Flight Planner

With all the attention to detail in the other areas of this product, it is good news that flight planning has also been considerably improved. From Jeppesen charts to GPS, flight planning and resulting navigation is much less of a chore. You will see how the convenience of flight planning from within FS2000 can make the overall process much easier.

Bruce: "We put in a Flight Planner into the product. You can go in and graphically layout a flight. You can go direct route, you can go VOR to VOR, or you can use the airways that are in the Jeppesen Nav databases.You bring up a dialog box and pick your departure airport and your destination airport and you pick which kind of route you want to fly. You can either manually select waypoints or you can have it automatically find a route for you. It will then create a flight log that says that you are going to fly at this speed and distance between waypoints, how long it's going to take you to fly each leg, what your course is, and so forth. Just like a real pilot uses. Then you can transfer that information over to the GPS, so when you want to fly – Boom! If the airplane you are flying is equipped with an auto pilot, punch it into GPS NAV mode and it will take you there. That capability is all there but we did not simulate a specific GPS.

Andy: One of the common complaints you get from the novice user who is not very versed in aviation navigation is "Ok, I took off, now how do I get anywhere?" Without having charts available, or paper and not knowing how to tune the radios and that sort of thing, I think the GPS will go a tremendously long way in helping people do that. Now they only have to say, "Start here", "I want to go there", "Now follow that route for me". Or they can have it just pick the route for them. To go fly they just take off, bring up the GPS. There is a big fat red line that says go that way and you will get where you’re trying to go. I think that will alleviate a lot of that concern.

Bruce: In the manuals we have charts from Jeppesen. Some airport charts, approach charts that sort of thing. They tie basically to the lessons and adventures in the book but through our agreement with Jeppesen they have created this product called SimCharts, which you have heard about. People who are really interested in doing more serious IFR practice flying or just cross country flying will be able to order (the products are actually available now) charts by region just like the real Jeppesen charts are. They come on CD Rom and you can print out the ones you want or keep them online. That’s another thing that we often get asked about is people want charts and obviously we can’t supply them. My Jepp books just for the northwest are very big. We can’t reproduce all that, but we now have a mechanism through Jeppesen to get charts. You can buy them for the West, Central U.S., East Coast and there is one for Europe etc. Depending on which package you buy you also can get some paper charts.

Andy: It’s also worth pointing out that the map view in Flightsim is a lot better. We use the same technology to drag the moving map on the GPS in more of a full featured map view. It looks more like an IFR on route chart than a sectional chart but it shows you every airport on the map. It shows you basic geopolitical data. You can see when you are crossing state or country boundaries. You can zoom in and out.

You can reposition the airplane by dragging the airplane around the map. In fact if you drop it on an airport on the end of a runway and it will snap your airplane's position to "on the ground facing down the runway at that end of the runway with all your speeds zeroed out". For instance, if you're in the neighborhood and you just want to go back to some airport, it makes it very easy to relocate there very quickly. You can turn various bits of data on and off. You can turn on or off the VOR’s, NDB’s, or the intersections to the airways so you can see just the information that you care about. You can see the route you’ve flown. If you have been flying for a while you can see the track that you’ve flown overlaid on this map. And you clicking on any of these objects (this replaces the AFD that was in FS98 - instead of having a wild text list of airports and regions etc. with no way to see them on the map) now you just find the object and you click on it. You get the dialog that tells you the name of the airport, the identifiers, if its Navaid, what its frequency is, ILS frequencies, Morse code identifier and all the kind of stuff that was in the AFD before. It is now in the map.

Bruce: It is very important to emphasize that all that information is coming from the Jeppesen NAV database. This is the same data, but obviously we froze it at a certain time. We are not updating it every 28 days like Jeppesen does, but the data that are in there is the same data that is in GPS databases, and Flight Management Systems databases, and Flight Planner databases. Its the real data for the whole world. There are over 21,000 airports in the product. Almost every airport in the world for which a government publishes information and that Jeppesen knows about is in the product. All the VOR’s, all the NDB’s, all the intersections, the Jet routes, the low altitude airways, they are all in there. So if you fly and you want accuracy and you fly with the charts it's all in there. It's an addition of over 3700 airports to bring the total to over 21,000. There are really two reasons for this – one is the realism for many people who want to fly around with whatever they are familiar with but they also want the fantasy. I like to to go fly in Australia and wonder what that would be like and I know I am not going to do that anytime soon. So I can go fly a cross country flight in Australia or Asia, or Europe, or Africa or any place I want now. But I can also go do the flights I’m going to do this weekend. So with the exception of a private airport with a grass strip some place that somebody has put on their farm it's going to be in Flightsim. (Andy: But we do have a lot of those.) Essentially, if the information has been forwarded to a regulatory agency, a government agency that is responsible for airports that Jeppesen got the data, then we got it.

A very important point that I would like to make is that there is a lot of gee-whiz wow stuff that you will see. The panels look great, there is rain on the windshield, but there is an awful lot under the hood that will take some time to discover. Things like, (oh) the ATIS Broadcasts fade out as you get farther from the airport, VOR’s have accurate service volumes, there are all these little things you can do with the moving map. All this stuff that in and of itself you would say "this is pretty cool I can see my ground track" and "it's easy to read and figure out where I’m going" or "I didn’t know I could get all this information about a particular Airport or NAVAID". So it's the kind of thing that when you do spend a little time with it and burrow around in it you should be pleasantly surprised at all the level of detail and the amount of attention that we paid to some of those things.