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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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ATC and speech recognition is pretty good, although still get that annoying 1 out of 4 is a ‘repeat’ unless speaking super clear.