RJ_FO

Hey Ryan! Yes, as others mentioned, SI is definitely improving. For me, the biggest issues right now are: Vectoring off SIDs: Radar vectors aren’t always great, and sometimes they forget about you entirely. I know they’re working hard on this, but it still breaks immersion. Vectoring from STAR to ILS: The intercept vectors are way off — they’ll send you on a heading that’s nowhere near a reasonable intercept angle or distance. Terminology: They still struggle with callsigns. For example, SkyWest 2703 becomes “SkyWest 2-7-0-7” instead of “Twenty-Seven Oh Three.” And some of the live traffic phraseology is just… not used in the U.S. (“DAL 123, boarding complete — ready for pushback.” I should try that next time I’m in JFK.) A few other terms aren’t really aligned with how airliners are handled. Runway changes: If you request a different runway, the next controller often tries to revert you back to whatever’s in the SimBrief OFP. It’s like the OFP becomes the law of the land. None of these are showstoppers — more like minor annoyances. I genuinely feel the SI team listens to customers and is actively fixing bugs and improving the product. And to be fair, they have a ton of features that are really well done (Skypocket, etc.). For me, the biggest win is the virtual FO. It genuinely feels like being at work, like complaining about crew scheduling for example lol. The AI does a surprisingly good job chatting back. You can even interact with the virtual FA, who might call you with a medical emergency, and so on. There’s a lot of depth there. Overall, I definitely recommend SI — though I mainly use it to simulate airline ops, not VFR or GA. But from what I hear, it handles those pretty well too.

I actually do, Ryan. I ask SI for deviations since SI can’t see the weather either, but honestly it kills the realism for me. A perfect example is the Hot Start CL650. I absolutely love that airplane (I used to fly it IRL), but the missing weather radar — even though I hear it’s coming — was a big letdown. In my opinion, they should have designed the map projection from the start with the ability to overlay weather. It’s a shame, because the addon looks fantastic and they clearly put a lot of work into systems fidelity. But weather radar is an important tool when weather is present. I’ve flown aircraft with an MEL’d radar, but only when there was no weather in the area. Under no circumstances will an airliner be dispatched without a functioning radar when thunderstorms or other adverse weather are around. Hopefully they’ll look into this in the future, and I genuinely wish them a successful release.

too bad about the weather radar, I mean we know the current limitation of the sim but it's better than nothing. It's a shame they are making this airplane with complex systems but no weather radar is a no purchase for me. Every developers now include the default radar nowadays..

I see things differently, but we can agree to disagree. From my perspective, this is something pilots are trained on from the very first steps of becoming aviators, and it’s our responsibility to maintain that knowledge. Perhaps some ATPs don’t keep up with it (though I doubt many fall into that category), but to this day I always scan for the “what if” scenario. I am far from taking credits away from Sully, but many other aviatiors would have followed the same steps. There has been other events similar to Sully (Air Ural A321 a few years ago, also a 737 that had to dish into a river in Indonesia iirc). I’d be curious how you would feel if someone came here and spoke about your profession in the same way? I was far from scolding him, trust me.

So I guess you think an airline pilot is only good at playing with a MCDU or FMS uh? You have no idea how many of us started our careers. Many airline pilots come from being CFIs, flying corporate, serving in the military, or other ways. How do you think we build the minimum required hours to make it to a flight deck? You dont start a career flying an airliner, you start flying a Cessna/Piper, etc. and make your way up. How dare you refer to us as “more than a bus driver.” Next time you board an airliner, feel free to speak to the flight crew that way and see how they react. I find your impression of airline pilots insulting. Regarding the Hudson river incident, any well trained pilot would have reacted the same (this is basic private pilot skills here, simulate engine failure and find a spot to land). It doesnt matter if you fly a Cessna or an Airbus, find the best glide speed, pick up a spot and land the plane. If you believe that being a desktop simmer gives you more knowledge than a professional pilot — and it doesn’t even have to be an airline pilot btw — then good for you. I guess you think you know more than an ATP who studied for years and spent 1,500 hours (1200 restricted ATP) flying before even starting a career. Tell that to anyone that had to grind getting to the airlines, corporate, etc., with all the personal sacrifices that comes with this job (as many other jobs). We train on Level D simulators where we practice multiple failure scenarios, so yes — I know how to recognize a defective flight model or systems, and level D also have bugs, which we can recognize. From what I see with certain products, even though they had airline pilots on their team, the product came out with bugs (and I am sure these bugs were identified, the developers chose to ignore due to deadlines or other reasons). I am not against open betas, but also realize that this needs to be managed, and most of devs here are small teams and managing a large beta takes resources away from other tasks.

