Radar Contact 3

By Andrew Herd (10 January 2003)

hen I reviewed John Dekker and Doug Thompson's Radar Contact 2 a couple of years back, I was impressed by a program which added air traffic control to the eerily silent skies of FS2000. RC2 was based around an engine which processed FS2000 flight plans to create an adventure - once that was accomplished, all you had to do was to load it and go. While the result was a revelation, the control system relied on a pretty obscure set of key strokes and the adventure generation process was slow and more than a little clunky, but the ATC was so good that the product sold like hot cakes.

The popularity of RC2 didn't go unnoticed, so it was no surprise that when FS2002 was released, it had grown its own built-in air traffic control. At first glance, the outlook for Radar Contact looked bleak, given the slick presentation of Microsoft's ATC, but with experience FS2002's shortcomings became brutally clear: no SIDs and STARs; no alteration of flight levels; you can't divert due to weather; and you have to accept the runway you are given, no matter what. As if that wasn't enough, Microsoft have chosen to implement a strange mongrelly type of ATC that doesn't seem to belong to any real jurisdiction I can think of right now. But, whatever its faults, you cannot deny that FS2002's ATC is impressive - any competitor is going to have to be very good if it is to stand any chance at all.

In Radar Contact 3 by JDT LLC, I think we have a successful challenger; and furthermore one that has been substantially redeveloped and made much easier to use. The headline changes are that the adventure compiler has been dropped and the whole program has been rewritten in Visual Basic, but many user requests have also been implemented and numerous improvements made, not least adherence to the full 7110.65 FAA rule set and some moves towards compliance with European ATC standards. When you consider that RC3 works with FS98, FS2000 and FS2002 in both standard and pro versions, it clearly has a great deal to offer. FS98 and FS2000 don't have built in ATC, so an add-on is the only way to get it; but a utility which hopes to challenge FS2002's ATC has to address three areas: authenticity, usability and customisability. Given that one of the developers of Radar Contact is an air traffic controller, RC3 can be expected to deliver in the first area, the only question remaining being how well it does in the other two.

But first, a few words about thin air.

There are two broad types of airspace: controlled and uncontrolled. Uncontrolled airspace is designated class F or G the world over, though in the UK you sometimes hear it described as the 'Open FIR' (FIR = Flight Information Region), but whatever it is called where you are, if you are in it, you can fly without a transponder, a radio, or even a plane. Controlled airspace, on the other hand, can only be entered with the express permission of ATC and you have to ask for that over the radio; worse still, controllers not only like to know when you are going to arrive, but have a terrible habit of telling you exactly what you are going to do when you get there. This, I am told, is for our own protection, though, as a well-known after-dinner speaker in the UK used to be fond of pointing out, given that the chance of two jet airliners colliding with each other is infinitesimally small, it seems strange that we shorten the odds by sticking them all in narrow little airways.

There is a hierarchy of controlled airspace, ranging down from Class A to Class E, each type having different rules of engagement, the reason being that controlled airspace doesn't just consist of airways, it also includes complicated stacked up boxes of air around many airports. These provide a comfort zone for airliners as they descend from the airways onto approach, or as they are making their climbout, and ATC are justifiably nervous about letting anyone wander around in there. So if you take a look at a sectional like the one above, you will see a confusing jigsaw of different colored shapes superimposed on the chart - the shapes indicating the boundaries of different types of airspace. This is why it is so important to know exactly where you are at any given moment (see the UK VFR scenery review I did a while back) because if you get into any of those boxes accidentally, the Powers That Be will send you a Very Nasty Letter. What air traffic controllers do is to look after planes flying within controlled airspace; though if they have time they will often give a hand to pilots flying outside it as well. They are nice people. Generally. Although if I ever get my hands on the military controller who diverted me twenty miles off route when I did my first solo cross-country flight I swear I will make him see the error of his ways.

While I suspect that the vast majority of flight simmers ply the skies in glorious silence, that isn't the way of the real world. Although there is a good deal of non-radio traffic out there, if you have a set, it makes sense to use it. Yeah, I know I said that the chances of banging into someone else are pretty slight, but aircraft are unevenly distributed and tend to concentrate around waypoints, natural features and runways. So for example, even when I know that the radio on our farm strip isn't manned, I still make blind calls, just in case someone else is trying to land when I am taking off; and when I am flying VFR in class G airspace I ask for a service from ATC whenever I can - simply because they have radar and I do not. Anything which lessens the chances of an airprox is seriously to be encouraged. So though it is traditional for pilots to bitch about ATC, ask any one and he or she will tell you that there are plenty of times when there is nothing better than hearing the friendly voice of ATC - unless it happens to be asking you to do another orbit.

