Pro Pilot 99

Beechcraft King Air B200 over Mount Rainier, just outside Seattle.

Pro Pilot 99 from the team of Sierra Online and Dynamix bills itself as "The Complete Flight Simulator". As such it's intended to include everything the simulator pilot will ever need, including a range of aircraft, flight planner, GPS and lots of area to fly over. This also means that it's not intended to be added on to which means a simplicity of use as there are no complicated configurations that must be changed and tweaked with each addition.

Beechcraft Baron panel, with GPS popped up, flying over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

INSTALLATION

The only difficulty I had with the install is that it failed to detect that my 3Dfx Glide driver was out of date. This didn't actually effect the operation of the program until I tried to switch from 2D to 3D mode...the result was interesting to say the least but not flyable. Upon getting the Glide 2.43 driver for my Monster 3D card the sim worked fine in 3D mode.

THE AIRCRAFT

Beechcraft Bonanza panel, waiting for takeoff at Las Vegas.

• Cessna 172P Skyhawk (mid 1980's)
• Cessna 172R Skyhawk (mid 1990's)
• Beechcraft V35 Bonanza v-tail
• Beechcraft Baron 58 twin
• Beechcraft Super King Air B200
• Cessna CitationJet

Cessna 172P panel with GPS; this image is in 2D mode.

The problems I did find were on the ground. If you do not have rudder pedals you will have to ground steer with the keyboard as having auto-coordination turned on only affects the rudder (most light planes have the rudders and the nose wheel coupled together, but not here). You thus have to learn to use the rudder and brake keys on the keyboard. It can be done, but it's not much fun. Fortunately, an alternative is provided in that you can select auto-taxi, even on a fully planned flight, and just get placed on the runway end.

Cessna 172R panel flying over Boston; note the low cloud layer with the building tops showing through.

The other ground problem is apparent when you hit the throttle. Several of the planes feel like they have rockets attached as the initial acceleration is much too quick. Once in the air things settle down though.

Aircraft operation has been made as realistic as possible. You won't be able to just jump in, hit the throttle and fly as each plane must be properly started up before flight. A nice drop down checklist covers this, so with no other reference you can get going in any of the aircraft. Since real pilots use checklists in exactly the same way this is a nice touch of realism.

A number of options are available. You can control fuel and cabin loading and fly on partial panel with six individual instruments being controllable.

All the aircraft panels are very nice looking. The switches really move when you change them and the throttles, mixture controls, trim, etc. all visibly respond when you adjust them. Each panel is quite realistic for the type of aircraft being modeled. The panels are loaded with instruments (Cessna 172 drivers would be especially pleased to have a plane loaded like these) including dual nav-coms and a nicely working auto-pilot.

Bonanza over London at dusk.

GETTING IN THE AIR

For a more flexible way of starting you can use the "Position Aircraft" menu. This lets you place your aircraft anywhere, using a map that can show airports, navaids, waypoints, routes, etc. The map scale is widely selectable. You can place the airplane on the ground at any point or you can place it relative to navaids. This is a great way to practice ILS approaches as you can place yourself in the air out on the approach and immediately get to flying.

Flight planner.

The most sophisticated way of starting a flight is with the flight planning wizard. Here you choose a starting and ending airport and then let the wizard plot your route. You're not stuck with the route it chooses either, as you can add and remove waypoints. Using the system is quick and easy any time you want to fly a complete route rather than just joyriding around an area. Flight plans can be stored and recalled later.

The only weakness in the wizard is in weather generation. You can choose a VFR or IFR flight, but you never seem to get real instrument conditions...the worst weather I was able to get was clouds at 3000 or 4000 feet. Three weather regions are generated, but all weather is random so if you don't like what's chosen all you can do is hit the button and have new random weather generated. Fortunately, there is a solution as you can just ignore the randomly generated weather and go into the weather menu and set up what you really want once you're at the starting airport but before starting up the plane.

Cessna 172R with Manhattan in the background.

SCENERY

I found that the sim does a better job with natural scenery than with man-made. That is, flying by mountains, into canyons, over water, etc. the scenery really looks nice and quite realistic. Flying over cities is less impressive. While most cities have some buildings it's sometimes not enough to really give the feel of the size of the city. The scenery includes 35 major urban areas that get more extensive scenery treatments than other cities. A bigger problem is that buildings have two detail levels: a simple outline seen from a distance and a textured version seen close up. Good idea, but in many cases the textures seem to appear only when you're very close to the buildings and much later than they should.

