bennyboy75

I don't see the appeal. Anything longer than about 30 mins in the cruise and I get bored. That rules me out of flights longer than about 70 minutes. Thankfully within Europe that gives plenty of scope.

+100000 I have a preview copy of this and it's probably the best scenery of anywhere in the UK. A pal of mine (Flybe Q400 skipper who lived there for a year) had a peek around it and was astonished at how good it was.

I tried the VOX ATC demo but it baffled me and installing the panel into my aircraft was problematic. Next... Radar Contact is old and clunky but does what it says on the tin. PFE is good for immersion (has lots of different accents - German controllers are German, Alitalia pilots are Italian etc - but is a chore to set up and is temperamental in its operation. Great when it works though. Pro ATC X isn't there yet. It could be great - dynamic SIDS and STARS, a doddle to set up and use but the actual ATC instructions are so screwy it's unreal. You'll get cleared to random intersections and VORs that are not along your flightplan (indeed not even in the FMC!) and you're often left flailing about in a descent miles away from the airport. Pity, because it really could be a winner.

Now now ladies.... Agree that it's turning out to be a bumper year for the hobby, although if the Level D 757 turns up this year I'll buy everyone on the forum a copy. And a round of beers. And go talk to the fairies at the bottom of the garden! I'd LOVE it to be true but all we've seen is a screenie of part of the panel, and that was about 4 years ago.

Nothing wrong with the Logitech but you could pick up a Saitek or CH yoke for less than a couple of hundred bucks. Much more realistic for flying stuff that puts a yoke between your legs and no need for it to have force feedback. The only time a Boeing yoke will push against you is if you try to stall it. Other than that personally I find force feedback joysticks are unhelpful in their control surface loading but that's simply based on my own experience of Level D 737 and A320 sims and they way they handle. As always, YMMV. I do feel bad pouring cold water on Pro ATC X as it could be fantastic. The user interface is nice and simple, it handles SIDS and stars dynamically on the fly and if there were more voices and less oddities in there it could be superb. As it is, it's one for the future.

Rudder pedals are a must have, if you don't have them. I also added a saitek throttle quadrant recently and it's made a world of difference to my setup. Plus a yoke for flying Boeings, keep the joystick for Airbus and fighter stuff. Software wise you've got a good list. I prefer Activesky for the nicer interface and the in-game ATIS, but you'll never get a consensus on that one over Opus. Pro ATC X isn't there yet, save your money. It lacks voices and the ATC vectors are completely weird. You get vectored off to all manner of weird and wonderful waypoints, none of which are in your flightplan. Radar Contact is old and clunky but works better or PFE if you have a lot of patience and want a 'fuller' experience. Also take Aivlasoft EFB over the others. It's pricey (not helped by being priced in Swiss Francs!!) but is incredibly feature rich, has a very nice user interface, good support and is really all the planner/ moving map/chart program you'll ever need. Just my 0.2p.

True. They missed a trick there. I can't remember how much the Fokker was but they could have charged a small amount for the VC upgrade and I'd have happily paid it. I'd love to have a PMDG/Majestic quality Fokker 100 in the FSX fleet. Flew on many of KLM's baby fleet over the years and recall they were lovely and quiet in the front. Anyhow, this CRJ does look a good un. With this, the 777, the Milviz 737-200, the Flight 1 King Air and the FSL A320 (when/if it arrives in 2013) it's turning out to be a bumper year for FSX releases. ETA - F1 Fokker - $50! Too much for 2d only.

You're missing out on a mighty fine turboprop with all the latest modelling techniques and a state of the art FDE model. The Mad Dog was great at the time but doesn't compare with the Q400, period.

Excellent feature and adds to the realism of actually flying a large modern airliner which is more about managing systems on the ground and in the air than heroic feats of stick and rudder skills! I too hope this can be made to play nice with GSX. My only criticism of that program is the way you have to open and close doors for it and generally get distracted from the task of pre flight. If we could set PMDG ground ops to do its thing with the excellent vehicles from GSX doing their thing at the right time at the right door, that really would be excellent.

Was supposed to be now but they've run into a hiccup with the FMC. Now a couple more weeks.

My credit card is missing a beat. I want this 737 but I also want the F1 King Air, Orbx Global and the PMDG 777. That's what, a couple of hundred dollars already?

I'm quite excited about this, especially as there's a version with the later SP177 autopilot which has autothrotte and VNAV and LNAV capabilities so IFR flying is a bit easier than in a true steam cockpit, which I find is very hard to do single pilot. VC looks nice if a little 'cartoony' but looks lovely at night. Any thoughts?

You really could do with a yoke to fly the NGX realistically. Saitek and CH both make decent ones which are widely available. Also might be worth looking at FSUIPC to map your control axis to. FSX's own axis configurator is often the cause of many problems. You can depart with LNAV and VNAV engaged in the NGX or use TOGA and once you reach acceleration height (the point at which N1 illuminates on the MCP), select HDG SEL, rotate the speed knob to the flaps up speed and then select VNAV when the flaps are up.

Default ATC don't do STARS. Just select the arrival runway and go direct. Also remember a lot of airports have STARS that don't go anywhere near the airport - Manchester for example has a hold at Dayne where you'd be vectored by ATC to the runway. If you put this STAR into your FMC and try to fly it you'll end up in a right muddle. Have a look at the charts and pick one that fits.

IIRC you need to 'show hidden folders and files' on both to allow each to see one another. I'm not by my PC now but I'll look later to see where the folders are pointed to on my EFB.

