Ha…see you on the ramp there @fearlessfrog as I was taking off… I’m not on Discord at the moment…
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Hah - busted. I was just playing with settings and thought I’d plop down next to you. 
Haha…I’m hopping on Discord now…I’m on call though…so could drop off anytime…
So I’m assuming it will eventually hand me off to either Atlanta Center or Greer Approach or Asheville approach at some point? Why am I know hearing anyone else on the frequency?
Yeah…it just handed me off to ATL Center…cool…
And now it gave me: “Maintain present heading and altitude, expect ILS runway 35 approach via TUXDO transition, cleared to TUXDO, Cirrus 1MS”
That’s pretty damn good. It even truncates my callsign after the initial callup…that is a good little tiny detail…
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So it may not be the brightest ATC though. They brought me down to 4,000’ a bit early…which would be too low for that transition, then took me back up to 5,200’ which would be the proper altitude and switched me to another ATL ATC frequency, but I should probably be talking to Asheville Approach at this point…
In and on the ramp at AVL. Actually a very, very fun and pleasant experience with the ATC. Sure, they screwed up one of the transition altitudes, but it wasn’t too big of a deal breaker. I did too notice that the SID coming out of CLT (KNIGHTS) shows the wrong initial course for the first bit of it. I think MSFS is reading the D fixes for turns right off the runway and just drawing the next fixes based off a linear order…that isn’t really how it works. The D fixes are flown if no other ATC instructions are given, but then you would get radar vectors to intercept the true fix radials (unless it is an RNAV departure).
You can see that here on the departure - if I’m given the KNIGHTS 2 I can expect to be radar vectored to join the 275 degree radial from CLT to BOBZY. The sim depicts it as more like D1.0 to BOBZY which means the radial is not correct. I might have been able to manually set it up though…I’m sure I could have. But the point of the matter is that you can’t quite trust the SID as shown in the flight plan to give you truly correct course guidance.
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Isn’t that an oxymoron…?
They’ve saved me enough times now that I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt… 
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Another cool thing…as I’m taxiing in at Asheville you could see cloud buildups over to the northeast…which is right in line with what the weather radar is showing right now…
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The in-built ATC is quite nice, and like a lot of things, comparable to a paid add-on. But, also like a lot of other things MSFS related, it could have done with a couple more months testing and fixes.
Apparently the updates are going to be monthly, so let’s hope for lots of fixes all over the place.
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I assume updates will be automatic…like it will let us know when it is updating when we launch?
OK…I already love the DA40 TDI panel. No autopilot was a mistake though… 
So for me , this is already pretty darn functional for a first time try at a complex aircraft from a game company.
For others, its not top line PMDG on the first try, so its crap, and other negative pejoratives.
I wonder what would happen if PMDGs first attempt at a plane was put out on the market today?
Would the company even have survived to get better, after the community got through tearing it apart? 
Yes, it prompts and then either does the Windows Store update or I guess Steam will get a new client update app as well. You can tell what version you run by putting to window mode ALT + Tab and seeing 1.17.2 in the title bar (which it’s been at for about 6 weeks now).
The trouble is with MSFS the versioning story is quite complicated. Here’s the various moving parts:
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The client app, at v1.17.2. This is the application that runs when you click the icon.
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The Content Manager, which is the 92GB of content that comes down from Azure, and is in individually versioned packages (like aircraft, custom airports, scenery libraries etc). There’s about 60 packages so far. That’s the bit where all the versions are checked and the ‘blue progress bar’ sort of crawls with KSFO in the background and a shiny TBM.
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The online services, like Weather, Traffic, Streaming Textures, Photogrammetry, ATC Voices that require an internet connection to Azure data centers.
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The services and AI algorithms that make the data and run the services for the above, so a Bing refresh takes 30 mins to build on the Azure side (to ‘bake’ a new world) but processes 2 Petabytes of data each time.
So the trouble with the test versions was that all of the above sort of changed all of the time, in that the client app version didn’t really tell the story of what ‘version’ people had. Because the sim sort of tries to gracefully fall back to be ‘disconnected’ it meant that if something like ‘Weather Model’ didn’t work in your region, it would use a local guess (on your PC) to do the clouds etc. There’s no indication if the online services are working or what version they are, just that when they do it’ll be better (maybe).
So I guess put another way, stuff can change each day and we’d probably never know.
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Ah, shows how much I know. Apparently you hold down Right ALT, see the 
cursor icon appear, and then when you click over any panel you get pop-out windows on instruments. Just playing with it now, and it looks like you can mouse click the buttons on some of the fake garmins…
Great if you have multi-monitors, as you can put ATC, the Garmin, Radios, the VFR map, all undocked and resized on another screen. Nice!
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Thank god. That might fix some of the problems I had when leaning in to look at instruments lol. Tanks the framerate that way.
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Neeto ! That will come in handy.
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