This is isn’t just a ramble, I’m hoping for comments that might help.
I’ve wasted about 3 weeks trying to do do something that, just now, doesn’t seem possible - fly with Beyond ATC in VR using a Pimax Crystal Light HMD. I got the Pimax a couple of months ago and bought and installed the BATC just after. Both of these work perfectly under certain conditions - fine on rheir own but not when combined.
In real life I’m a helicopter pilot flying the Cabri G2 from an unconrolled airfield in East Anglia UK. Being a small and twitchy but excellent 2-seater I fly it solo and so don’t have any help from someone in the other seat for the radio and nav, all ATC comms have to be done by me. That’s not a problem because all my flying is for pleasure and most of it is outside controlled airspace. But I do end up in controlled areas from time to time and at these times I’ve got my hands full. And I’ll admit that I would benefit from more practice. Such practice is doable in the real aircraft but it’s very expensive. It’s also mind-intensive and so best avoided there for safety reasons. Practising with MSFS would therefore seem best. And I always like to have ATC on frequency providing Basic Service, keeping an eye on my position and telling me about close proximity traffic.
That’s why I bought BATC. I’d already tried Avsim; it definately closely resembles real life but coverage is far from perfect. I’m always looking around for other add-ons to meet my needs and the best seemed to be BATC. But it won’t work with the Pimax. I’ve tried all sorts of things from good advice here on the forum without success. It seems to be partly down to the incomplete stage of BATC’s development. But I think the biggest factor is the tremendous demand placed on my CPU managing the 3D rendering of both MSFS and BATC. This might be overcome as BATC improves; but I’m not going to hang around and see and I don’t want to overstress my poor old CPU, the fans have been roaring.
So here I am, wondering if I can get what I want from Asobo’s MSFS2020 ATC. If so it shouldn’t create any additional stress on my PC. I’m thinking that it should at least be able let me …
dial in a stby frequency,
use PTT to approach ATC (rather than select from written options) ,
hear ATC’s response and use PTT to speak my compliance,
have a visual record of messages for reference,
have a handy list of frequencies for the flight,
create the flight plan from MSFS World (with no need for a “SimBrief” OFP.
And I’d do all the comms and transponder settings by hand as required.
I don’t know if all this will be possible.
I haven’t really given Asobo’s ATC a try yet; I thought I’d send this post into the Forum first in case anyone can help or advise.
Say Intentions may be worth a look, but it is subscription based so certainly not the cheapest option. You can try it for free for 24 hours, so perhaps worth a look when you have a day where you can spend some quality time to try it out.
I was much the same. I figured there was nothing to lose in taking advantage of the 24 hour trial. While that alone was not enough to really appreciate the scope of SI it was enough to convince me to give it a longer term trial. Soon after I subscribed for a whole year and have been using it ever since. After the year is up I will review again.
It is quite uncanny how you can communicate with SI and do not need to worry too much if you are not 100% correct in your communications. It still works and you can take your time to improve your own interactions. The response time 1s also pretty good most of the time so it is not often you sit there wondering if you have been heard/understood.
Also a private pilot irl and I love flying heli’s around cities like Osaka, Tokyo, and LA. I’ve always loved flying the aircraft more than flying the radios. So, I do my best to avoid any ATC interactions. Each to their own I guess. Cheers.
VATSIM was, is and will always be the best option, provided you use it in specific populated areas and during busy traffic hours.
However reality has shown that the vast majority of both VATSIM and IVAO networks are empty of ATC most of the time for most of the planet and for the vast majority of airports. If someone is willing to fly mostly on Friday nights or Sunday afternoons, then yeah they’ll definitely have great fun with VATSIM in western Europe and eastern US.