You'll hear different opinions on EZDOK and AS 2012 vs Opus but I've tried all of them and I went back to EZDOK for cameras and AS for weather as I find the interface nice and simple and I couldn't get on with Opus's cameras. EZDOK takes a bit of setting up but once you hit the sweet spot it's great. Easiest thing to do is just import a bunch of camera presets (I think Angle of Attack did some good ones for the NGX) and delete any you don't need. You many also find Track IR enhanced your flying. I tend to use it mostly for taxiing, takeoff and landing but you can pretty much use it anytime. With EZDOK it works wonders. Flight planning can be a pain if you don't keep it simple. I just use EFB now to generate me a plan using its built in interface with routefinder. You just pick a flight level (quick rule of thumb for the NGX is route distance = flight level up to max ceiling so 300 nm = FL300, 200 nm = FL200 etc, obviously the NGX will only go up to around FL390 so beyond 400nm route that's a high as you can go) and it plugs the whole route in for you. It'll give you the preferential runway for the wind (you can point it to look at your active sky weather, another good reason to go that route!) and show you the SIDs and STARs for your route plus you can see them and how they join up with your route on the screen. Really simple. You can export that route back to the NGX but I just enter it into FMC manually, as it only takes a couple of minutes using airways, add the SID and STAR and away you go. If you're having problems getting down then you need to think ahead a bit more. In the real world you'll rarely fly the whole STAR, although doing so is probably easier while you're new to it all. In time you can vector yourself off the star to align yourself with the ILS as ATC do real life. Slow down, you should be under 250 knots by 10,000 feet and looking to be at 200-180 knots by 15 miles out and 160 knots up until 4 miles out on the ILS. Takes practice but you'll get there. ATC wise Pro ATC isn't there yet and the developer has been poorly and gone slightly AWOL. Save your money for now. VOX ATC baffled me. Good luck with that one. Radar Contact is old and clunky but works. Pro Flight Emulator has a very steep learning curve and is a temperamental old nag but works well when it works and the variety of voices and accents are nice to have. It's by far the most 'effective' if you can live with its foibles. An yes, one other tip for an easier life - make sure if you get EFB that it and your NGX are running the same Airac cycle. If the two don't match up you'll spend hours trying to figure out why the procedures in the plane don't match the ones on the moving map!

Much obliged. Might be one to just fly at night, that's what I do with sceneries that aren't quite up to scratch these days. For example, there's a 'reasonable' payware version of Muscat Airport in Oman, which is only present on my system because it's 40 minutes from Flytampa's wonderful Dubai Rebooted. In the day it's a bit bleurgh but leaving Dubai at dusk by the time I get to Muscat it's dark and with the usual viz in that sandy part of the world (not far) for a landing and taxy in it does the job.

O/T I'm tempted with the Simcheck A300 but the VC looks pretty nasty in all the pics I've seen. Obviously once used to the sweet fruit of the NGX and the Q400 it's easy to overlook anything else but is the A300 worth a look?

I suppose we don't know. PMDG, Aerosoft and others will be able to give you the hard facts as to the health (or otherwise) of the market. MS themselves have a large hand in the current situation by not having a current FS title on the shelves of places like PC World, supermarkets and other stores so that has probably served as a barrier to 'new' entrants into the hobby. In many ways, we've never had it so good - the bar keeps going up again and again and add-ons that we deemed cutting edge only a few years ago looks like something from FS98 to my eyes these days. How much money there is to be made from it, we don't know. It seems that MS decided it wasn't worth the bother but then again they've hardly made the best judgement calls on a whole host of things in recent years so I wouldn't place too much sway on that. There will always be plenty of folk obsessed with aviation and who will play that out with desktop simulation, but on the scale of other types of gaming such as racing and shoot em ups? Naw.

I have win 7 on a 128gb SSD, FSX and P3D on a 240gb SSD and a 2tb HDD for general stuff. Still plenty of room on the FSX SSD but the Win 7 one is nearly full. I should have got two 240 ones really. Booting up, installing, dragging stuff between drives etc is lightning fast. FSX boots up from cold into the NGX in about 10 seconds. Compared to the old days where everything was on one creaky hard drive and you'd go make a cup of tea while it was booting....

I had deleted all the default num keys for Ezdok which is why I could only ever get the front pax door to open. I've brought them back and they work pretty well, although occasionally I can't get one of them to play ball. This still needs to be incorporated into a pop up panel or the FMC though. I delete pretty much all the default keystrokes with an FSX install so I can use them my own way.

The Avro is really rather nice, although you can see where the corners were cut compared to say the NGX or the Q400. Their 757 has a rather nasty VC by FSX standards which is a shame as it's a lovely looking bird.

Tried them all. VOX ATC baffled me, but it has its fans. Fair enough. Radar Contact is old and has its limitations but generally works as advertised. PFE is the most immersive and by far tries the hardest to provide a 'full' ATC environment. Hamstrung by its origins as an FS 98 program however and is a chore to set up and use. Pro ATC has potential and is a doddle to set up and use. Biggest gripe for me is chronic lack of voice add ons rendering it rather unrealistic and it gives you really odd ATC instructions. It's still rather buggy at this time. Definitely could be excellent though.

I'm not a GA-er as a rule but I recently bought Aerosoft's DA20 Katana 4X to explore Orbx Scotland's lochs and Highlands. It's not particularly quick but it's stuffed full of delightful features and has become a particular favourite of mine.

Airport charts or if I'm feeling particularly lazy I use GSX's follow me car, although relatively few airports use them much in the real world. I never use the progressive taxi, giant pink arrows are so lame. Some airports are a nightmare to navigate around though, Paris CDG springs to mind.