PeterS72

I recently also ran into this abrupt descend clearance issue when being vectored, last example was to EDDM ILS 28L approach, which wants me at 5000 to intercept the glidescope according to the charts. Final vector altitude was 11.000, followed by two descend instructions to 7000 and 5000 within ~10 seconds, which is impossible to do. The descend instructions 7000 and 5000 make sense, but they come way too late. I often find myself 5000 ft or more above the glidescope intercept getting descend instructions 2 or 3 miles before the FAF. From my observations, the altitudes are in general correct, but the timing is not. A few months ago I read on this forum the latest Pilot2ATC version fixed vectoring problems, but the abrupt descend is still happening occasionally, but not always. However, when it happens it totally spoils the experience, it's either dive-bomb or missed approach or ignore ATC and descend on your own. Neither is satisfying. Lateral vectoring works fine, and the decision when being vectored and when not also seems reasonable. Have 2.6.2.3 from 2nd July 2021, though window titlebar reads "Pilot2ATC 2020 v2.6.2.4_x64_beta1". Have logs if required.

Pilot2ATC can be used in a text-only mode. All ATC messages are displayed in a text field. Pilot can enter phraseology terms from dropdown menus. I occasionally use that when it's late and my wife already asleep. The window can be reduced to the most necessary elements and optional sticked on top of any other window. I'd still recommend a second monitor, though you could overlay it over the flight simulator main screen, but I think that would get annoying. There is no in-game overlay. I think it should work out, with the only possible problem that you'd need to look to the second monitor frequently if there was a new ATC message. Luckily, Pilot2ATC does not revoke your license on pilot deviation if you might see one too late. 🙂 As Burge already wrote above, there is a 10 day demo without any feature limitation, so you should just try that and see if it fits your requirements. Regarding quality of offline ATC, Pilot2ATC is definately the best available option.

Hi, I have recently been training some missed approaches with Pilot2ATC with the copilot voice enabled. Everything working fine, I announce "Lufthansa 123 going around" and the copilot takes over for the rest. Now this will happen and all will be managed by the copilot: 1) Tower sends us to approach frequency 2) Copilot tunes in approach frequence 3) Copilot checks in with approach 4) Approach gives us radar vectors for new approach So actually everything is working fine and as expected. However, this is all going way too fast and I usually end with just starting my (for example) right turn on the published missed approach procedure, when ATC gives me (while being in that right turn) a left turn for new radar vectors, so I cannot continue on the missed approach procedure and fly erratic turns. So, this is not really a "bug" as things work as expected, but just way too fast. Of course, I can disable the copilot and do it myself, or delay the initial "going around" call. Not sure how all of this is done in real life, if approach would let you fly the publish procedure to the end before giving radar vectors for a new approach, or at least the initial part of the procedure and then pick you up from there for new vectors. I have no real life piloting experience. A perfect solution would be if approach could wait with the radar vectors until I am done with the published missed approach, at least with the initial turn. But I don't know if this is easily possible to do and actually realistic. So, not sure how to improve the experience here. Any hints on how this works in real life would be appreciated. My current workaround is to disable the copilot and do things myself (I like to keep him enabled when flying airliners).

I didn't mean to whack you. Apologies if I sounded like that. I ran into exactly the same question a few weeks ago when I noticed that P2A ATIS cannot be listend to on the non-active radio, so some really old forum post had confirmed that suspicion. The X-Plane ATIS is not really bad, but sometimes the active runways mismatches with P2A. I tend to ignore that part, the weather report is usually identical to what the P2A ATIS would say. So all in all it's not a big deal. Another advantage is that P2A ATIS always works, while some X-Plane ATIS/AWOS frequencies are just dead. But for the sake of being able to tune it into COM2, I mostly use the X-Plane ATIS. As I understand it, Dave had built the P2A ATIS for flightsims which do not offer a build-in ATIS, so it was probably never meant for X-Plane. Toggling X-Plane ATIS on and off is easy, I have some quick Lua script for that. Or just get a dataref editor plugin and toggle the dataref manually on-the-fly. Pilot2ATC is a great product. Is has it's quirks, but it is obvious a lot of effort was put into it. Overall I find it extremely useful to teach myself as a casual simmer ATC phraseology and prepare myself to dabble a bit in Vatsim or PilotEdge occasionally.

Regarding ATIS on COM2, if that's the ATIS provided by Pilot2ATC, it won't work with the secondary COM. P2A cannot play COM2 while COM1 is the active one (or vice versa). It only plays the currently selected one, so you'd either need to tune in the ATIS to COM1 or make COM2 active, both resulting in loss of radio connection to your currently assigned frequency. You can request leave frequency and return, but not listen to ATIS on a secondary radio. I found some old post on this topic in this forum where Dave confirmed this limitation, but too lazy now to look that up to be honest. This limitation does not exist with the vanilla X-Plane ATIS. Personally I prefer the ATIS provided by Pilot2ATC, too, but then you need to deal with above radio limitation. So either use X-Plane ATIS and tune it on COM2, or use P2A ATIS and tune it on COM1. Cannot have both at the same time, unfortunately, but not a huge problem in my opinion. Would be nice if P2A could support a secondary output, but it's not the end of the world. Reasons might be related to other flightsims than X-Plane, I dont know.

