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Radio,
Navajo Alpha November Hotel, will you please open my IFR flight plan at this
time?
Roger, Navajo Alpha November Hotel, will open your flight plan at five four.
Navajo Alpha November Hotel, thank you.
ProFlight 2000 is the latest in a long line of products that has its roots in Flight Shop for FS5. The reason for this history lesson is that Flight Shop was a key development in the history of flight simulation, because it was the first program to simulate ATC in adventures, and its release opened up possibilities we had only been able to dream of until then. The involvement of AETI brought new investment and the result was ProFlight 98, which sold 20,000 copies and is one of the reasons why many simmers stay with FS98. With ProFlight 2000 on the shelves, they need to think again.
Tower, Navajo Alpha November Hotel, at the terminal IFR with information Juliet, ready to taxi.
Roger, Navajo Alpha November Hotel, cleared as filed, fly runway heading, maintain three thousand, expect flight level two five zero ten minutes after departure, squawk 3062, departure frequency 118.6, taxi to runway three.
Navajo Alpha November Hotel, request runway three one.
Roger, Navajo Alpha November Hotel, taxi to runway three one.
It is probably easier to say what ProFlight 2000 doesn't do, than what it does do. Installing ProFlight will not add interactive ATC to every flight you make in FS2000. Many readers will be disappointed by this, but the long and the short of it is that this isn't technically possible to do this yet, although it remains the Holy Grail of ATC add-on development. ProFlight is a program which generates interactive ATC adventures, which once compiled and loaded via the 'adventure' menu on FS2000 will give you about as realistic an experience as it is possible to get. ProFlight is delivered in the usual smart AETI packaging, the principle contents of which are a CD and a 48 page instruction manual, with a useful command summary card. In my usual fashion I stuck the CD in the drive and asked questions afterwards, an approach which has always served me well, even if it has meant a few complete reinstalls of Windows (-:
The
installation screen offers you the choice of installing ProFlight 2000 or various
demos of other software, including Game Commander, which can be used to handle
responses to computer generated ATC by voice alone. I had half an hour available
at lunch time and guessing (wrongly, as it happened) that this was long enough,
I clicked the option to install ProFlight. At a rough guess, because I didn't
time it, the installation took more than an hour, and this was on a 733 MHz
machine with a reasonably fast CD drive. I should point out that I checked every
option and installed all the voice sets, which ate up 300 Mb of my hard disk.
The default is for 30 voices: 6 Asian; 6 British; 4 French; 6 German; 4 Spanish;
and 6 North American.
Tower, Navajo Alpha November Hotel, runway three one, ready for take off.
Navajo Alpha November Hotel, runway three one, cleared for immediate take off, fly runway heading.
Roger, cleared for take off, Navajo Alpha November Hotel.
I had a few trials and tribulations getting ProFlight 2000 to work, which were fixed by a series of patches and endless patient advice from Rob MacKay the developer, but judging from various electronic forums, the majority of people seem to find the installation much more straightforward. However, I should point out that I could not get the software to work 'out of the box' on either of the two machines I installed it on. The version of adventure generator I finally tested was 2000.02.0004 and the ATC was 2000.02.0076. I also had to install version 1.34 of APLC32 (Martin Smith's freeware adventure compiler which 'writes' the adventures to disk) which is more recent than the version supplied on the ProFlight CD, and it was necessary to reconfigure the APLC32 options after installation. Whether or not this is acceptable is up to you to judge, based on your experience of upgrading software, but if you are not a techie, then it might be worth waiting until AETI release a version on CD with the bugs fixed. All the patches should be available on the AETI web site, but it isn't obvious where to find them - but I would suggest a visit to the ProFlight Center.
The
way ProFlight 2000 works, you need to save a flight plan in FS2000 for the route
you want, and then exit Flight Simulator and start up the adventure generator.
One of the key features of the software is that it allows you to compile plans
as either VFR or IFR adventures and you can swap from VFR mode to IFR in flight,
if the weather deteriorates. The screenshots show me compiling a VFR adventure
from Birmingham to Popham airfield in the English southwest. After selecting
the flight plan, a voice for the pilot has to be chosen (assuming you aren't
using Game Commander), and there is an option to set up weather
conditions for the flight. Since I habitually run Marc Philibert's excellent
FSMeteo, I have the 'Use real weather' option checked in the settings
page. Once you are happy with the basic setup, you click the compile button
and choose an aircraft to fly the adventure, and the software chugs through
the process of putting everything together; usually taking several minutes before
it spits out a completed file in the FS2000 adventure folder. ProFlight adventures
are quite big things, weighing in at the 9 meg mark even for the VFR flight
I used as an example here.
