The future of home cockpits and flight simulation

While crawling around public forums I see a lot of postings of bitterly disappointed people when it comes to Microsoft Flight, so that has gotten me thinking (wow!).

As most of us know Flight Simulation on the desktop started long ago with FS 1 by Bruce Artwick [see “History of Microsoft Flight Simulator”]. I have been interested in aviation since I was a kid and many years ago when my father installed Flight Simulator 98 on his computer I was thrilled. I soon became disappointed at the graphics to some extent, buy hey back then the masses didn’t have access to anything better. What I was really disappointed at was that the PCs were not fast enough to properly “play” flight simulator, especially with the keyboard. One spent more time pushing keyboard buttons to correct the over-shootings than actually flying. I stopped playing FS98.

That is until one day in 2006 or so, I bough Flight Simulator 2004 (FS9) and I discovered a whole new world where one could actually kind of fly a plane in a more realistic manner. The technology of PCs and graphic cards was mature enough and soon enough I found myself buying extra hardware such as rudder pedals and flight simulation yokes (CH Products), a throttle quadrant (Saitek) and a B737 autopilot module (Go Flight, Inc.). I also started flying online for more realistic ATC and joined a serious community where actually learning about aviation and navigation was more important than the game aspect.

Nowadays I would say there are two major groups of Flight Simulator users. The first group being gamers, people that aren’t really interested in aviation, they just want to hop on the virtual aircraft and take off without even knowing much about aerodynamics or what the instruments tell you. The other group is hard-core flight simmers, people that use Flight Simulator as a learning tool to learn about aviation. I belong to that last group.

Invariably, hard core flight simmers have spent considerable amounts of hard-earned money in buying software add-ons (more realistic aircrafts, weather engines, scenery) as well as high-tech hardware to build (some to a greater extent) their own home cockpits.

My Share of the Pie

I don’t have any other than enjoying learning more and more about aviation using FSX without suffering any physical or financial damage

A terrible day for Serious Flight Simmers

And then back in 2009 most of us heard the shocking news! for some strange reason Microsoft had decided to crash and burn the Aces Studio, the team that had been in charge of post-Bruce Artwick versions of Flight Simulator for so many years.

Yes, the world came to and end for most serious flight simulator enthusiasts, Microsoft was stopping the FS franchise with Flight Simulator X.  Sure, there is X-Plane and Flight Gear but FSX is FSX, period (even with its shortcomings!).

There were talks by some companies such as Aerosoft about developing a new flight simulator but a couple of years after, little about that is known so I presume that went nowhere.

Gathering my thoughts

So, where am I going to? Last year Microsoft announced Microsoft Flight which promises a lot. However, by reading posts in public forums and seeing the web episodes on the official site, I have come to believe what everyone fears: Flight might become a game rather than a simulation but we may still have to wait for the final outcome.

Anyway, the actual purpose of this post is to put this nagging question out there.

What is the consequence of the demise of Flight Simulator for all the home cockpit builders out there in the world? Many of whom have spent thousands of dollars buying specialized hardware to emulate the cockpit to nearly absolute perfection.

For now everybody is safe I think, but we all know that every time Microsoft brings out a new Operating System version, old ones are phased out and no longer supported, many “legacy” applications (MS FS falls in that category) simply stop working on the newer OS versions. The day will come that a new OS is brought and Flight Simulator X will simply stop working for good. What a huge disappointment that would be for those that spent a lot of money emulating cockpits like real life!

There appears to be one viable alternative, it is Lockheed Martin’s Prepare3D. It is based on the Microsoft ESP (not extra sensorial perception) which is the base of Microsoft FSX. Lockheed Martin’s bought its rights (as far as I know) back in 2009. But with a price tag of $499 I think many would think not twice but 15 times!

Plan-G a new star in (simulation) flight planning software

A few days ago a fellow on IVAO posted a link about a “VFR flight planning software with charts of all over the world”. I was sceptical but decided to download it and install it (zip file) on both my flightsim PC and my laptop (I always fly with a two-PC setup).

