Unfortunately, there's this little FSInterlude (not to be confused with the FSInterlude with The Boss, which is another thing entirely) known as the Cruise. Let's face it; the cruise is like kissing your sister. There's just ... nothing there. Should you feel the need to experiment in order to prove this, please don't email me to tell me about it! I neither need nor want to know (ew, gross). So trust me, those of you who have not really gotten to cruise for more than 25 minutes or so, the Cruise is rather bland.

With this in mind, I would ask you, what do you all do for in-flight entertainment? I mean, there really is little to do for those who like to drive the heavy iron in cruise, other than check gauges, fiddle with the air conditioning to watch the cabin temperature rise and listen to the flight attendants complain about it (I see all you 767 drivers out there nodding your heads). On particularly long flights, you can always wait until ATC hands you off to another controller, not respond and then go and become a member of the ersatz mile high club. Those of you without Bosses, you can still make a good effort in this regard, but again, I implore you to keep this to yourself (which is actually quite apropos, if you think about it, and certainly you might wish to take note of the article I did on Carpal Tunnel Syndrome).

For you low and slow drivers, well, part of your fun is sticking your head out the window and having a good look around, while leaving a line of drool back to the elevator. For you all, I imagine flights tend to be on the short side, what with the teensy fuel tanks and all. How bad can your cruise be?

I find it odd that no developers have given adequate attention to the pre-flight walk around. Think about it. If you happen to have Active Camera, you can walk all around your bird, and kind of kick the tires a little. But beyond that, nada. Time to start looking for your sister for comparison's sake! If the developer wizards can create an atmosphere in a game in which some god-awful monster with warts and halitosis is descending upon you in an effort to remove your head from your shoulders (no, really--if you have teenage boys in the house, have you seen the games they are playing lately?), how hard can it be to simulate sticking your head inside a wheel well with a flashlight to check some gauge? That would give a little more zip to our preflight setup. Perhaps a generic yet applicable checklist system, which would jazz up the time we spend fiddling around until we taxi.

And the default birds... puh-lease! Other than hitting shift-M to get the battery going, what else is there to do in pre-flight? Please, God, let there be at the very least default birds with even partially functional overheads in FSX! I don't know, maybe a nice little APU button with some cool spooling up sounds, or perhaps a call button so that we on the flight deck can be ignored by some snooty flight attendant. Hey, maybe even a nice pushback gauge (anything is better than the finger-twisting shift-P 1 or 2, and which way is 1, anyway?), you know, like the ones in which Lefty talks back to you and even gets a little bit testy when you don't release the parking brake quickly enough.

Well, being the intrepid soul that I am, and one who simply can't stand looking around during cruise for more than 10 minutes or so, I found this nifty little gauge called RADIOCD4.ZIP. Here's the link.

With this, your entire CD and mp3 collection is at your fingertips during your flight. You may click, drag and resize the window. You may play your CD's. It is an easy matter to assign any of your mp3 files to each of 12 buttons (six "AM" and six "FM"). I've yet to find a conflict with any of my aircraft (even the PMDG, which as we know is a rather temperamental little beastie). Installation is easy for anyone with even a passing familiarity with modifying your panel.cfg file. Many thanks to R.L. Clark for this fantastic add-on!

While using this gauge during the cruise mode of your flight may not be nearly as much fun as an FSInterlude, it certainly lasts longer and may be repeated until your heart's content!

Three Green!

Chip Barber
rfbarber@optonline.net