Navajo Alpha November Hotel, contact departure on 118.6.
Roger, 118.6, Navajo Alpha November Hotel, good day. …
Departure, Navajo Alpha November Hotel out of one five hundred for three thousand IFR.
Roger, Navajo Alpha November Hotel, radar contact, altimeter is two niner niner one.
What
are the adventures like to fly? If my experience is anything to go by, they
certainly run very smoothly, and I experienced very few problems with them after
the 2.68 patch was released. You start a flight by loading an adventure in the
normal way, and after a short pause a screen prompt flashes up to tell you that
everything is ready. Then it is a simple matter of opening your flight plan
with the Flight Service Station and getting on with it. ProFlight offers every
level of ATC from the most basic Multicom small field system to the whole nine
yards of international airports and I'm glad to say it does it well. Following
as they do the the latest edition of the FAA standard (7110.65 v02/00) the ATC
routines have a definite American flavor to them, but with the whole world
to go at, Rob had to make compromises somewhere and I didn't find it hard to
get used to it, chiefly because I was having so much fun. The controllers' voices
are great, and for the first time I was able to listen to English, Scottish
and Irish accents. More than this, the accents are correct for the country you
are flying over, so they change on transatlantic trips and even between different
European countries.
Navajo Alpha November Hotel, turn right zero niner zero, climb and maintain one six thousand.
Roger Navajo Alpha November Hotel.
Having
mentioned the chatter I might as well discuss it in detail. Essentially, ProFlight
2000 calculates the probability of chatter occurring on the frequency to
which you are tuned, according to a user selected setting which is chosen during
adventure compilation. If you choose a setting of 100%, the airwaves will be
full of chatter; lower settings being more realistic if your flying takes place
in remote areas. The thing that really is extraordinary about the chatter is
that it is assembled on the fly and that even if you try an adventure several
times, you are unlikely to hear the same chatter twice. If you listen closely,
the chatter sounds a bit clipped, but on the whole it is very convincing, especially
since it reflects the weather conditions you are experiencing and you can hear
the controller to whom you have just been talking giving instructions to other
planes. Chatter is also localised so that you will hear mainly British accents
in England, Scandinavian ones in Norway, and so forth. While the computer generated
nature of the chatter means that it is very well 'localised' the disadvantage
is that what you hear is limited to the basics of aerial navigation - what you
do not get is the kind of one-liner humorous back chat that is so often heard
in real life. You could get around this by compiling adventures with a particular
module loaded, but read on.
Navajo Alpha November Hotel, turn right zero four five, climb and maintain one six thousand, resume own navigation.
Roger, Navajo Alpha November Hotel.
The
strength of ProFlight 2000 is that it handles almost every situation you can
think of in flight, including VFR, IFR, Victor and jet airways, different national
Flight Level designations, using a very slick interface; and with the recent
patch it can also manage runway overrides. It is also uses the correct frequencies
for every airport ATC system, so that if you miss a hand over, you can usually
look up the frequency you need. There are some very clever touches, like the
'taxi guide.' Given that if pilots ever get lost, it is likely to happen on
the ground, this feature is likely to prove extremely popular. While on the
Ground frequency at the departure airport, after being told which runway to
taxi to, pressing Ctrl Shift 1, brings up a text message window with simple
left/right instructions that will direct you to the correct runway end, at the
majority of airports. Rob had also made it possible for third parties to develop
'modules' which enhance ProFlight's features. Dave March's pf2kcombo.zip is
already available, giving you enhanced options for adventure setup, US or UK
flight crew announcements and greater control over which chatter files are used,
allowing you to use real chatter recordings as long as they are renamed according
to a specific convention. Another module called 'Snap-it' from
Holds are well simulated and the frequency increases as the weather gets worse - if you are nervous about flying holds, you can engage the PIC mode of the virtual co-pilot and learn how it is done. The virtual co-pilot is switched on by pressing control-shift-V, each press cycling through three available modes: comm. Mode; PIC mode; and off. In 'comm' mode the virtual co-pilot handles all the comm. radio frequency changes, including initial contacts, which lets you get on with the interesting bits of the flight without constantly worrying about the radio. In 'PIC' (Pilot in Command) mode, the virtual co-pilot does everything, including fly the plane as long as the autopilot is on. If you want the luxury of full ATC without having to worry about anything beyond takeoff and landing, PIC mode is for you, because you can turn it on after take-off, engage the autopilot, and then fly the landing simply by disengaging the autopilot when you have a visual on the runway.
