Oh man, I was sure this happened. You mean struggling to take off in a fully-laden plane was all in my head?
I tried with a Air King 350 - it actually models 4 passengers by default. This is it before I connect to FSE
And this is when I connect with a 7-passenger load. Only the fuel weight changes :(
Kaosfere has ruined everything! :P
Lol, that is great! There is a service where someone acts as a live controller for your flight? Amazing.
A funny one - I was flying over Japan yesterday and suddenly I couldn’t believe my eyes. There seemed to be golf courses everywhere:
And apparently this is a massive concentration of country clubs just NW of Osaka. Like, a golf zone?
Now if I hear Kiryu saying he’s going to the ‘Golf District’, I’ll know what he means ;)
Yeah, I just checked too. Must have been confirmation bias.
We were doomed when he used ‘Interesting!’ twice in his post. It just remained to march to the scaffold ;)
In other news, a cheap alternative to TrackIR has been posted on the FSE forums:
There’s a number of them. PilotEdge is staffed by real or retired controllers so it’s the most professional (one assumes), but requires a monthly fee. In addition, there is VATSIM and IVAO which are both free, and POSCON which is also free, much newer, and apparently has state of the art software but as it’s so new it has barely any controllers yet.
I haven’t tried IVAO but I can highly recommend VATSIM. The immersion that real controllers add is incredible.
There’s a mobile app which does much the same thing.
If I had a nickel for every time… :D
PilotEdge, though, limits itself to a (relatively) small geographical area. It was originally just southern California, but they’ve now apparently added the rest of the Western US for an additional fee. Never used them, but what I’ve heard comports with Paradroid: the best by far in terms of authenticity if you want to fly in an area they cover.
The problem with VATSIM and IVAO is coverage. Unless you’re flying at peak times or around a busy airport, you’re often unlikely to find a controller around for you and you end up just broadcasting on CTAF anyway. Still, it’s better than nothing.
For these reasons, combined with the type of flying I do, I generally stick with the offline single-player alternatives when I use ATC at all. Some folks really, really dig it though, and that’s cool.
I should try POSCON.
Oh hey. Some folks may have found this already, but I figured out yesterday that hidden within the mystery meat UI of the NeoFly settings page is the ability to change the primary and secondary colors. It requires using these two mysterious buttons.
Pick a color name in the dropdown field to the left, then click the eyedropper to change the primary color and the brush to change the secondary. (Why the icon that’s usually used for sampling a color is the one that’s used for actually setting one is… yet another esoteric NeoFly interface puzzle.)
Dark mode plus some experimentation there and I’ve finally found a way to not feel like it’s actively trying to blind me while I’m using it. :D
How is NeoFly these days? I remove MSFS from my PC to conserve drive space, but I’ve kind of been getting the itch to jump back in.
Of that whole general gaggle of addons it’s the one I regularly use. It has enough unique features (like now injecting actual scenery objects into SAR areas) and missions (banner towing?!) that it scratches an itch the others don’t.
It also still has its annoyances (why do I have to re-hire my crew every single day I want them to fly?!) and the UI, will. See above. But it’s pretty dang good for free. Or a few bucks, if you want FBOs and a few other odds and ends.
@Pedro @Paradroid @kaosfere You guys have described PilotEdge accurately. You get professional controllers, and every towered airfield in the system has a controller. In practice, every moment I flew on the system, I had some form of contact with live ATC. Even if you fly out of a non-towered airport, you’re still expected to announce taxi and departure on the CTAF frequency. They publish logs of all communications on their website. I listened to some of mine, and wow, did I sound nervous.
What’s more, there are optional certifications. I worked up the courage to do one: request clearance to taxi and take off, fly a pattern around the airfield, request appropriate clearances to land, land. I did mine at Grand Canyon airport, but you can do it anywhere in the system; a lot of people choose John Wayne field.
