Airline Pilot 1

By Andrew Herd (21 December 2000)

light Simulator has had the facility to run adventures for a long while now, but the sheer complexity of writing them has held developers back and adventures are easily outnumbered by add-on aircraft and sceneries. This puts flight simmers who don't have ATC add-ons like Radar Contact or ProFlight 2000 at a disadvantage, leaving them to cruise the skies in silence, apart from the drone of the engines. Airline Pilot 1's manual sets out the case for adventures very clearly, '...cruise flight is roughly as interesting as a long-distance drive on the motorway. Nothing ever happens; all you can do is watch the sluggish movement of the indicators on your instruments...' but it remains the case that the majority of simmers never fly an adventure from one year's end to another, preferring instead to roar off alone into the skies. This new package from Aerosoft, retailers of the well-known German Airports series, does something to redress that balance.

The heart of the package is a series of eight adventures, ranging from an 'Introduction to Instrument Flight' to a complex international flight from Munich to Brussels, which involves a go-around procedure. The software installs from a single CD, and includes two Airbus A320s, in Lufthansa and Swissair colors, with an accompanying panel. This review will not focus on the planes, or the panel, which can be considered as 'extras' although the flight dynamics of the A320 are very accurately modelled. Instructions are supplied for using the aircraft of your choice, although this means certain parts of the adventure, like the cockpit checklists, will make no sense at all. However, since the object of the exercise of the adventures is to give you the opportunity to feel what it is like to sit in the left hand seat of an Airbus, it would make sense to use the planes and panel that are supplied.

According to Steffen Gerlach, of team AFDA (formerly ADT), who was one of the developers of the package, 'Our dream was to let you feel, let you hear on the COM where you are, where you fly. That is why we let only native speakers overtake a role in our ADVs. An American pilot will always be spoken by an American, a Swedish pilot by a Swedish guy and so on... We had more than one hundred simmers who helped us by recording their voices... We had pilots and controllers, pursers and rampers who helped with their professional know how to make really every single word in these ADV absolutely realistic...'

Airline Pilot 1's manual is exceptionally well-written, and is presented in English and German, with all the necessary charts included. Apart from being an exercise in clear writing, it displays a terrific sense of humor, starting with instructions on how to make your flight more realistic by preparing a stale bread roll for in-flight food, and how to simulate a taxi-ride from a no-name hotel to the airport. The package is almost worth buying for this section alone. Whatever you do, make sure you read this manual from cover to cover. Then read it again. Then go to a hermitage and read it again. Finally, read it carefully before you make a flight, during each flight, and after the flight to see what went wrong; because what Airline Pilot 1 is all about is doing it by the book, and if you don't get it right, the adventure won't work properly and will become an exercise in frustration. Fly LH4432 from Munich to Brussels too fast and the go-around won't happen; drift too far off course and the controller will abandon you to your fate.

These are very well-scripted adventures, but the code does not keep track of every single thing you are doing and if you don't stick to the flight plan - exactly - things may not work as expected. For example, on LH292 I completed the last leg faster than I should have done and was given a set of vectors which took me well beyond the airport, simply because I was five miles further on than the adventure expected. At first glance, this sounds strange; but as the developers point out, commercial flight is just as unforgiving, and if you can complete one of the adventures perfectly, then you can congratulate yourself - none of them are pushovers. Steffen told me that he worries that, '...the "normal" user will not recognize how realistic all this is - he will only recognize the difference to what he had before... and maybe condemn us for being different, for not allowing him to taxi at 55 kts, or to fly at 350 kts at FL80 and so on... But that is how it is in reality.' In fact, the AFDA team's faithful approach to reality is why Airline Pilot 1 works the way it does - with the bonus that if you get things badly wrong, you can always press ctrl-i and hit the next waypoint as if nothing had happened. Now try doing that in real life!

The first thing to say about the adventures is that for all that they are standard commuter flights, you won't crack them unless you are proficient at VOR navigation and ILS approaches. The developers have chosen some difficult SIDs (Standard Instrument Departure), with busy ATC and you will have to have your wits about you if you are to make all the connections OK. I'll confess at this point that I flew the majority of the adventures with the co-pilot set up to handle the navigation instruments and the communications, because sometimes there is enough to do just handling the plane. This is a tribute to the developers, because that is just how it is in reality; Airline Pilot 1 makes you really want to have a second pilot beside you at times. But the trouble begins long before you get off the ground, because all the adventures start on the apron with the engines shut down and a cold cockpit. You have to start up the plane, go through the checklists and push-back, all the while listening to the purser going through the cabin routines. Then you have to find your way to the runway. More pilots get lost on the ground than ever do in the air and if it wasn't for the 'top-down' view in Flight Simulator, I would still be trying to find my way off Munich airport instead of writing this review. Once you have your clearance, your troubles really begin, and you will find yourself juggling the autothrottle, altitude and heading while trying not to miss ATC instructions aimed at you rather than dozens of other aircraft that the controller is talking to at the same time. There will be relatively few moments in the flights when you will be able to relax and look out the window, and I would suggest activating the text relay of ATC instructions on screen, just in case, like me, your mind has a tendency to wander.

Criticisms? Well, adventures are either your bag or not, and you will probably know that by now, but if you have never tried any, Airline Pilot 1 isn't a bad place to start. It pays to have the 'adventure volume' turned up and the 'engine volume' turned down in FS2000 for maximum clarity; a few of the ATC messages are a little tough to make out, though the text relay makes up for this. Some users may find the different national accents a little difficult, but real pilots have to put up with this too! One niggle is that on the Munich/Innsbruck flight, which is the first one that many users will fly, the introductory text messages are in German rather than English; but once you know what choices they are offering, this is a minor problem. Flight LH4432 refers to the DAMOR 5F SID when the manual includes the 4F SID, but this is due to a copyright issue. There are also a few mistakes in the manual, for example in places the Ctrl key is sometimes referred to as the Strg key in the English translation, and the A320 panel cockpit frame obscures some of the on-screen text relay, although you can switch out the relevant bitmap. I wasn't all that sold on the panel, the forward view is not great for taxiing and I couldn't switch the main bitmap out with the 'W' key, but the .air file on the A320 was everything the developers said it was.

Overall, Airline Pilot 1 is a good package. You will probably appreciate it most if you own Aerosoft's German Airports packages, although these aren't essential and the flights work alright on the default scenery. As long as you can accept that you must fly these adventures exactly the way the manual says, then there is a lot to learn here. It has to be said someone who owns ProFlight 2000 and Dave March's PF2KCOM2.ZIP could construct most of these flights with the bonus of smarter ATC, but they would lack the cockpit chatter and the ambience of Airline Pilot 1's ATC and there is no doubt that the chatter which was so painstakingly recorded by AFDA is streets ahead of anything a generic ATC program could supply. Personally, I think the adventures will be an eye-opener for some virtual airline pilots, who have been used to playing fast and loose with their flight plans, and if you have the right sort of mind, doing a perfect flight will become an end in itself.

When you complete an adventure, there is no fanfare, no evaluation, no roll of drums. All you get to do is park the bus, shut everything down ready for the next crew, and eat that stale roll.