Radar Contact 2

he world in which the majority of simulator pilots fly is eerily silent apart from the drone of the engine; a strange contrast to the real world of flying, where conversations between air traffic controllers and pilots frequently bring the radios crackling into life. In fact, the Tower of Babel was probably quieter than the real world of flying, and unless you concentrate hard, it is easy to miss a request for a vector from ATC - with dire consequences. Radar Contact is an air traffic control add-on for Flight Simulator which has the potential to change all this, and the opening words of every adventure - 'Welcome to Radar Contact. It is as close as you can get to how it really is. Enjoy your flight!' sum up very well the impact this program makes on the flight simmers world.

Radar Contact is the three-year old brainchild of two Flight Simulator enthusiasts, Doug Thompson and John Dekker (right). John did the programming, and produced an adventure 'engine' which can create realistic flights, based on flight plans generated by a wide variety of commercial and freeware programs including Flight Simulator's own system. Doug is an air traffic controller with the Memphis ARTCC, and his 19 years of experience means that Radar Contact gives very realistic impression of what it is like to fly under today's current ATC jurisdiction.

Radar Contact doesn't add ATC to every flight you make in Flight Simulator and the first thing you need to do to fly with 'real' ATC is to create a flight plan and then process it in Radar Contact to create an adventure. Although this sounds tedious, it is a relatively quick process once you get the hang of it and requires little or no effort, because Radar Contact can import flight plans from almost type of flight planning software out there. Once the plan has been processed, it is automatically saved in a directory of your choosing, and all you have to do is to start Flight Simulator and load the adventure in order to go.

The software is delivered on a single CD and I'll confess that my heart sank when I saw it for the first time. I have gotten used to some pretty slipshod programming over the years I have used Flight Simulator add-ons and the first impression I had of Radar Contact was that it had been hand-rolled in someone's garage; there was no manual of any description included with the product and the print quality left a lot to be desired. There is a very full range of HTML help pages on the CD, but there is no easy way to find what you are looking for and so it was without much expectation that I stuck the CD in the drive, crossed my fingers and followed the prompts that came up. My mood was not improved by a tricky installation, which is the case partly because the software is broken down into several components, and partly because there are several options for some of the components. It took me a couple of goes to get a working setup, relying on natural instinct and some trial and error - it would be good to see a more comprehensively annotated installation 'wizard'. The other thing worth bearing in mind is that this is a very big program and if you do not have 600 Mb of disk space available, you can forget it - but read on, because this is an add-on you should not miss.

I started off by generating a terminal departure and arrival flight which I flew with one of my favourite aircraft, Abacus' Piper Navajo, available from their Premier Collection web site. My reason for choosing the Navajo was that it isn't too complicated to handle, and I was more interesting in finding out how Radar Contact worked than flying the aircraft, but I have since used many types of plane right up to 747s. For the most realistic departure possible, I slewed the aircraft onto the hard standing, loaded the Radar Contact adventure and loaded FSMeteo so that I could enjoy some real-time weather. In a 'normal' FS flight, I would have taxied to the threshold, held the aircraft on the brakes, opened the throttles and have been on my way, but not with Radar Contact, oh no. The software uses an unobtrusive 'scroll bar' at top left of the screen for user interaction and prompts, and after Doug's dulcet tones greeted me, the scroll bar announced 'RC is ready.' I used the RC99 Control Panel to find my way to the scroll bar COM section, found ATIS and hit the enter key.

