avallillo

The "washed out" scenery is actually more likely to be a frustrating feature of XPlane 11. I find on my system (with a 43" 4K TV as a monitor) that 2020 is on average much brighter, with more contrast and more like a Kodachrome slide (the absolute gold standard of color realism and rendition, then and now) than XP is. The lack of documentation is also annoying, and I agree about the "manual" that is available. I bought it online, and although it does contain some good info, and at $13 US was not excessively expensive, there is much more that could be added. In all fairness, though, it about duplicates the overall content and depth of the popular aftermarket manual that was available back in the early days for FSX. What I have found is that, even as it now stands, 2020 is a great "next step" replacement for (wait for it...) not XP11 or P3Dv5 but for Aerofly FS2. Until now, FS2 was the walk-off leader in the area of visual scenery based simulation -- their level of detail in satellite based scenery and intricate mesh was not to be beaten. But 2020 has taken that level of what might be called "video realistic" scenery and extended it throughout the entire world. So if you like visual based flying, 2020 is ready for you now, even in its' current "beta release" status. The really frustrating problems that I encounter even now relate to the perhaps unfortunate simultaneous availability of 2020 and the Honeycomb line of otherwise outstanding controls. Of course the main thing that makes these units outstanding is their tremendous versatility, and the unfortunate thing is that getting them programmed to work to their full potential in several different sims at once is, at least for a computer illiterate like myself, stultifyingly difficult. That is no one's fault, really, but it has made my last month a long series of profanity laced diatribes against the entire computer industry!! Oh well, there has never been a version of MSFS that did not have its share of problems and frustration early on, and come to think of it that is also more than true of Windows itself, so we should be used to this by now. But hope springs eternal - just ask a Cubs fan!

Ah.....! Now that (start ready equals ATC tuned) is news to me! As a RW pilot I'm not a big fan of cold and dark, as many of you may know, but it may be worth it in this instance. I'll have to give that a try. Thanks!

Well, looks like I'll have to try to keep tricking it, perhaps tuning 121.5 as was mentioned somewhere else. It is nothing short of ridiculous that you cannot completely disable both the voice and the text versions. That might free up some much needed resources to handle the remainder of this beast in a reasonable manner. Where were the beta and alpha testers when all of this was being developed? I would have melted the lines to Asobo and MS over this and a few other issues! A far better way to give yourself some ATC would be to find a real airline flight to where you want to go at the same time, and use Live ATC.net to actually listen for it. Simply follow that flight through the frequency changes and do what they tell him to do! Much better and more realistic in my opinion. Then you can graduate to VATSIM or Pilot Edge.

I get enough chances to interact with real ATC every time I fly, so I really don't need it in FS. Up to now there was always a way to completely shut off the in-game ATC, but in 2020 there seems to be no way to get rid of it altogether. Oh, you can disable the voices, or tune to 121.5 (assuming MS has not reached the level of realism that would have ATC looking for you on that frequency!), but apparently you can't shut off the text version, at least until they tire of trying to reach you and you still have to deal with them working other AI airplanes. How on earth did this happen? We have so much control of so many things in this sim (one might say too much control for intelligibility in many aspects, but that is another rant for another day), you'd think turning off ATC completely would be a given. Yes, I know you can't do that in the real world without a wing-side visit from some sort of heavily armed high performance airplane (and I get to do that too, in CAP!). But in here that is gilding the lily a bit too much. What have I missed? Is there indeed a selection somewhere that I can turn OFF ATC completely?

A little of both, I imagine. There is plenty of venting to be done about all of this, to be sure. Question - is there actually no nosewheel tiller steering dataref (or whatever they are called?) in the Controls area of Settings? I can't find any. Question 2 - when you have multiple complementary input devices like the Alpha and the Bravo, is there a way to create a profile (or whatever they are called) that encompasses both of them, plus any other hardware such as rudder pedals, as opposed to having to set up a separate profile for each unit?

Those are actually two topics, but I am trying to save a few digital trees here so I combine them into one! First of all, I just got this thing (2020) with my new computer a week ago, and I have yet to really get off the ground! I almost wish I had saved my money and concentrated on XPlane until MS gets this mess sorted out. Am I missing something, or did MSobo actually push this out the door with no provision for setting up a control axis for nosewheel tiller steering ???????? I certainly cannot find anything in the controls section for nosewheel steering! Incredible! Let me refrain from a rant on the ridiculous interfaces, other than to say that this whole evolution has almost soured me on flight simulation! Thank goodness for XPlane! In the midst of the near impossibility of setting up the Honeycomb yoke and throttle rig for this mess, I also see that, unlike brand X(P), there seems to be no way to link a number of devices together in one profile - ie, the yoke, throttles, and in my case a Thrustmaster T flight for the yaw axis, since my TPR pedals have done something nasty in the bed, if you get my meaning! I need all three of these to be involved in a "profile", and I see no way to do it. Looks like I will have to go in and set everything up, on every device, every time I want to switch airplanes! Hopefully, some one here will have answers to these questions!