Beechcraft Baron flying down inside the Grand Canyon.

There is plenty of spectacular scenery to fly through. I'd certainly recommend a trip inside the Grand Canyon as seen in one of the screen shots. Snow capped Mount Rainer near Seattle is another fine example of natural scenery. Shorelines just about anywhere are beautiful. There's really just too much to mention...

WEATHER

Cessna CitationJet on short final to Chicago O'Hare in hard IMC conditions.

For visibility you have two choices: clouds or IMC. Here, IMC means reduced visibility from ground level up to any altitude. Unfortunately, this isn't quite realistic as even when there is fog you will break out above it at some height. The IMC setting is good, though, for practicing instrument landings and the reduced visibility effect is quite stunning...seeing those runway lights appear out of the gloom after tracking down the ILS is quite a thrill.

Cessna CitationJet over LAX with a fine example of Pro Pilot's puffy clouds.

If you choose clouds instead of IMC you have quite a bit more control. Clouds can be set at three levels, with each level having a different amount of cloud coverage and cloud thickness. You can generate clouds right down to ground level, so you can use the cloud settings to simulate IMC conditions and this works quite well if you want to do a full IFR flight instead of just landing practice. The only "gotcha" here is that the cloud heights are set relative to sea level so you have to check the runway altitude to properly set things up so you'll break out of the clouds at the proper level during your descent.

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL

Side window view of London at night.

You can also pick up ATC during free flight. It's easy: tune in the ATIS for the airport you want to land on using your comm radio (finding the frequency is easy too, as you can pop up the GPS display and read it right off there). The ATIS will tell you the approach control frequency; dial this into your comm radio and you'll automatically start getting vectors for landing. Neat idea!

While using ATC you will hear chatter between the controllers and other planes, though there does not seem to be as much of it as you might expect and it's sometimes unrealistic (like the time I was on an ILS approach in solid IMC conditions and the tower was talking to an Archer doing touch and goes on the same runway).

View over the nose cowling at Innsbruck, Austria.

However, I talked to the people at Dynamix and was told that ATC was a late addition and they admitted that it was guilty of what they call "overvectoring". This means that when you approach your destination airport ATC will tend to send you off on seemingly random headings and altitudes before finally getting you on the ground.

My experience with ATC tended to be even worse. I was once sent on a series of vectors that had me completely circle the destination airport twice before I gave up and landed on my own. I was once told to turn base...while 17000 feet above the airport. Every case was different and I haven't used the sim enough to find a pattern to it. There may be ways to lessen the problem; for example you have to choose left or right traffic patterns and if you choose the wrong one for the side you're approaching from you're guaranteed to get a lot of vectoring just to get placed on the correct side. The controller also doesn't fully understand IFR versus VFR as during every IFR approach somewhere along the way I'd get an instruction like "turn left base". Well, in IFR flight you don't do traffic patterns so these instructions at the least made no sense and at worse were impossible to follow.

45 degree angle view over Madrid, Spain.

This is an area that's going to take some more user experimentation with. The ATC does seem to work just fine everywhere except on the approach so you could use it for most of the flight and then just cancel at the first sign of the overvectoring symptoms. Of course, not everyone cares about ATC anyway and the rest of the sim works whether or not you're under air traffic control.

OTHER FEATURES

Also worthy of mention is the wide variety of viewpoints available. From the cockpit you have four choices: full panel, partial panel (generally eliminating switches and engine instruments), view over the cowl and full unobstructed view.

Cessna 172P over Las Vegas in 2D mode.

In addition to the view ahead you have views each 45 degrees around the plane with very realistic looking windows, wings, engines, etc. in view depending on the plane being flown. There are also a variety of outside views, including a tower view and four views around the aircraft. It's quite fun using the outside views when flying through scenery areas to really get a good look around (wish this could be done in real life!).

For new pilots there is an extensive set of lessons. This is probably the only time you'll need to access the CD drive as these are on the 2nd program CD and are done as video instructions. If you're new to flying these short lessons will help get you started.

Beechcraft Baron flying inside the Grand Canyon.

CONCLUSION

Like any piece of software with this complexity it's not perfect of course. The flight models, especially in ground handling, could use some work and the ATC needs an fix...which I really hope comes about as this could be the highlight of the program if the approach vectoring can be made to work.

Pro Pilot 99 is certainly a worthy competitor in the civilian flight simulator arena and I think anyone using it will have many enjoyable flights.

Nels Anderson
Email: nels@flightsim.com

For more screen shots read the original Pro Pilot 99 press release.