Having read the post I originally thought of VFR approach plates but I thought it was difficult to have such an amount of information without subscription on a single freeware program.

Plan-G doesn’t actually have VFR (or IFR) approach plates, it does however have a moving map (Google) with an overlay with important and relevant aviation data such as airports, ILS feathers, airspaces (and their information), etc. What else could you ask for?

Flight Plans
With it you can also create a flight plan for both FS9 and FSX. You can open existing ones, or you can create/edit them graphically via an intuitive interface. You can set your cruise altitude as well.

The program creates its own database from FS data and stores it in an Access database. It also has a fantastic feature that lets you create user waypoints of various types such as regular waypoint, airport, visual reference, etc. Something I could not do with my Flight Sim Commander very well. In my region of interest for example (Panama) most airports don’t have IFR charts, not even VFR charts so it is imperative that you careat your own navigation and create your own waypoints to plan a proper approach.

In this figure I have a partial map of the Republic of Panama showing a few airports, the Panama TMA and the flight plan I charted from Contadora Island (OTD, add-on scenery) to Chitré (PX06 in FSX).

Other Features
If you have loaded a flight plan you can also display a vertical elevation profile to monitor during your flight. For this however you have to download a freeware DEM available for all regions of the world. You only need one tile to enable the feature, the tile you are going to use. I did notice that if you do a free flight without flight plan, the vertical elevation profile does not display any information.

It has a weather panel with information about the weather in your selected stations and nearby station(s). It also has a GPS panel that shows some extremely beautiful gauges with your ground speed, bank status, vertical speed, heading and altitude. Particularly good if your a/c has a (virtual) cockpit that is difficult to read unless you zoom in.

It also has a traffic panel with either AI or Online traffic, I fly mostly online so this would display my IVAO traffic in the vicinity. The Trail analysis panel I haven’t quite deciphered, don’t know how to create a trail. The Plan panel shows you the flight plan that is currently active.

User Interface
It is extremely pleasant, while some people might be annoyed with Microsoft Word ribbon interface, this application uses them beautifully. They don’t confuse the user or have cryptic names. There are basically three ribbons: Home, Map settings, and Data.

The largest part of the client area is a moving map using the Google Maps service. You can either have the airplane always centered (continuous download as it moves) or let it go free until it goes off-bounds and the map reloads and centers again.

Remote Connection
We all know you can always run them on the same PC and it will connect to MSFS. So far I had Flight Sim Commander on the FSX PC as a logbook. It was not much of a moving map because it did not show terrain (boring interface) and being on the same PC you either fly the plane or watch the map.

Well, with Plan-G the ball game changes and at least for FSX it liberates the user from the “tyranny” of WideFS. WideFS is a handy utility for remote connections of such clients but it has a relatively high price. To this date I have not bought it.

In a multiple-PC setup Plan-G (on the remote computer) connects to FS9 using a combination of FSUIPC and WideFS (from Pete Dowson). But with FSX it can use FSUIPC or SimConnect (the latter being preferred). SimConnect is from the Microsoft FSX SDK. The difference here is that while most FSX client applications that use SimConnect, this is in my opinion the only one that truly liberates the user from having to buy yet another software utility to accomplish something that could be done without it, Microsoft already gave us the tools.

Conclusion
To this date with over 20 years of experience in software development and some electronics I have seen plenty of payware and freeware applications out there (Flight Simultion utilities included) that are unstable, have poor exception management (cryptic error for simple procedures and crash to desktop), require administrative rights to execute (following a programming model of last century) or suffer from a combination of illnesses that are easy to solve. Well, Plan-G is not like that, I tested it with a 1 hour flight over Panamanian territory and worked wonderfully, only FSX crashed while taxiing.

My hat off goes to Mr. Tim Arnot developer of Plan-G as well as to Jeff Schallenberg & Peter Dodds for the excellent user manual. This is certainly an application that is well crafted like I had not seen in years as a flight simulation enthusiast!