OnCourse Software

Currently I am getting familiarized with the trial version of PF3. My initial interest in PF3 was/is the variations of accents it offers as a change to default MSFS2020 ATC voices. I am not using fancy features (not using Simbrief nor Navigraph) to create elaborate flight plans. I just use MSFS for this matter. Over the last months now, my main use of MSFS2020 is doing short flights with Air Hauler 2 and Skypark. My "flightplan" requires only the takeoff airport and the destination airport, the flights are VFR.

Is there an "easy" mode or way to use PF3 as a replacement to the boring default ATC voices in the sim and use PF3 in a somewhat similar and easy fashion?

Looking forward to some tips/tricks or yes/no's if this might be possible with PF3.

Ralf Maeder

Welcome. One of the (many) nice things about PF3, in addition to the voices, is that the program options allow the program to grow with you as you desire more complexity. You do need a simple flight plan in addition to your departure and destination airports. For IFR flights, try starting out with some evenly spaced waypoints along the route of your flight, with your first and last waypoints about 30 miles or so from the airport. Leave the SID and STAR options off for now. This should give you a fairly good flight with voices and vectoring, assuming you are not flying into or out of very mountainous areas. Waypoints can be anything you want, including VORs, NDBs, intersections, fixes, or user waypoints just defined by coordinates.

For VFR flights you need a flight plan with at least one waypoint in addition to the departure and destination airports. PF3 has both standard and free-flight VFR modes. Standard requires you to follow your flight plan; free-flight does not, allowing you to fly where you want and only requiring that you depart and land at the filed airports. See the User Guide for much more info. Note that Center altitude (by default 8000) is the upper limit for VFR. If you climb above Center altitude you will be prompted to change to IFR.

As you get more familiar with IFR you may want to start flying some published procedures rather than vectored departures and approaches, and that is where the SID and STAR options come in, but no need to worry about that now.

One small point to make in addition to Dan's post, you don't actually need to add any way points if you just want a simple VFR flight as MSFS adds a couple of it's own which will suffice.