So if you want your flight simulation to be as real as it gets, there isn't much choice but to fly using ATC; and if you are beginning to chafe at the restrictions that FS2002's flavor enforces, then roll up to RC3 and see what it can do for you.

The distribution is available only on CD, chiefly because a full install is 438 Mb, split over a staggering 31,000 files and you can order it from the Radar Contact 3 website for $44.00 if you are a new users and $34.00 if you are upgrading from a previous version. Just about the only question you have to answer is which version of Flight Simulator you are using, after which you can hit OK and go out for a long walk. There is a choice to be made between a minimum and full install, the difference being that all the country-specific ATC chatter is left out if the minimum option is selected. When the (long) installation is complete, you will find an icon for the Radar Contact application and a link to a 188 page pdf. As part of the installation, RC3 installs Pete Dowson's FSUIPC and AdvDisp modules - it won't install older versions over newer ones. After the file copying is complete, you need to fill in the boxes on a product registration applet, which sends a message to the developers, who guarantee to return a registration key within 24 hours. Until you enter this you can't run RC3, which is kind of tough on the soul, but understandable given the amount of piracy in the FS world.

Using the program is as easy as launching Flight Simulator, creating and saving a flight plan, launching RC3, picking up the saved plan, processing it and then going for a flight. Okay, you have to tell Radar Contact a few things about your situation, like the type of plane you are using and its registration, but it couldn't be much simpler. However, as the manual points out, 'real' ATC isn't for the turn and burn fraternity and there is a certain amount of learning to be done. No, you don't need to study ATC syntax, or learn calls - RC3 does all that for you - but what you do need to know is a little bit about the general principles of how air traffic control works and the do's and dont's of flying under its aegis. All of this is covered in the manual and for all it has many pages, it is well indexed and you can read enough to get going very quickly.

After creating and saving a flight plan, for maximum reality you should slew the plane to the ramp and shut down the engines. After doing that, you click the RC3 icon, browse to the flight plan folder and load the plan you are using for your flight. This is where you will notice the first difference between RC3 and Flight Simulator, which is that RC3 supports the FSNavigator and Nav 3.0 flight planners in addition to the default one. After RC3 has processed the plan, which took only a few seconds on my 1.7 Mhz PIV, you need to select the type of plane you are flying (heavy, jet, turboprop, or prop, but not chopper); your airline, if any; and your callsign. There are various other options on this screen which set thresholds for vectors, enroute chatter, vertical separation and holds - and you can enable dings at checkpoints, pilot autoreply and autotuning of the radios here as well.

The most important options are the ability to set the VFR squawk code to something other than 1200 - in Europe everyone uses 7000; and the transition level, which is 18,000 feet in the US, but varies elsewhere - in the UK, for example, it is only 3,000 feet. Once you have okayed this screen, the next step is to hit the start Radar Contact button, which minimises RC3, and you can swap back to Flight Simulator. The only real gotcha in this entire process is that you must start Flight Simulator before you start Radar Contact and it pays to be aware that RC3 doesn't actually place your plane at the departure airfield - you have to do that yourself. If you start with the bird on the wrong continent, Radar Contact has no way of knowing about it, because the program doesn't track where the plane is on the ground - in fact it is actually possible to conduct the entire ground phase sitting on the threshold pretending you are doing what the controller wants, which saves all that tedious taxiing.

Although RC3 provides realistic air traffic and pilot audio, like FS2002's ATC, it can't 'hear' your commands, so you have to use an interface called AdvDisp to talk to it. This neat little utility displays text in a resizable box on screen and the selections you make determine what your pilot says to air traffic; in a nutshell, it fulfills the role that the transparent ATC window does in FS2002. I did all my testing in FS2002 and the first problem I came across was getting AdvDisp to behave itself - to begin with all it wanted was to be a green bar at the top of the screen and it was full of nonsense box characters. With some help from Doug Thompson I learned to tame it, by right clicking on the bar, closing it, reselecting AdvDisp through the modules menu, dragging the box it so it was over the panel and then docking it. I could not get the little tinker to work if I placed it anywhere in a transparent section of the panel graphic or windshield. Why? No-one knows. Another problem I have with AdvDisp is that while it offers endless options for its background color, transparency isn't one of them, so the box always ends up obscuring something you want to see - and if you place it over a gauge, it flickers. While I appreciate that the developers have been incredibly ingenious getting RC3 to work with three different versions of Flight Simulator, it would have been great to see it hijack the FS2002 ATC window and use it for its own purposes, rather than using AdvDisp.

