introducing PilotEdge, professional ATC for flight simulators

[coma24]

Nick,

I apologize for the delay in responding. I received email notification about your question but I didn't follow up right away, then it dropped off the list among many other tasks. We just completed an interesting project with Gulfstream helping them certify a new FMS for the G650 (providing a higher fidelity experience in the sim, to the point that they were able to move the human factors testing for the avionics from the jet to the sim, a huge win for everyone). Here's a recording of one of the test flights they performed prior to certification if anyone would like to hear it.

To your questions, there are some differences between flying in the US vs Europe. Here are some examples:
- pilots file SID and STARs in the flight plan
- altimeter setting is inches of mercury rather than hectopascals, or fathoms, or doubloons, or whatever is used over there
- no need to report established on an approach unless requested by ATC
- no need to request push and start unless you're going to push into a movement area

That's about all I can think of, honestly. I don't fly much in Europe, though, so there might be more. We have a few people from Germany, Spain, England, Itay, France and Switzerland that fly with us from time to time, and those are the differences that I've noticed so far.

Regarding the software, it looks a lot like Squawkbox, but it's not Squawkbox. It was based on the original source code and the interface looks the same, but the internals have been changed quite a bit to work with PilotEdge which has significant fundamental differences in how it works. At the end of the day, it's just a SimConnect client, though, which creates AI traffic in the sim and drives it around. You can use it in a network environment. It will coexist with SB (it uses different offsets for a lot of the interprocess communication, except for the PTT, which is the same FSUIPC event).

You can use it minimized. The only issue that I know of is that the transponder offset doesn't appear to work for cockpit builders, so you have to squawk altitude (mode C) at the beginning by using the optional pop-up panel, or from the PilotEdge application itself.

Regarding the coverage area, we recently added SFO which makes it possible to do 45-75 min flights in the 737 without running out of ATC coverage (SFO-LAX, SFO-SAN, SFO-NYL, SFO-LAS, SFO-SAN, SFO-LGB, SFO-LAS, SFO-PSP, SFO-ONT and all the reverse flights).

[coma24]

One thing I forgot to add. Here's a video of a FDS 737 rig (still under construction, no yoke/pedals yet) being flown on the network: SFO LAX 1 - YouTube

[dc8flightdeck]

Nick,
You can use it minimized. The only issue that I know of is that the transponder offset doesn't appear to work for cockpit builders, so you have to squawk altitude (mode C) at the beginning by using the optional pop-up panel, or from the PilotEdge application itself.

For mode C are you refering the on/off/standby function of the PE panel or the ident button?

Justin