OnCourse Software

Dear Dave,

I have written down a couple of suggestions below. Hope you'll look into it

1. I have attached a couple of screenshots here of my settings. One showing the tweaks section and the other one the aircraft info on the flight plan page.

As you can see, I have set the approach speed to 200 knots on the flight plan page. On the tweaks page I have set it to 100 knots.

Why ? This is an attempt to avoid the irritating speed reductions, even when there is no traffic around. Yes, I am aware that PF3 cannot control airborne AI traffic, but - what about having an option to remove these speed calls? It is annoying to have the speed reduced to 200 knots when you have 50 track miles to go - and there is no traffic at all. It would be so much better to be able to turn off this feature (like you can choose whether or not you want to have pushback or not). Or maybe a slider to set probability (as with holdings).

2. When climbing out after takeoff and upon initial contact with departure, it would be more realistic to get a few variations, for example:

- just an aknowledgement, for instance (radar contact). By the way, why do they never say "radar contact" here?
- An clearance to a higher level immediately (to avoid intermediate level of at high rates of climb)
- Maybe a random chance to get a "stop climb at XXXX feet" instruction

3. The phraseology pushback approved heading XXX is cool. But I've never heard this in real life. Everybody says "facing", "not heading". I realize that maybe another user pointed out that the word "heading" should be used. I suppose it's maybe used some places in the world (I fly long haul cargo for work, and I've never heard the word "heading" used in conjuctions with pushback, only "facing").

4. The pushback direction I get is sometimes a bit odd, like having to flip the plane 180 degrees around. So, if my nose is facing east at the stand, and my taxiway is behind me, ATC would either have me push straight back (and make a 180 myself), or facing south or north. If they have me facing west, I am going to need a lot of space.

5. Sometimes the vectoring is extremely tight, so I just buzz through the localizer. In the 73 for instance, I normally intercept the LLZ at around 180-220 knots depending. It seems like there is an issue with the calcuation of turn radius? Here I have attached the debug_monitor.log file to see my approach into ENZV. Never mind the extremely high approach, that is being told to intercept the LLZ at FL100. I realized that on the SID and STARS page for ENZV, I had accidentally set my FAF altitude to 19000 feet. Anyways, after the missed approach, ATC had me turn left to 170 immediately, which is a bit of a too tight downwind.

Regards from Norway



Kyrre Andersen

Three pennyworth from me, on the speed calls.

If you look in the aircraft's aircraft.cfg file, there is a section headed [Reference Speeds] which is just that - a reference for speeds - it has no effect on how the aircraft flies. So you can fiddle with these figures without harming the aircraft's dynamics.

From my observations, PF3 uses the flaps_up_stall_speed entry to give its "reduce speed to . . . " calls. If it is set too low you will get nagged a lot. I think it cuts in at 10 knots above the flaps_up_stall_speed speed, so if you want to approach at 200 KIAS without being told to slow down, set it to 200 or perhaps 210 if you prefer.

John

Sorry for the delay i replying... I've been out of action for a while...

1. Next time you have a problem with this please post again and include your debug log

2. 'Radar Contact' is not something used outside of FAA areas (so I'm reliably informed)

3. We're limited to the recordings already in the can I'm afraid

4. Next time you have a problem with this please post again and include your debug log

5. Maybe try a slower intercept