Not only did PilotEdge help me with my ATC syntax, but it also induced me to fly more carefully. I also did this while playing Flight Sim Economy, so the ATC added an extra dimension to otherwise routine delivery of cargo.
PilotEdge has expanded past the ZLA area, California and some neighboring states. It now includes a few major airports outside the western US. Looking at the live map, it looks like someone is flying to or from southern Africa right now.
It’s $20 a month, though. Also, at any given moment, there may be only two or three actual people handling all these airports, so you’ll hear the same voice over and over. I request taxi from ground; ground hands me off to the tower, which is the same dude; tower hands me off to approach, which might well be the same dude again. I didn’t mind this, as I was nervous enough without having to get used to umpteen different voices.
Anyway, I highly recommend the service, but only if you’re really ready to wear a headset and do ATC constantly. Website here: https://www.pilotedge.net/
If anyone’s looking for a super-fun approach to try, I can highly recommend the VOR A into GEML (Melilla, a Spanish colony on the Moroccan coast). Check this plate out:
It has a procedure hold, a DME arc, and a circling approach in a tight valley where, by the way, you’re not allowed to go west of the runway because that’s Morocco. Nice challenge to do by hand.
Especially when you’re flying into it at sunset and are trying hard not to be distracted by the scenery.
What an awesome discovery!
I do not mind you asking. I am always thrilled to talk about it with anyone. The flight school I’m training at has a fleet of 172s with full Garmin 1000 glass cockpits. My CFI commented early on that I seemed unusually confident in using the G1000. So the sim is helpful in that regard.
Did my second cross-country yesterday - flight from Scottsdale to Prescott to Cottonwood (untowered) back to Scottsdale. Old school navigation with charts and plotters and cardboard E6B. Pretty fun, although I came down hard and sideloaded in Prescott because I’m not used to crosswinds. Also need more practice with the radios. Prescott is also a lot higher than I’m used to (around 5000 feet as opposed to 1500) so my approach was a lot faster.
Ha! I must try PilotEdge - that sounds really useful. Except for the most basic calls, I still recite most of mine at least once before pressing the mic button. We used flight following yesterday for my x-country, which was pretty cool.
One thing I love about the 172 that doesn’t reflect as much in-game is how gentle and easy to handle it is. I felt like I was flying an old Oldsmobile my grandma had. Very predictable. Glad to hear they have the new stuff to do training on that (more when the time comes I’m sure.) I’ve heard it’s a supplemental ground school item but this is from someone that got PPL a few years ago. I have no clue if it’s now required to know or not.
That flight you took was probably crazy scenic. How close to Sedona did you get and were there any fantastic things you actually had time to see while you were up?
As for crosswind, that has to be tough. I was fortunate we didn’t have a lot of excessive wind in Western NC, too many trees and hills. In real life a heavy crosswind would probably scare the crap out of me.
The scenery in this part of Arizona is pretty amazing. Mountains and desert and a lot that isn’t very populated. We were using small towns as way points. There’s a good mix of altitudes also to get used to that kind of experience. To get from Prescott to cottonwood you go from about 5000 feet to 3000 feet, but there’s sort of a mountain in the way that the charts show as 8000 feet. So we went north to a VOR fix to avoid it which brings you on a nice approach to cottonwood, but it’s a pretty quick descent. The entire flight isn’t much more than 15 minutes.
To answer your question, Sedona is only a few miles east of that. We talked about stopping there, but it’s already almost 3 hours of flying. Sedona is supposed to have a pretty cool approach though so I’m sure I’ll fly there sometime.
Sedona was the airport in-game for the initial tutorials I believe. I had to go back and look at it once I had VR but it needed a bit of a scenery update to show all of its glory.
I’m glad you’re pursuing your PPL and really wish you a great time doing it. As mentioned, if I was younger I’d probably go back and get back into it myself. I hate that I didn’t do it when I was younger with more time, money and dedication to it.
I’m 53.
Damnit! Now I have no excuse.
shakes fist