The DC-3 autopilot, the old Sperry "Iron Mike" (known these days as "Otto", following the success of the movie "Airplane!") would not fly an approach at all. As others have indicated, it was a wing leveler, and did not even include any vertical modes such as Vertical Speed or Altitude Hold. Those were the days of aluminum planes and Iron Men! If you want to fly the DC-3 with any level of realism at all, you have to man up and hand fly the beast. It's really not that hard, since the DC-3 was, as Ernie Gann once put it, "an amiable cow", and very stable - not at all difficult to fly on instruments. The old stock DC-3 from back in FS-9 was like that, as is the freeware one over on XPlane. IF ATC is giving you vectors to the final approach course, just fly the headings they give you. That should end up with you flying approximately 30 degrees off the final approach course, similar to the runway heading usually. When the localizer needle begins to move off full deflection, you start your turn to a heading that lines up with the final approach course. If all goes well, you should have the vertical localizer needle centered when you roll out of your turn on the final approach heading. To keep the localizer centered, just fly that final approach heading accurately. Keep flying level during all of this, until the horizontal glide slope needle comes off full deflection (it should be above the center of the instrument, ie, showing you below the glide path - we always intercept the glide slope from below, never from above). When the needle reaches the center of the instrument, reduce power and lower the nose a bit. What you are looking for is a particular rate of descent, which will depend upon your speed. At DC-3 final approach speeds of around 100 kts, a descent rate of around 500 feet per minute should keep the glide slope needle centered. If it goes high, add a touch of power and raise the nose a tiny smidge, and do the opposite if the needle goes below the center of the instrument. All the way down final you will be making small turns to keep the localizer needle centered, and small pitch changes up or down to keep the glide slope needle centered. That's all there is to it! But it looks easier than it is... Don't worry though - if this were easy then airline pilots would make as much as baggers at the grocery store!

Very nice indeed; but, to quibble, it looks like shiny grey metal, not like polished aluminum. I may have to stake out a certain expert witness status here - I have flown polished metal airplanes since 1977, and since 1996 I have polished the darn things, so I know whereof I speak! Polished metal is perhaps the most difficult "look" to achieve in flight simulation. Later improvements in rendering have made it somewhat better, but at a cost - things tend to look like the "chrome" parts of model cars I played with as a youth in the 50's and 60's. Put another way, things look like the silver surfer character in the Marvel movie! This is most certainly not what polished aluminum airplanes look like, possibly excepting a top notch show plane at Oshkosh. So far, the best representations of, say, an American Airlines jet seem to make some use of photos of the real surfaces in the skinning process. What these airplanes do NOT look like is a mirror, with coherent reflections of the surrounding world. Mostly this is because not more than a day out of the polishing shop, they begin to look more and more like an old lawn chair, and airlines jets, at least, are only polished around once a year. Of course, for AA this is all moot since they went to paint. If you could find a way to get the basic color more toward silver than grey, your terrific effort here would probably look more like a natural metal airplane. As it is, the overall hue is just a bit off in most, but not all, of your shots. All in all, though, a really fine piece of work!

I would second the suggestion from marcroussy, about getting FSX for the lessons. Any of the previous versions of MSFS (FSX, FS9 otherwise known as FS2004) had some fairly complete lessons, taught by one of the great aviation educators in the real world - Rod Machado. Now it may be tough to get hold of FS9, although you can probably find the disk sets on eBay. But FSX is still available online from Steam - FSX Steam Edition. Around the holidays they often discount it to around $5 - I got my Steam copy a few years ago for $4.95! This all is simulation, not really a game per se, and you will more or less teach yourself to fly as you progress through the process. I teach CAP cadets to fly real airplanes, and the best among them come to real airplanes with a lot of flight sim time, and they stand out among their peers right from the moment they step into the airplane, because they know what the instruments are telling them and they know what the controls do. So seek out all of the aids that are available, particularly on YouTube. Flying is, to a large extent, a visual art, and the best of the videos, like those from MzeroA flight training and Gary Wing will show you what things look like, in and out of the cockpit. And the mention, above, of seeking out an introductory flight lesson at the local flight school will be of great value as well, and it will only cost about as much as a good joystick!