Throughout any flight using RC3, the AdvDisp window displays several lines of text. The top one gives the ID for the next waypoint, the distance and bearing to it, and the frequency that should be currently tuned. That last one would be a life-saver if real aircraft had it, but if you ever can't figure out who you should be talking to in RC3, the answer is on that line. Neat idea. What follows next depends on what stage of flight you are in, but it will either be various numerically selectable choices, or the next frequency you need. On the last line is a reminder of how to get back to the main menu, because RC3's choices are nested several layers deep and despite the improved interface, it is still quite possible to get lost. The second line on the graphic is the selection to ask permission for leaving the frequency to get the weather - necessary if you have only one COM radio. The next two lines allow you to ask for higher or lower flight levels.

At this point it might be a good idea to make it clear that RC3 is an IFR ATC simulator. This is so fundamental to the way the program works it might just be worth spending a little time on it. Flight can be divided into two types, the basic definitions of which are that: VFR (visual flight rules) apply where the plane is clear of cloud and the pilot can see the ground; and IFR (instrument flight rules) where those two conditions can't be guaranteed. However, there are certain situations where even if you aren't in cloud and can see the ground you can't fly under visual flight rules. I trust this makes things clear (-:

The most obvious case where IFR applies in VFR conditions is on airline flights. Except in very rare circumstances, airliners are flown IFR, even if visibility is 150 kilometres and there isn't a cloud in the sky. While it is tempting to speculate that this is because ATPLs spend their entire time trying to figure out how to use the Flight Management Computer, the real reason is that they spend much of their time in Class A airspace (airways and the areas around some of the bigger airports) and you can't fly VFR in Class A - there is far too much traffic in it to risk having folk bumbling about in 757s wondering where the hell they are. The big difference between going IFR and VFR is that a flight plan is mandatory and that you have to fly under air traffic control, so that the boys in the control room can stop you bumping into other airplanes. This accounts for why you have to file a flight plan in RC3 whatever kind of flight you make - even on a clear day with unlimited visibility - and it means that the program isn't really appropriate if your ideal FS flight is a short spin from a farm strip in a Super Cub.

I'm not going to go through a call by call crit of RC3s' phraseology, because as far as I can tell, it is pretty much perfect; and so it should be given that one of the developers is an air traffic controller. But to give an idea of how the program works, the first thing you would do at a major US airport after checking the weather is to called Clearance Delivery. How do you do that? Well, you just press the key corresponding to the number that RC3 puts alongside CD's frequency. With autotune enabled on the options screen (see the graphic below), you don't even have to change frequency, although you do have to set the altimeter and squawk code. When you press the key, you will hear your pilot call CD and they will reply in turn. After Clearance, you will call Ground, then Tower, then Departure and so on, all the way to your destination, listening to much the same variety of voices than you get in FS2002: a default RC3 install bringing you ten controllers and two pilots. While the speech is a little choppier than FS2002's ATC, you get used to it and besides, there is a lot more on offer.

What RC3 doesn't attempt to do is to assign the correct nationality of controller to each country - there simply isn't the variety on offer (or space on the CD), but with the help of a utility called RCWavUtil.exe, which is included in the package, a new controller set can be recorded in about three hours. So theoretically, given time and patience, users could completely replace the existing files with accents of their own choice and as Doug Thompson says, 'As the product matures, and more people become willing to record pilot and controller scripts, we could, for example, offer a British package, which would overwrite the default voices with British pilots and controllers.' On the other hand, RC3 is sophisticated enough to provide Norwegian chatter in Norwegian airspace and a hunt through the dark corners of my hard disk turned up 29 other sets of country-specific chatter, ranging from Colombia to Kazakhstan. Talking to Doug, I found that not only is it possible for users to add their own chatter, it is theoretically the case that later versions of RC might assign ATC phraseology by region, opening up some awesome possibilities. The one problem with this is that once chatter kicks in, it is quite possible to hear say, JFK chatter in Memphis airspace, but you can't have everything.