But if they want to fly at any other time or at any other place, they may be better off with a 3rd party ATC, at least until a VATSIM controller joins in. And there’s none better than SayIntentions. They say that 90% of users giving SI a 24h trial, end up with a sub (either monthly or yearly). This conversion rate says something about the app.
ps: also SI can prepare people for VATSIM. I had logged hundreds of hours in VATSIM under text-only comms, as I wasn’t willing to move on to voice. After spending a few dozen hours with SI, I know feel 100% confident to upgrade to voice comms in VATSIM.
pps: SI works seamlessely with VATSIM, in the sense that you can begin your flight plan with VATSIM and once they send you off to Unicom territory (because it’s late in the night and all controllers left, or whatever), then you can seamlessly switch to SI and continue your flight with active near-human ATC.
Definitely give SayIntentions a try. It has come a long way in a short amount of time and can handle a wide array of ATC requests… I’ve done VFR flight following, IFR clearances, landing approach change requests. I like hearing the local radio chatter (some of it is recorded). I have also been able to do radio frequency checks and altimeter setting requests.
A beautiful thing about SI is that you can rate the ticket after each flight and describe any issues you have seen. I, personally have seen in some International Airports (non North America), available runway information is inconsistent or incorrect. So you can sometimes hear the same pilot asking the AI ATC to confirm the approach or the runway that doesn’t exist in your stack of plates.
Overall, I have been very impressed with what the dev’s have done so far, and can’t wait for live traffic injection that will be coming very soon.
Does sayintentions work with helos now? I tried it several months ago, it was not yet useable with helos. For example, it would clear you for takeoff, and after you took off, it told you that you were not cleared for takeoff and gave you a phone number to copy.
Yes, they officially added helicopter-specific ATC about 1.5 months ago, so they now support features such as hover-taxi etc. Obviously with SI being what it is (i.e. constant improvement almost on a daily basis), they’ve already said they have big plans for helos in MSFS2024 so they expect to release many more features soon-ish.
They have a separate channel about helicopters in their Discord. As one can imagine it’s not the most popular of these channels, but feedback there seems to be very positive.
Hi @CabriG28724
I too am a real world (UK) G2 pilot and have the same challenges as you.
I also want to improve my radio skills and its very frustrating trying to find a realistic simulation application.
I’ve tried a number of different apps, at one point I tried writing my own using Microsoft’s speech and language tools, but while I got the basics to work I soon realised I was out of my depth.
I signed up to Vatsim but in my experience they really weren’t Heli GA friendly. Basically I was told to stay below radar and do what I wanted which completely defeats the object of the exercise.
I’ve just signed up to the IVAO network and the guys there are brilliant, super helpful.
The other night I took off from a controlled airport and while it was at my discretion, I did manage a proper Gatwick crossing which was great fun.
Happy to have a chat…
I too use VR (Reverb G2)
I’m a real world PPL-H. SayIntentions.AI is the way to go. I was able to get clearance departing from a taxiway “at my own risk” and was clearly understood to be a helicopter.
This tech will quickly replace VATSIM just due to unavailability of live controllers.
Re-reading my post it was a bit of a gross generalisation, though it was in the context of the thread being helicopters, so I appreciate the balanced view.
Having said that you fly planks and I’m sure that’s a different experience again.
The thing about helis is we don’t need to line up behind fixed wing. In many cases we have dedicated take off triangles, areas or heli strips. We can land at private sites, our circuit levels and often, circuit direction are different to planks to avoid conflict. There’s many more differences and these are just not catered for in many ATC simulations online or off.
Certainly the ones I looked at treated me as a fixed wing and wanted me to ground taxi to a holding point.
It would be both fun and useful to replicate some of these nuances using AI or otherwise.
@CabriG28724@belatu42 and any other real world heli pilot out there. I reached out to SayIntentions.AI to ask them where they were with implementing heli ops.
This was their response:
“ Not yet, but we have a helicoper team working on it to support oil rig operations for FS2024. So that is nearly there! The only problem is that we have a very limited amount of users flying helicopters and actually know how it’s done in real life. So if you have that experience, I would like to invite you to our Discord anyway because we really can use that real world experience to get it right.”
and I’m sure that’s a different experience again.