Ultimate Airlines

By Andrew Herd (23 December 2000)

ave you ever sat down to do another flight plan and wondered, some time around the nineteenth waypoint, if there was a better way? If I don't experience this emotion while I am building a plan, I usually do when I am flying it, often when I discover that I have inadvertently stuck in a 600 mile dog-leg just short of the IAF. Well the good news is that there is another way, and this program is it. You can purchase and download it from either Flight One, or from Just Flight, who have the exclusive European distribution rights.

Ultimate Airlines is an application which allows you to use realistic flight routing, view virtual departure and arrival terminal screens, maintain a pilot log book and even use a toolkit which allows virtual airlines to insert their flights among the real schedules. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is one of the most original add-ons I have ever seen for Flight Simulator.

Using the program you can look at live departure boards of any airport around the world with scheduled airline services, choose a flight, load the plan into FS2000 and fly it. To add to the ambience the departure boards have boarding calls and the truly obsessed can even check which meals the airline is serving on each flight. The interface is excellent and the graphics are gorgeous, and if the product isn't absolutely perfect it is it only needs some details fixing to make it something every FS2000 user should have.

The reason Ultimate Airlines is such a must-have is that Flight One have gone to town and have included over 250,000 flight plans - practically all the world's scheduled airline flights. This is a real break-through in flight simularion, because it solves so many flight planning problems in one go.

The plans include high and low altitude routing, as appropriate, and setting a route up could not be easier. The first step is to enter the departure airport, which can be done by name or by ICAO code. Then you enter your destination and a list of flight plans for various airlines will appear.

Next, you select a flight by left clicking on it, and a boarding pass appears, although to be fair, I'm not certain that the flight crews of many airlines are asked for passes before they get let on the aircraft, but it is a nice touch.

Flight plans can be exported ready to fly in Flight Simulator 2000. They can also be exported to other formats for use in Squawk Box, Radar Contact 2, ACS-GPS, FSNavigator 4, and to Flight One's FMC (which is incorporated in ProFlight 2000 and Corporate Pilot). There is also an option to export plans directly into ProFlight 2000.

The plans are, as far as I can tell, true to the originals, but I would take issue with a few points. First, if you look at a series of flight plans from a particular airport, each one always starts at the same waypoint. To take the example of London Heathrow, this is the OCK VOR. I presume that Flight One have adopted this as a standard way of 'anchoring' flight plans, but personally I think it needs reconsideration in the next release. The problem with using this particular navaid is that it is comparatively close to the south side of the airport and using it would involve a tight turn from any runway - it is particularly unsuitable for flights which take a northerly direction. In addition, no published SID I have yet found uses OCK. It is a minor irritation, however, as it is easy enough to delete one waypoint.

The second problem with the flight plans is that they are based, according to the developers, on standard FAA data. This means that climb rates for some of the aircraft are pretty optimistic - for example at least one Heathrow departure assumes that a 747-400 will be at FL180 at the MID VOR, only 26 miles from the airport. An empty 744 could probably achieve this, but a fully loaded one complying with existing SIDs would have trouble.

Another gripe - and these are only small moans, because this is an inspired product - is that the default speeds for the flight plans are incorrect in many cases. Taking the 744 again, the IAS is 171 knots on the first leg. Now, I don't know about you, but this would make for a slightly sweaty departure with full flaps in anything but the most lightly loaded aircraft, and a more realistic speed would a hundred knots higher than this. Equally, the cruise speed of 230 knots is far too low. Flight One does include an excellent aircraft spec editor which allows you to correct these parameters, but it would be great if they could be put right in a patch so that it wasn't necessary for users to get their hands dirty. To be fair to Flight One, it would have been a huge task to incorporate realistic profiles for every known aircraft, but it would be good to see accurate profiles for the common ones and I can imagine that a brisk 'exchange' market will grow if the package achieves the popularity it deserves.

SIDs or STARs have been purposely left out, on the basis that it is easier to add them with a flight planning utility than it is to take them out, and many freeware or shareware editors are capable to inserting them. My own view is that it might be worth Flight One thinking about optional SIDS and STARs for a later version, as it would make the package even more attractive than it already is.

Flight One have included a log book with a 'career tracker' and flight evaluations, but one feature which will sell thousands of copies of this product is the support for Virtual Airlines - you can import your own Virtual Airline routing database and merge it among the flights of real-world counterparts.

Overall, this is a breakthrough product. I found it was fun to use and will definitely be keeping it on my system. It does need a bit of tweaking here and there, and if the graphics were speeded up it would make me really happy, but you owe it to the flight simming community to buy this - if it sells as well as I think it should, Flight One will extend its capabilities and then we will really have something to shout about.

Buy it.