I politely disagree with above conclusions, at least partly. I also experience the same difficulties with World Traffic. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. "does not" mostly means, absolutely no traffic in Pilot2ATC. Sometimes I see planes, but at some point they stop updating. This seems to meet other users experience. With Live Traffic I mostly have good experience, at least initially. However, after some time the same problems start to occur as with Live Traffic. Lack of updates, missing planes etc. Connection to the new P2A_XP plugin is established, I see the opened port, a TCP connection and network traffic bewtween X-Plane and P2A. P2A is also configured to use the new traffic. I dare to say everything looking good on that part. Vanilla Laminar traffic so far always works, also adding and removing planes. However, we are limited to 19 planes here, so that may not mean much. The trend I observe is that the problems start to occur as more planes are added by the traffic engine. For example. I load up in KBLI (medium airport near Vancouver) and World Traffic would give me 30 planes. I connect P2A and everything works fine. Once I fly south over Seattle and more traffic is added, multiple things can happen. Either all planes gone from P2A, some planes gone, some or all planes not updating. I have not managed to find a reproducable pattern here, unfortunately. Other example: I start at KLAX where World Traffic gives me immedately 60 planes. In 99% of the cases I see zero planes in P2A on connection and it never will pick any up. This leads me to believe that the number of planes might be a factor, not only the traffic engine. As Live Traffic hardly ever starts up with 60 planes immediately, Live Traffic appears to work fine at the start of a flight, but will also show the same problems as World Traffic does over time. With WT you just notice it sooner, as WT will immediately fill up the traffic with 60 planes while Live Traffic takes a while to fill up to 63 AI planes, if ever (often it never goes beyond 30, depending on your location and time). One noticable observation is that both World Traffic and Live Traffic will cause "holes" in the array of 64 planes as planes get added and removed. Depending on how the P2A plugin reads these arrays (from 0 to number of planes, or all 64 skipping the holes), this *might* be a factor. Not saying it is, impossible to say without knowing the code or more detailed (rather: any) debug logging. I am observing the TCAS DataRefs for vanilla and third-party traffic and so far these look reasonable, though without knowing what exactly the P2A plugin is reading, it's hard to say if anything is wrong here, either the provided data or reading the data. However, as more as I try, as more the "too many planes added/removed over time cause issues" theory, independant from the traffic engine, seems to be valid. I am not saying P2A *is* the problem, nobody can say that without knowing the code. But trying to bring a few more facts on the table which may offer a possibily different perspective. I apologize for being so persitent with this. But the new P2A plugin is a dream coming alive, so it hurts even more when thing don't work as hoped. The only thing I have not tried yet is to examing the network traffic with WireShark and check if the provided data matches the tcas datarefs, but I lack the motivation to do so, it does not sound like much fun to me.

Really no idea why it works for me but not for you. Just did a complete flight with WT and P2A and had the new traffic. The only thing I noticed is that P2A seems to "lose" planes over time, which may hint that it does not pick up planes newly added by World Traffic during the flight, as they come and go. Also P2A warned me about a plane which did not exist in the game (not on TCAS, map nor LittleNavMap), this might support the that theory as World Traffic removes planes which is not caught by the P2A plugin. So there might be room for further improvement with the P2A plugin. It might also be related to TCAS not picking up the new WT planes instead, in that case nothing to improve in P2A. Doing the occasional TCAS off&on trick helped to resync everything. So overall World Traffic sort of works, with hiccups where manual intervention is required, which is slightly annoying but still a huge improvement to the old 19 planes, so I am not going to complain. Also WT 3.2 is still in beta, so there might be known issues. Yet, it does not explain why I see the planes and you do not, which is odd. TrafficGlobal may work better, I don't know, but I am definately not willing to purchase a second traffic addon when you can only use one at the same time. But I might give Live Traffic a go for testing and see if it is more inconsitent.

