Just about to wallow in the details of this puppy (Warning: Geocities School of Web Design behind this link):
Here’s a recent video of some latest v2.2 features:
It looks very nice - anyone tried it already and what did you think of it?
I tried it back when it was first first released and it was pretty good then. I can only imagine how much more feature rich and functioning it is now. I just find the price hard to stomach.Like I get that folks put time and effort and that needs to be rewarded and so on, but when it’s costing me almost as much as the sim itself for something that frankly should already be part of the sim (ATC, weather, etc…) it just puts me off.
1 Like
$60 USD feels pretty high from what I’ve learnt so far. The demo is for 10 days.
It works across FSUIPC, so X-Plane, FSX/P3D, so I guess at least it’s cross sim (unlike something like FlyInside, Orbx etc)
Not good for VR as yet, as FlyInside on X-Plane doesn’t import windows just yet. FSX would be ok though.
1 Like
Looks great - the SID/STAR selection graphics where it shows all the possible spokes is very reminiscent of how ForeFlite looks in our aircraft iPads. I might try to demo and see how I like it.
I’ve been meaning to dive into X-Plane 11 (I’ve never used X-Plane before) but I was getting a bit overwhelmed with all the web based flight planning resources out there …
AirNav
Flight Plan Database
FlightAware
FltPlan
ForeFlight
Online Flight Planner
RouteFinder
SimBrief
SkyVector
xFlightPlanner
XPFlightPlanner
Now that you brought up Pilot2ATC, I’m sold! Are there any other good programs like this out there for X-Plane? I mean, flight planning and ATC in one program? … you can’t go wrong!
I didn’t even install Pilot2ATC on my X-Plane machine! It installed fine on my secondary computer and seems to communicate with X-Plane fine with XPWideClient (part of the free XPUIPC package). Easy peazy.
1 Like
I’ve not got into Pilot2ATC as yet, so curious to see what you think of it. Report back! 
For flight planning, we had a good topic here that I often use to find nice tool/site links:
skyvector and simbrief should get you going just fine for US flying.
If you need to learn stuff, then ya just go through that link frog posted.
Wait, is this just an interface for ATC and a flight planning tool? Or is it updated ATC AI? I wasn’t really able to tell from the webpage.
$60 seems awfully expensive for an enhancement of the marginal in-game ATC, but I’d consider buying it if they added some complexity/depth.
I’m also positive I’ll hate the voice recognition features. I have yet to find a voice recognition algorithm that I lick. No, like. No, I meant. Delete lick and replace with like. No delete that. Duck. Stop typing stop. Listening no end. Quit. Enough Jesus Christ I hate you computer.
It’s complete voice recognition ATC, not the in-game ATC.
It is, but for speech input/output I believe it is using the underlying OS API capability, so it doesn’t come with its own recognition engine or anything. I think what he has done is ‘fuzzed’ the possible responses in the ‘state machine’ it has, so that there are some sensible assumptions if ATC misses certain words in a reply etc.
ya, it uses the windows speech recognition. You really need to train it if it has trouble recognizing you.
If you already use voice attack it shouldn’t be an issue.
1 Like
I saw that “What do you use for flight planning?” post about a week ago and since then signed up to SimBrief … very nice website! There’s a European flying tool in there as well that helps with getting around Europe’s MANY no fly zones. Skyvector looked cool too.
Anyway, today I did a search for X-Plane 11 ATC and read that it kinda sucks so this Pilot2ATC thread started making A LOT of sense to me since it even seems to have it’s own ATC system (and I don’t even care about it’s voice recognition at this point). I just started the 10 day trial today … we’ll see how it goes …
ya, default atc sucks balls
Had a play around with it tonight - it works pretty well. My summary:
- Nice flight planning, with great SID/STARs editing. Nice to have a visual picker for STAR’s with transitions especially:
- A well featured ‘auto flight’ builder, that uses a typical route, depending on weather etc. If I just throw in CYVR to KSEA as start and end waypoints and then hit ‘Auto Plan’ it comes up with this:
That is the most common route in FlightAware/IFR using the active at KSEA and what I would have picked manually.
- The integrated chart loader/viewer is very convenient, so if you hate sorting out your PDF’s then this does save time:
-
FSUIPC works great in FSX, although the flight plan exporter is very limited for paid heavy FMS’s add-on aircraft it supports (just plain .PLN, .FMS or the Aerosoft format). Although in some ways this sort of acts like an FMS, not sure.
-
The ground handling is good, although a little complicated to sort out. You get route helpers, but nothing in sim I don’t think:
- All radio calls (with auto tunning of frequencies) and hand-offs are there, with even a nice ‘practice speech’ trainer for getting used to the format of the back/forth calls:
- Works with popular weather add-ons, although I didn’t try this out as yet:
- Integrated maps, with the charts:
-
Some pretty rough UI design, but it’s functional. Not a lot of polish. There is a ‘on top’ window that you use for comms but it doesn’t really work in FlyInside VR as it opens a couple of unnamed windows.
-
ATC and speech recognition is pretty good, although still get that annoying 1 out of 4 is a ‘repeat’ unless speaking super clear.
2 Likes
Wow that looks like it has really improved from early days. I assume it works just as well in x-plane.
That’s still expensive but almost has me convinced.
Found some voice command examples on the X-Planes forum somewhere that have come in very handy, so wanted to share. I lost the original link, but here’s the PDF. Pilot2ATC is a bit of a memory hog, but great fun to try for 10 days or so on the free trial.
voice-cmds.pdf (131.0 KB)
While Pilot2ATC is expensive for what it is, the SID/STAR visualization, autorouting, taxi managment and integration with the OS voice recognition and speech output is a lot of fun.
1 Like
Necromancing an old thread here about Pilot2ATC … Dave is firing it up for FS2020 …
3 Likes
That’s really cool, will give this a go - thanks @Elby!
There’s been lots of reports of simconnect causing frame rate issues and stuttering. It’s funny as it was fine before the release but I do hope they fix it soon.
2 Likes
Can confirm. Just tried running FSUIPC7.exe before running FS2020 … FSUIPC7 runs as a toolbar icon now. I think Pete embedded simconnect.dll into FSUIPC7 or something as you don’t need simconnect.dll any more.
Anyway, FS2020 runs like a turd with FSUIPC7 running in the background LOL! It basically chops my framerates in half. Looking forward to seeing this get straightened out.
The patch coming up this week claims this sorts it out, so hopefully soon:
SIMCONNECT
Significant FPS drop when using Simconnect should no longer affect the experience
3 Likes