So far, so like FS2002's ATC; but very early on you will begin to spot some subtle differences. For a start, RC3 lets you select a different runway, but you can also abort your takeoff. After you are airborne you can request an unscheduled return to the field, declare an emergency or even hand over everything to your co-pilot and have a cup of coffee while he does all the hard work. This is where RC3 really begins to shine: for example if you have filed a departure procedure within the flight plan, or checked the 'flex DP' box on the controller input screen, RC3 won't assign you a heading until you are 30 miles from the airport, but at that time, RC3 expects to find you on course and 'as filed', so pay attention! In the default setup RC3 expects that you will fly within 15 degrees of heading, 300 feet of filed altitude and 10 knots of assigned airspeed, which sounds generous until you appreciate that those standards have to be maintained regardless of drift, chop and inattention. If you have trouble keeping within these limits, you can loosen them up, but only before you start a flight - there is no changing your mind once you are airborne. Using the default settings, the allowances for completing turns onto headings are relatively tight, even when they are strictly rate one.

One much needed enhancement is that Radar Contact no longer belongs to the 'one size fits all' school of airport ATC. In RC2, you sometimes encountered packed ATC setups at two-bit regional fields that in reality have barely a dog to their name, but version 3 allows for fields that have tower and ground, but lack approach control and just about any other variation you can think of. The first snag is that all the frequencies are derived from Flight Simulator, which means that RC3 shares the same errors, but in the event that the database is wrong, or you want to change things, you can add and delete controllers and change frequencies as much as you like using the Controller tab set in RC3; though you can't do this once a flight is in progress. The second snag is that where a field has a tower, but no ground controller - as is relatively common in Europe - you can get the curious situation in which clearance asks you to change to the frequency you already have tuned in order to taxi. Despite the occasional peculiarity like this, RC3 is much better about the controllers it uses than FS2002 and RC3 correctly implements the Super, High and Low controllers, for example.

The enroute phase is the moment when RC3 absolutely trashes, outclasses, buries and generally forces the FS2002 ATC to eat its dust. Don't like the weather? Ask for a deviation. Want a different flight level? Request it. Can't handle the turbulence? Call in and ask for a new level. Want clearance direct to a distant navaid? Go for it. Using the FlightOne DC-9 and can't handle the cabin pressurisation? Make everyone's day and declare an emergency. Bored with pounding the airways and need to get down before your partner files for divorce? Request a diversion. All of these things are possible using RC3 and none of them can be done in FS2002. I feel kind of guilty writing off all this added value in one short paragraph, but the reality of FS2002 is too often that you find yourself with no option but to tool along in the exact middle of the only cloud bank in the sky, unable to see those ground textures you so carefully installed the day before. FS2002 flight plans might as well be carved in tablets of stone as saved electronically for all the change you can make in them. With Radar Contact, everything is up for grabs and you can near enough apply to chase your own tail - it even gives you spacing from the FS2002 AI planes, although it doesn't actually control them, so you have to put up with them going their own sweet ways.

The descent phase has obviously had a great deal of attention and it is much cleaner than anything RC2 had on offer. For example, approach controllers will give you crossing restrictions, while center, or tower won't. What this means is that if you are dealing with an approach controller, a certain amount of forward thinking needs to be done to ensure that a discretionary descent doesn't result in you arriving too high and busting a restriction. While we are on the subject, it pays to remember that as with FS2002, RC3's controllers don't know where the high ground is and every so often they will deliver instructions that, if followed, would lead you to inspect the inside of a mountain; but the reason you are paid so much to wear those stripes is that you can always say no.

There is a very detailed section in the manual on holding patterns, the reason being that it isn't good to hear something like: Speedbird 245, cleared to the Wacko three three five radial, three five mile fix, hold west. Right turns, two zero mile legs approved, maintain one two thousand, expect further clearance when I get back from turning the hay in the twenty acre field, without having a reasonable idea of what it all means. This is one place where having a pen and paper to hand throughout an RC3 controlled flight pays dividends, because even if you understand holding clearances, it doesn't mean you can remember them and by definition, they tend to be issued at the worst possible moment, when you are in thick cloud, the co-pilot has become incapacitated and the creature has gotten loose in the hold. Just about the only way to get your own back is to declare minimum fuel and guess what? RC3 lets you do that, too.