Hi, I can confirm that the new TCAS integration is working with World Traffic 3.2.0rc4, I see all the planes in P2A. While experimenting with the feature, I encountered some quirks where P2A would not pick up the traffic, but in summary I think it's more a World Traffic issue, but not sure. - When you resync in WT while TCAS is OFF, P2A will not pick up the traffic until you disable & enable WT traffic and TCAS once. Probably this triggers the P2A plugin to synchronize with the traffic data again. - When you resync WT while TCAS is ON, P2A will always pick up the traffic, but some planes will not be announced to TCAS. I believe this is a World Traffic problem. I usually turn TCAS OFF, then resync, then TCAS ON to make TCAS pick up all WT planes. This is so far unrelated of P2A and only meant to have TCAS pick up all WT planes. However, with this procedure, the P2A plugin will NOT synchronize with the data. My new procedure is: While TCAS is ON, resync WT. Then turn TCAS OFF and ON again to resync TCAS. P2A will now pick up all planes. The procedure when P2A does not want to pick up any planes anymore, which I had only once so far: TCAS ON, resync WT, disable & enable WT processing, TCAS OFF & ON, wait a few seconds, P2A will now pick the traffic up. You can use the World Traffic menu for these actions or the integrated menu in A-Better-Camera, which offers everything in one place. After fiddling with the settings, I just did a short 30 minutes flight, and traffic worked perfectly in Pilot2ATC. I did not do a longer flight yesterday. From past experience, it may be necessary to resync World Traffic occasionally. I know this sounds totally confusing. 🙂 Been experimenting yesterday evening with it and these were my findings. However, World Traffic <-> Pilot2ATC integration does work, which makes me very happy as that was the major problem I had with Pilot2ATC, which is now resolved. A huge Thank You to Dave! I do not own TrafficGlobal, so I cannot comment on that. Peter

I also found some inconsistent behaviour when live traffic would be displayed in Pilot2ATC or not. I found that restarting the xpuipc plugin from the Plugin Admin interface and reconnecing PT2 would often help. Meanwhile my routine is to start XPlane, wait a bit until traffic has initialized, restart xpuipc, then connect Pilot2Atc, problem solved. Using vanilla X-Plane AI planes seems to work fine, no plugin restart required. So maybe the actual issue here is xpuipc not picking up live traffic which is being loaded after xpuipc plugin initialization. This is just a wild guess, though. Anways, once Pilot2ATC is getting the proper data, it works just fine, both for planes in air and on ground. I have no experience with other traffic plugins, above oberservations only applies to LiveTraffic and vanilla KI.

As Dave said, SayIt will work, but from own experience with my strong German accent, training the Windows speech recognition with Grammar Helper really helps. I had a couple of phrases which the AI always got wrong, including flight level changes as you described, so I added these to a personal training list and trained that a couple of times. Noticable improvement. Yes, it requires some work and time to train all these phrases, but it's worth it. The Windows speech recognition is actually pretty good even with accents after some training.

Both X-Plane G530 and G430 also require to activate an approach. Not so with the airliner FMS, though unsure about the vanilla FMS, have not used that in a while (flying Zibo when flying airliners). While I have no knowledge about real-world procedures, I think it makes sense. You probably don't want to have the autopilot start the approach before you get clearance. Not sure what happens if you are at the end of the STAR and got no clearance for approach yet. Hold? Ask ATC? Does that ever happen? Apart from that, having the pre-set flight plan with SID, STAR and Approach before even turning on your plane and then being able to fly it to the letter without any future change is probably somewhat unrealistic. As I understand it, you would only insert your flight plan without SID/STAR/Approach and then enter them into the GPS/FMC once you received them from ATC. Pilot2ATC would also support this, there are lots of options for this in the flight plan section, though I have not experimented with all of them yet. If you actually file SID/STARs in a flight plan seems to differ greatly, I've read contradicting information about this depending if you ask an U.S. or European pilot, even within Europe there are differences. Pilot2ATC at least seems to stick to the originally assigned procedures. While there are some randomized options for this, these seem to apply when originally filing the flight plan. It may be possible you get a different STAR/Approach enroute depending on weather changes, but flying mostly short / medium flights I have so far not encountered this. So far I have not yet encountered any deviation between GPS/FMS route and Pilot2ATC route, even when not loading the autogenerated Pilot2ATC flight plan into the GPS but e.g. the one from SimBrief and insert the procedures as I receive them. Of course you need the same AIRAC cycle in all applications.

Ehem, end of the STAR of course. How embarassing. 🙂

If I may guess, you did not activate the approach.You need to do that manually via "Proc" button, "Activate approach". If you don't do that, the autopilot will just ignore the approach and fly your regular waypoints, which usually end in the destination airport. This is not related to Pilot2Atc. I usually activate the approach when I am at the end of the SID (or own judgement when not using a SID) and ATC has given me clearance for the approach. Not sure if that is real life procedure, though. :)

Just a thought: Possibily different FMS data cycles? I'm using the same Navigraph data cycle in X-Plane and Pilot2ATC and so far the import vom SimBrief worked fine and routes were identical. Check your SimBrief AIRAC Cycle and see if that matches your Pilot2ATC cycle. If you have Navigraph, you can update Pilot2ATC to the latest Navigraph data with their updater. If not, not sure if SimBrief has 1801 available. Not sure, could be something completely different. Just throwing in an idea...

"Bing confirmation" == Speech Recognized Tone from Config / Speech That's where I noticed something was wrong, as that Recognized Tone no longer occured, even on simple stuff like "Say altimeter". Anways, I know how to reproduce the issue, if required. I will try again with the proper VFR phrases tomorrow and see how that works. I'm glad to see VFR is also supported. Occasionally some VFR flight is a nice change of pace. 🙂 Btw, using X-Plane 11. But probably not really relevant in this case.