pdebaty

Thanks, I will definitely hold off based on your feedback and others. It's a shame, it looked like a great yoke.

I am interested in purchasing a Fulcrum Yoke as it looks great, but reading the forum posts, it seems that things have been in limbo for some time. Are people receiving the yoke they ordered? If so, how long was the wait? The website currently says there is a 4 weeks lead time if I order now until shipping. Is that accurate or is that a gross underestimation?

Doing a quick search, and I found that "Left/Right Closed Traffic" is the recommended phraseology when talking to ATC at least in the US according to JO 7110.65V (3−10−11). https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2023/what-is-the-difference-between-closed-traffic-vs-stay-in-the-pattern-request But for un-towered airports "remaining in the pattern" is the correct phraseology when talking on the CTAF frequency.

I am taking lessons in Southern California (KSMO to be precise). When holding short of the runway before departure, we say "Santa Monica Tower, N643JK holding short of runway 21, Left Closed Traffic". This is equivalent to requesting take-off to remain in the pattern, which happens to be a left pattern at KSMO. Nothing special about that pattern, it's the normal large box rectangular pattern. You can also just say "Closed Traffic" if you're not sure of the direction of the pattern and tower will respond with "...Left Closed Traffic approved, Runway 21, Cleared for take-off". For the more unusual airports where the pattern in on the right, you would ask for "Right Closed Traffic". I assumed these were universal standards but I now realize that VFR communication standards can vary by region. Not sure if this applies to everywhere in the US or just the West coast. This style is also recommended by PilotEdge (https://www.pilotedge.net/pages/cat-03-rating). Another thing my flight school recommends doing at our airport that confuses Pilot2ATC is to ask for VFR flight following at the same time as asking for taxi to the runway: "Santa Monica Ground, N643JK at south parking, request taxi to run-up B5 with information Lima, and request flight following to Malibu". Then ground would first give directions to taxi to the run-up and a little later, while we taxi, give us a squawk code and departure frequency for the flight following. I realize this would be more complex to handle for the AI and it's not a big deal to break it up in two separate requests.

Hello, I fly VFR in X-Plane and Pilot2ATC is by far the best solution for AI ATC speech recognition out there! Great job and I love using it. As mentioned, I only fly VFR at the moment and I have a few suggestions of little tweaks that could be done to the grammar to better match my experience with real life pilot lessons: It seems that saying "Inbound" is not recognized unless it's combined with "for landing". But in real life, it's not recommended to say "inbound for landing" as the word "for" should be avoided whenever possible (because it sounds like four) and it is superfluous. My flight school teaches to just say "XXX tower, N643JK 10 miles south at 2500ft, Inbound with information XXX". And that is currently not recognized by Pilot2ATC. It seems like it would be an easy tweak? Pilot2ATC does not recognize phrases like "Left Closed Traffic" or "Right Closed Traffic", which is what is recommended by my flight school for pattern work. That seems more complicated but it would be cool to support miniroutes or VFR special flight rules through class B airspace. Also much more complicated, but it would be awesome to hear CTAF calls from other traffic (either from LiveTraffic plugin or AI traffic plugins like Traffic Global). Are any of those suggestions already on the roadmap, or would they be considered for future releases? If so, a rough ETA on each item would be awesome! Thanks again for all the great work! Philippe

I bought the X-ATC-Chatter plugin and I love the added realism that it provides to Pilot2ATC! I also use the excellent LifeTraffic plugin, which allows me to view live traffic in X-Plane. It is awesome and Pilot2ATC does detect the traffic and gives me traffic alerts. With data from RealTraffic, it also allows me to see traffic from earlier in the day. I usually fly my sim at night when there is less traffic so it's great to be able to see traffic at busier times. Now the thing that would hit it out of the ballpark, would be to be able to hear LiveATC recordings synchronized with the data from RealTraffic/LiveTraffic! You would be able to hear ATC communicate with other traffic and see the corresponding traffic in the sim! It would be such wonderful practice building awareness of other aircrafts in the sky from listening to the radio. It seems that it would be technically feasible because LiveATC does provide archives for its audio. However, from reading other forums, it seems there are some legal issues and LiveATC refuses to give access to their live audio in an X-Plane plugin. My question is whether this limitation would extend to their archives as well? @markcellis, do you think that would be doable? If so, could that be integrated with Pilot2ATC and LiveTraffic/RealTraffic?

That video is no longer available, but I found this one, which seems to talk about the same thing (perhaps it's the same one?): Very useful, it greatly improves the realism of the AI voice by making it sound like a radio! However, I wish that the ATC chatter was not impacted by the equalizer since it already sounds like a radio. So a feature request for Pilot2ATC would be to provide a different output channel for chatter and for the AI voices. Or even better, provide that radio sound effect to the AI voices out of the box (without needing to set up this whole Voicemeter Banana workaround). It could be controlled by a checkbox in the config for those who don't want it. @Dave-Pilot2ATC is that something you would consider adding? Also, I did have the issue reported by @Dornus