommander (by "validator" I mean Eurocontrol CFMU validation) If the program doesn't have an built in validator, I will use vroute for validation. 2) For performance planning it's TOPCAT (only supports certain aircrafts), but for fuel planning and documentation it is (in order of preference): - PFPX (has direct integration for TOPCAT which is a huge plus) - SimBrief (it's free!) - FSBuild 3) For monitoring my flight, online traffic and ATC I use (in order of preference): - EFB - FSFlightKeeper - FSCommander - PFPX So if you look closely, PFPX is mentioned in all of the three steps, but SimBrief in only one of them. The point I'm trying to make: SimBrief currently has less features than PFPX, but the things SimBrief does, it does them very well (especially for the price).

On flightaware, the DPs and STARs are only available for a tiny portion of the world (unfortunately). Only US and Canada if I remember correctly.

The European routes is exactly where paid version of rfinder beats PFPX. Here is how: In PFPX you create the route, validate it, then you make changes so that the route passes validation. (here is a post I wrote on the subject: http://forum.aerosoft.com/index.php?/topic/72444-cfmu-validation-errors-and-using-pfpx-auto-routing-to-fix-them/) For me the _paid version_ of rfinder is more user friendly. After route generation, it will automatically tell you what parts of the route are not valid (this feature is not available in the free one). You then just tell it to avoid the parts that would cause validation errors and you are done. The point being, that in PFPX you have to know how to correct the route and iterate the validation process after each run. rfinder knows how to fix the route for you. Of course: what works for me, might not work for everyone. EDIT: my go to place for routes in Europe (not found in vroute) is eurofpl.eu

The PFPX route planning is only slightly better than FSBuild's or FSCommander's. For me only real world routes top the paid version of rfinder in route planning. The fact, that PFPX pre-selects SID and STARs is quite nice, but when flying in Europe, it doesn't work as well because PFPX can only guess which runway might be in use and the weather might change between planning and the flight. So even with PFPX, I'm importing a route I have created outside PFPX. This is why I use PFPX when flying with aircraft that have TOPCAT profiles. For everything else, it's either SimBrief or FSBuild for me.

Even with this problem. VOX Atc is still the best offline ATC available (currently).

I'm not quite following you, Anywhoo, What worked for me, was to 1) have the inspector set to default values, 2) anti-aliasing inside X-Plane set to the max and 3) kept lowering my resolution until I was no longer maxing out my GPU's memory. Cheers, Jarkko

I have them both and I love the way KJAC looks! But... There is only on problem. The runway is quite short at KJAC, so your choise of aircrafts is quite limited if you happen to fly near max TO weight (like I do as in AirHauler, more weight equals more income).

Just a quick question. What program are you using to monitor AI's Indicated Airspeed? Most monitoring programs I have seen and used, are reporting AI's ground speed instead of IAS.

To answer the question about FSPassengers: For each aircraft, you can choose if you want to use either: 1) FSPassengers own payload loading program or 2) Aircrafts own payload handling software So here is what I do: For default FSX aircraft I use FSPassengers dialog. For PMDG's and Aerosoft's products, I have configured FSPassengers so, that I will be using an external payload and fuel manager. When I have FsPassengers configured to use external manager, here are the steps of NGX: 1) I use the aircraft's fuel and payload managers to match the PFPX/TOPCAT numbers 2) Once done, I start a FSPassengers flight, load all passengers onboard and I'm good to go This way you have the correct weights, but the CG is still managed by the aircrafts own manager. --- To continue on, what TravisG mentioned. Both products should have demo versions available. Give them a try. For me, these programs are suitable for different type of flying. Also one might work better than the other on your system (performance wise). Cheers, Jarkko

Oh my, what have I done Let me try to give you the facts: The following programs (to name a few) use NOAA as their weather source for weather for the whole world: - ASN, AS2012, ASE, ... - Opus - REX - FSGRW (FS Global Real Weather) At least ActiveSky, REX and FSGRW load this data onto their own server for before making it available to you. Why? Good question! Here are a couple of reasons: Reason #1: Historical weather. IIRC NOAA doesn't have a long history of METARs/winds aloft/TAFs. It's about 2 months or so (please correct me if I'm wrong). In order for weather engines to provide historic weather past this time period, they have to store the data on their own server. Reason #2: Interpolation and FS friendly weather. The data from NOAA isn't FSX friendly. AFAIK (when airborne) FSX use triangulation to decide the current weather in your current position. To get the weather more FSX friendly the weather programs can enhance the NOAA data, by adding "fake" weather stations. This is called interpolation in ActiveSky. I don't remember what the other weather engines call this process. The main idea is to "fill in" empty areas so that during triangulation, FSX doesn't get weather from two stations that are (for example) 20nm away and from one that is 500nm away. You can imagine how different the weather can be between these point if no "fake" stations are added to help the triangulation process. Reason #3: Less traffic on NOAA site. When you have all the simmers around the world requesting the current weather every 5 minutes (or so). It's good that they do not cause traffic to NOAA's site. If traffic goes to high, NOAA might no longer provide the global weather info as a free service. --- So for ASN, REX, FSGRW the process of weather fetching looks like this: NOAA server -> Weather engine's own server -> Your computer's weather engine -> to a file on your computer's drive (this step is optional). No sure, but I think that Opus get's the weather directly from NOAA to a file to your computer and then does all interpolation and weather smoothing on your machine (might be wrong though). --- The following weather engines can provide weather uplink data for the PMDG 777: - ASN - FSGRW - Opus - (not sure if REX has this already implemented) The main point, the PMDG 777 weather data isn't ASN exclusive feature. Even the 777 weather radar "works" with all weather engines (even the default one) in case you have installed ASN on your system at any given time. All is required is a DLL that only ASN supplies. After that, the 777 weather radar works with most weather engines. Even I can create you a program for the PMDG's 777 data uplink from the NOAA data. FWIW the programs I have made, use NOAA as a weather source and the results match exactly with ASN, FSGRW, REX and Opus. --- Last but not least. VoxATC reading weather data from NOAA/ASN/FSGRW/Opus/REX/name your product: I received a reply from the VoxATC developer about this feature and it was something like this: "Might consider it in the future, but currently the isn't enough time available to work on this feature". ---- One last thing: PFPX and EFB do load the weather in the background without letting you know. You can even force a weather update at any time you so desire. Cheers, Jarkko