It looks like, apart from the missing two engines, it is the same size as the 380. The reason that the 380, or the 747, or any 4 engine airplane ever in history, has had 4 engines is that it takes, or took, all 4 of them to get the thing airborne with the proper performance. Not since the 1940's has there ever been any other reason for more engines. The 380 needed 4 of the world's biggest engines to do the trick. In order to get it down to two it would need to weigh about as much as a 777-300. Unlikely that a double deck airplane could meet that requirement. Also, the world does not need the capacity and won't for a long time, likely not ever.... Still, a nice concept and nicely executed!

There once was, many years ago (around 1989), just such a product. It was called Blue Angels Formation Flight Simulation, by a company called Accolade. The formation was welded together and you flew an open spot. It had a useful feature, a "catch up" button, if you will, that was used to instantly rejoin the group when you inevitably got good and lost trying to stay in formation with just the plus and minus keys to adjust the throttle! This product was a stand alone simulator, and not an add-on for MSFS. Its' major shortcoming was that it did not work with the throttle axis of a joystick, which had just been introduced with the CH Flight Stick. Without the ability to make rapid and minute throttle movements, formation flying at that level is pretty much impossible both on a simulator and in the real world. There was more recently a simulation of the Swiss version of the Blue Angels, for MSFS. Same welded formation, much more responsive, but without the catch up feature. There is a review of this in the features here at Flightsim.com. Then we must also mention that there is at least one actual Virtual Blue Angels team that flies it all "live", each pilot on his own simulator. They use a version of DCS World, and their flying is almost as impressive as the real Blue Angels, perhaps even more so since it is all done on simulation.

You are apparently thinking the same thing I am - that is, the X-Boxes of this world do seem to pack a whole lot of graphics and gaming capability into a specially designed and optimized hardware package. I speculate that such a specialized piece of hardware may well deliver a much better overall performance than a PC, which by definition is more of a universally adaptable machine. And due to the insanely high production runs, the cost per box is obviously much much lower for the game machines. This may possibly have very interesting ramifications for the future of flight simulation. But of paramount importance will be the ability to use the realistic high performance control hardware (joysticks, yokes and pedals and the like) that we now use on PC's with the XBoxes or whatever they come up with to run this on. Regular game controllers are quite unsuited to serious flight simulation. We shall see what we shall see....

Aerofly FS2 is said to be a work in progress, although how much more work will be done remains to be seen. I currently have FSX, FSXSE, XP10, XP11, FS2 and FlyInside installed and running (FlyInside as a demo only). I like them all, each for it's own purposes. If you are used to FSX, and use a lot of add-ons to up the realism ante, you will find FS2 a bit "light". Not on realism, per se, but on all of the bells and whistles that FSX, P3D and XP11 have that make them complete simulators. FS2 is perhaps the most astonishingly visually realistic of them all, right out of the "box", but lacks many of the detail touches that many of us are now used to in those other three sims - things like realistic flight planning and navigation, a more complete capability to control the weather, seasonal scenery, the entire world, add-ons and so on. But when it comes to flying in a stunning photorealistic world, FS2 takes the cake. That's more or less what I use it for - things like flying through the Grand Canyon (better than any other simulator even with add-on scenery) or around New York or LA or, in my particular case Las Vegas (I go there 5 or 6 times a year for CAP missions and use FS2 to get familiar with the area). If I want to stroll down memory lane and remind myself what I have been missing since I retired 11 years ago I use FSX or XP11 with their study level add-ons of the airplanes I flew. You have to spend quite a few bucks to get the scenery details up to the FS2 level, but everything else is more detailed and complete. FS2 actually reminds me of a simulator that came out many years ago and was ground breaking for its time, including the first use of photo scenery - Flight Unlimited II and III. Outstanding scenery and performance for the time, good flying airplanes, but a lack of heavy iron and no add-on's. All of that said, though, I can still recommend FS2 for your more unstructured flying!

Having flown the 727 for many years and having ridden in the jump seat of a number of 737's, I would say that the cockpits of the two types are dimensionally the same. So the only difference would be the number of throttles and what is on each panel, especially the overhead. It should fit, but much would depend upon just what kind of fixed base sim you have acquired for the 727. If it was a CPT, the controls may not be actual airplane items but rather fabricated items that look more or less real, but which may involve different mechanical engineering. The person you may want to correspond with would be Dr. Joe Maldonado, of Project 727. See "A Night in Elf Hill" in the features section of this website. He would know more about what might fit into what. Good luck, and show us the finished product!

Still have it and use it on occasion, and will until the Dream Fleet 727 or something as good as that comes to FSX. In fact, due to my computer's limitations, I will probably keep using it to see triple digit frame rates until I can upgrade the hardware again!