As soon as I was happy with the weather (light rain and low clouds - another fine English summer day) I hit the enter key to get my clearance, listening carefully so that I could enter the squawk code. This will be a new idea for many FS pilots, but without a valid squawk ident, ATC would find it almost impossible to track an aircraft. From there, using the enter key one more time passed me onto ground control, from whom I received my taxi instructions, and it wasn't long before I was holding short on the threshold of my assigned runway. In each exchange, Radar Contact generated very natural requests from ATC and the pilot (by default, Radar Contact provides an American pilot for the adventures, but you can record your own voice should you wish, and I think I will one day, when I get time.) All the while I had to pick out my call sign from among the radio chatter that is part of every Radar Contact adventure. I used the scroll bar to call Tower to tell them I was ready, listening to the voice of 'my' pilot talking to the controller and marvelling as tower came back and told me to hold for an incoming flight. Then we were cleared for take off, to fly runway heading and that is where I made my first mistake. I hadn't set my assigned altitude from the flight plan and in trying to dial it into the Bendix King autopilot, climb and clean up the aircraft, I must have strayed off course a little, because next thing tower was on my back telling me what 'fly the runway heading' meant and there were red faces all round! Once I was back on course and clear of local traffic, I was passed to Departure control and finally to Center, who issued my clearance and left me to set on my way. Once flying under my own command, I was free to take a look at how the scroll bar works. Although only one can be seen at a time, there are three lines on the bar, the first being COM information, the second being NAV information, and the last runway information. During an adventure, you navigate between the lines using the 'up' and 'down' keys and navigate 'within' a line using the 'left' and 'right' keys. If you highlight say ATIS on the COM line and hit the 'enter' key in Radar Contact, your radio is automatically set to that frequency. The same method can be used to scroll around the NAV line, which lists all your flight plan information, including the distance to the next waypoint. Scroll left or right on the runway line and use the 'enter' key and you will hear your pilot request an alternate runway - useful if approach is trying to vector you into a landing with a 50 knot tailwind, or if the controller is encouraging you to drop a 777 on a 2000 foot grass strip.

In flight, Radar Contact fills the airwaves with some great chatter, the best feature of which is that the accents change depending on which country you are in; assuming you installed all the chatter files. The chatter isn't just random; you will find yourself following it and some of the exchanges had me in hysterics. Radar Contact correctly handles all the different controllers under the FAA rules, approach and landing being no different to take-off. Vectoring to intercept the ILS is very reliable in version 2.0, although the controller doesn't take account of winds (this is fixed in version 2.1), or terrain and it is possible to be vectored straight into the side of a mountain if elevations are high around the approach. Fortunately, there is a solution to this, which is to select terrain NOTAMS when the adventure is compiled, allowing you to descend at your own discretion. Version 2 reliably places you about ten miles out on finals, but it sometimes leaves you with rather large interception angles which are fine in a light plane but tough to handle in larger jets. 2.1 will correct this and also allows for short finals with the airport's minimum vectoring altitude assigned on the base leg, which should allow a smoother transition to intercept. 2.1 also allows requests for weather information in approach airspace, rather than just in Center airspace, so that there is more time to call for runway changes and 2.1 removes the very narrow window for requesting alternate runways in the earlier version.

Radar Contact is sophisticated enough that there is a twenty percent chance that you may be asked to hold, and the controllers are particularly strict about standards here. In version 2.0, 20 mile legs are standard, but this has been altered in 2.1, and leg length is selectable in 5 mile increments. Holding can also be turned off after the adventure has been loaded. There is also a choice between flying a holding pattern and using vectors, the latter being easier since the controller tells you exactly what to do.

A Radar Contact adventure doesn't end until you taxi off the runway and set the parking brakes. A very good debriefing tells you exactly where you went wrong and if you push your luck you are invited to meet the man from flight standards district office to discuss your problems. In general the debriefings are limited to congratulating you on keeping to your flight plan, but if you make mistakes they are always picked up. Criticisms? Once you learn the key combinations and become familiar with the scroll bar, RC2 is a no-brainer to handle. In the version I reviewed, the documentation was slightly anarchic, although it was all there - if you knew where to look, and the tutorial flights are very good indeed. I would have liked to see some European controller voices, but I suspect these will appear in due course, as Radar Contact becomes more popular. The only other problem I had was that the adventure compiler generates default ATC frequencies at either end of the adventure if these are not entered by hand when the adventure is made - it would be good if a later version could get around this problem.

Do I recommend Radar Contact? You bet. The software is rock solid, and I rarely fly anywhere without it these days. Radar Contact is available from JDT LLC for FS2000 and FS98, priced at $38 for the CD and $28 for the download version.