Vectoring
seems to have improved with the patches. In the boxed version, I was often sent
the long way around and more than once was vectored in too high and had to declare
a missed approach. The patches seem to have fixed this, with more economical
vectors leading to easy intercepts - recent approaches haven't needed a vertical
dive to acquire the ILS!
Warp mode is a new feature that will be appreciated by long haul pilots. Warp means that instead of having to fly every inch of a transatlantic route, for example, you can skip the intermediate waypoints and get right to the interesting bit. It can also be used to skip through a flight to practice a difficult approach several times over.
Navajo Alpha November Hotel, contact Scottish control on 126.25.
Roger, 126.25, Navajo Alpha November Hotel, good day.
VFR flight hasn't been forgotten, and using the Multicom/Unicom facilities it should be possible for the most hardened bush pilots to get something out of this product. VFR calls exist to request airfield advisories and to notify entry into downwind and base legs, or finals; at present ProFlight 2000 is the only ATC add-on to offer this.
As if this isn't enough ProFlight comes with a Flight Management Computer.
Those of you who are not familiar with these beasts can read all about them
in my Glass Cockpit Conversion tutorial, but basically, passenger jets use FMCs
to manage almost every part of their flight. The ProFlight 2000 FMC comes with
a utility to add it to the aircraft of your choice, and although it might be
a bit over the top to stick it in a Piper Cub, given the complexity of the instrument,
it is surely tempting to do so. The FMC lacks any kind of linkage to a moving
map facility, however, so if your panel lacks a GPS or Navigation display, its
usefulness is rather limited. The bad news about the FMC is that if you use
it to alter your waypoints in flight the way real crews sometimes do, you will
be out of kilter with the ATC calls and the only way around it is to recompile
the adventure and fly it again. You can use the FMC without running ProFlight
and it comes with an extensive tutorial, but the one thing that this extra brings
home to me is the pressing need for the release of a fully featured FMC with
the next release of Flight Simulator so that some kind of standardisation can
be brought to this fast expanding area of the market.
Problems? Well, if you choose to ignore the ProFlight ATC and fly where you will, it isn't that quick to pick you up on your transgressions, though Rob tells me that this behavior is within the limits of FAA regulations. Once you get off track, due for example, to failing to make a tight enough turn immediately after take-off, the controllers tend to hold you parallel to your intended track unless you specifically request vectors to get back onto it. The holds in PF2K, on the other hand, require some serious concentration if you aren't going to blow it, and in the end I dealt with it by switching on the 'Pilot in Command' mode of the Virtual Co-Pilot and letting him do the job for me. Virtual co-pilot mode appears to be inconsistent at first, with the co-pilot only replying to ATC when comm frequency changes are required, but this is exactly what the designers intend to happen, and you have to 'roger' the ATC manually for other exchanges. If you want the virtual co-pilot to deal with all the radio exchanges, while you fly the plane, the solution is to switch to Pilot in Command mode and turn off the autopilot. A minor niggle is that ATIS frequencies can't be accessed at present, but this will be fixed in a forthcoming patch. Many users tell me they have run into trouble with the 'Do not position aircraft' switch on the compiler apparently not working - this is because when this switch is chosen, you must also uncheck the box which starts the adventure with an FS2000 flight file and it might help if this hardcoded. I had some troubles with slew mode for positioning the plane at the airport; if I used it before contacting FSS ATC sometimes gave up and refused to reply to me later on. AETI told me that the reason for this is that the aircraft sometimes leaves the ground in slew mode and if this occurs, ProFlight considers the aircraft to have taken off, so be careful about it. Another problem affects waypoints close to airports; these are sometimes omitted from flight plans, and the solution is to reduce the buffer zone in PF2000.cfg down to four or five miles. Finally, one of the female Spanish controllers is unintelligible, due to poor recording, and AETI are looking to provide a replacement.
In summary? Getting the software up and running had its moments, but with the most recent patches applied, the adventures ProFlight 2000 generates are great fun, though nowhere near as stable as Radar Contact 2 - however the program is definitely staying on my hard disk. Its ability to handle both VFR and IFR flights and to change from one to the other as circumstances dictate leaves it in a class of its own. You owe it to yourself to buy it, but at present you will have to resign yourself to downloading two patches and the latest version of APLC32 in order to generate the adventures and this may put a lot of potential
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[Note: The Navajo used in the screenshots comes from the Abacus Premier Collection and can be downloaded from here http://www.flightsimdownloads.com/ - it only costs 12 bucks and you can try it for seven days without paying anything at all.