One of the things a real approach controller will do early on is to give you a runway, so that you can set up the avionics. In FS2002, that is the runway you have to land on, come hell or high water, and I must have had three thousand emails asking how to change it - the answer is that you can't. In RC3 (FX: trumpets blare) you can, even if it involves landing downwind, so make sure you check out the weather first. One of the most sophisticated features of the entire program - well, it impressed me, anyway - is the way you can request short final if approach try and send you eight miles downwind in the 172 before turning you onto base. The new feature which allows the use of procedures works well as long as you select the item on time and don't get lost and fly more than 40 miles away from the airport. If at any time in the process you become visual, you can call 'field in sight' and get down the old fashioned way; then, if conditions clamp down at the last second, you can request and execute a missed approach, do another hold while you think it over and choose to land at either of your alternates instead. More or less anything you can do in real life is possible. Incidentally, check out the graphic - first line shows distance and bearing to the airport, second shows distance, bearing and frequency of the localiser for runway 15 (11010 = 110.10). You really have to try hard to get lost using this add-on.

By now I hope you have a picture of what RC3 is capable of doing, which is to give you gold-plated FAA ATC from the moment you turn on the radios to the moment you turn them off again. The program also handles uncontrolled fields very well, but the need to file a flight plan means that it can't handle 'unplanned' VFR flights at all, so if this is what you like to do, you are out of luck. However, if you start at a field with no tower controller, RC3 automatically gives you a choice of runways and follows up with a selection of departure direction - very neat. In discussions with the developers, it appears that there is no particular reason why a VFR ATC enhancement couldn't be developed... interesting...

At the end of an RC2 flight, there was the critique, something that was known to induce panic attacks in nervous users, it was that challenging. You would finish what seemed to have been an uneventful flight, start packing your things away, and suddenly the assessor would be on your case, tearing you to virtual shreds. In RC3, avoiding the critique is as simple as choosing the 'end Radar Contact' option, though it seems a pity to waste such a golden opportunity to have your character assassinated. Doug still retains his form, by the way, although I detect a little more conciliation in his approach these days.

What else? Hmmmm. There is some scary stuff at the back of the manual about how to use RC3 and FS2002 ATC together, which can be done in any aircraft that possesses a COM2 radio. Reading this section left me with a healthy respect for the author and the firm impression that a mere mortal like myself would become hopelessly confused if I tried it, but this trick does allow you to take advantage of Flight Simulator's ATC chatter if you don't have the disk space to load the stuff that comes with RC3. It is also the one reason I can think of why it is a good thing that RC3 doesn't hijack the FS2002 ATC window and use it, but given the vote I would dump the FS2002 ATC altogether and use RC3 via the Microsoft interface, were such a thing possible. Believe it or not, you can even run RC3 with WideFS, but I have enough trouble running two monitors off a single machine without electrocuting myself. Flicking right to the back of the manual there are eight tutorials and pre-saved flight plans which demonstrate virtually every aspect of Radar Contact. If you are new to the package, this is where I suggest you start.

Criticisms? Well, Radar Contact is a US product and although the developers had a good deal of help from simmers around the rest of the world, it is only just beginning to feel its way into 'foreign' airspace. Features like QNH are supported, though QFE is not, letting simmers outside the US fly with a measure of reality when they are advised on altimeter settings, but the phraseology inevitably varies somewhat from usage in Europe. It would have been good to see appropriate controller accents for different countries, but I can understand that a line had to be drawn somewhere unless RC3 was to need a DVD for distribution - but it does mean that the controllers' accents sound out of place in Europe and the rest of the world, which sounds even odder given that the chatter is correctly localised. However, given that Microsoft haven't internationalised their controllers, such criticism is relative. About the only other niggle is that AdvDisp is clunky and getting it sized and docked is more than a little tedious and it always seemed to be in the way of some instrument I wanted to read or another, but maybe I should use panels with a little more space on them.

I can thoroughly recommend RC3, because it is an outstanding product. If you enjoy IFR simulation and are frustrated at the shortcomings of FS2002's ATC, or don't have any ATC because you own FS2000 or FS98, then Radar Contact is the ticket to headache free, realistic air traffic control. There just isn't anything out there to touch it, especially where FS2002 is concerned. My judgement is that in this version, the development team have pretty much cracked the whole simulated ATC thing, and it is hard to imagine how the next version could be better, beyond a few international localisazation and interface issues. And who knows, we might get a killer VFR ATC sim thrown in?

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