I recently found myself in a similar situation on Discord while trying to advise the developers of a certain product (I’ll keep their name out) that some of their new features weren’t realistic from an airliner perspective. Their fan club immediately started making fun of me, and even the dev joined in. At this point I won’t bother anymore — sometimes it just feels very toxic to give an opinion or state facts. On the other hand, plenty of developers genuinely appreciate our feedback and value our input. I was a simmer long before I became an airline pilot, so the idea that we “don’t understand simmers’ requirements” is bogus. There are plenty of airline guys who were simmers and still sim to this day. We’re not trying to dictate anything (we just want to help); we want realistic products that simulate things properly. I use FS to prepare for recurrent, and I feel ready when I hit the sim thanks to the realistic simulation products we have available nowadays.

I would definitely try SI. I use it and although ATC still has a few issues, they are sending updates weekly and for me as an airline pilot, I absolutely love the ability to get calls from the FA informing us of pax having medical issue, misbehaving pax, etc. You can talk to your FA like a real captain and ask the questions we would ask IRL. The FA will respond to you appropriately. I havent used the virtual FO as there are some limitations and I use FS2Crew. I want to applaud Anil for his upcoming tool and wish him all the best!

hey guys, anyone else in the U.S having issues running the FS2C Product Manager or running the products in the sim? (others are reporting the issue on the FS2C discord). According to Brian on Discord, there is some sort of outage, and he recommends installing Cloudflare One Client. I use another VPN and have tried connecting to a few servers around the world but no luck.

very nice scenery and screenshots, thx Ryan! Brings back memories of my time at NetJets flying the global. TEB is a super busy airport and the departure procedures are tight. Always challenged myself and refused to turn on the AP right after takeoff and hand flew the SID (with that lovely 1500 restriction, you get to 1500 very quick and have to be on your game if hand flying).

1) It depends but really after checklists/paperwork and debriefs are done, we usually head out pretty quickly. Sometimes we even head out before the pax as we have to get to another aircraft and we're running late (or on go home day when you need to rush out to get to your flight home). Sometime we wait for the pax to be out before heading out (so everyone can leave to either the shuttle to the hotel or get to a new plane, etc.).. 2) I usually clean my side with wipes everytime I take over from another crew. Hope this helps, any question just lmk...

It doesnt look like they included weather radar yet, it's a shame because this is one of the best addon, hopefully it will be added soon.

It looks to me like this is a server-side settings issue. I am forced to use the Edge browser to visit the AVSIM forums, I hope they can look into this and fix it as it is annoying switching from one browser to another just to visit one site.

same problem here. I cleared my cookies and after one successful request to the forums, I get the same 404 error again on the next click. What happened? AVSIM is the only site doing this. Is it a server setting that was changed to reduce headers size (I understand it could be related to security)

I just listened to a podcast where Elon Musk was talking about building robots and the impact of AI. He was basically saying any work related to computers will be gone and replaced by AI (and let's not forget self driving cars and so on). I am towards the end of my career, but I do worry about the kind of future the younger generations will be faced with. I was in IT before being an airline pilot and worked on cloud/automation (Infra/Software as a service, etc.), it made a lot of jobs obsolete, but created other jobs. I dont know if this will be the case with AI. Elon was basically saying that in a perfect world, nobody would have to work and that there would be some sort of unversal income, I just dont see this happening. We already saw Airbus push for single pilot operations, granted it is for extended minimum crew operations (only one pilot in the flightdeck ion cruise, and the other "resting", but this is how it starts, more jobs to be lost. We are living in a very uncertain world nowadays....

indeed 🙂