Has anyone noticed this?
During long flights, I use AI to handle my radio communications once I’m in the air. The Flight assistant is no longer in the handlebar, so I can no longer assign the FO to handle ATC comms. Clicking the gear to select toolbar items reveals that Flight assistant is greyed out and cannot be turned on. Going to assistance options when A32NX is loaded in, shows the volocopter options and they are all greyed out.
At first I thought it was the sim, but I loaded in the default A320 Neo and it IS there. Went back to the A32NX and it is in fact missing. Hopefully this is just an oversight on the FBW team, and not intentional. I don’t use the AI pilot at all (not that it works with FBW) but AI comms with ATC is something I’d hate to lose while flying the A32NX. Any thoughts would be welcome. Thanks.
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Yeah, we had to force switch off most of the assistance settings as they are causing many problems with the systems of the plane.
We’re also not happy with turning off the ingame top menu assistance settings menu. But there is no other way possible at the moment. (we will have a look, if there’s a way to keep at least that active)
But you can still switch on taxi ribbons, co ATC, etc. via the msfs assistance settings options.
@VIPER883. I moved your post here to the #third-party-addon-discussion:aircraft category since third party product questions are not supposed to be asked in #community:general-discussion-feedback. Thank you.
Found this out as well this morning. Also the ambitiouspilots-shiftzstats mode is no longer shown.
Is this just for the experimental version or are the stable and devolpment versions effected too ?
Hope it gets sorted as these days the Flybywire A32NX is about the only thing Im flying these days
I’m not sure about stable. But I think it’s in all versions.
Hi Watsi01.
It would be great if you could keep the AI assistant at least for the ATC comms. Going to the assistance options to toggle co ATC is cumbersome during a flight.
Now please don’t take this any other way- you guys have done a fantastic job with this bird and I’m immensely grateful. I fly nothing else other than the FBW. And I used to fly the ZIbo 737 as well as the PMDG 737 in FSX/P3D. I can’t see myself going back, and not as excited as I thought I would be about PMDG 737 coming to MSFS. FBW all the way!
Anyway, I truly hope you can find a workaround for AI Comms at least, as it is very useful. Cheers 
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I hope you can find a way. It’s a major bummer I can’t turn on/off co-pilot ATC on the in flight menu . I saw some talk about this on Discord and I was hoping I was just reading it wrong.
I was never impacted by the “changing flight assistance” bug, so it was never an issue with me for some reason.
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If you like, you also can ‘disable the disabling’. 
Go to the fbw folder in community, find the flight_model.cfg, in there find
disable_assistances = 1
and change it to 0 (or remove it).
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To be clear:
you can still use the AI ATC function. You just need to enable it in the Assistance menu.
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I haven’t flown the past couple days to try this, but if I understand correctly, you mean by going through the “pause” menu to change ATC assistance, correct? If that’s the case, then I’m happy to hear about the .cfg setting so I won’t have to pause and go through the menus. Thanks for having that option.
No need to say thank you for that. It‘s the“official“ option in the flight model we are using to deactivate the assistant functions, nothing we invented. It seems they needed it for the Volocopter and that‘s the reason why there is this option.
So the right move would be to ask MS/Asobo to not deactivate the whole flight assistant menu when there are still options to adapt. That is an unfortunate consequence of using this way to disable the assistant functions.
The other ugly thing is that it seems that those options are likely to reset in different ways. We have even seen that those things are somehow on even when people say they have it off…
Is it still newest stable version simrate restricted?
Yes but you can disable it via configuration in the work folder.
Found it.
The exact path is: Community\flybywire-aircraft-a320neo\SimObjects\AirPlanes\FlyByWire_A320_NEO. There you will find the flight_model.cfg. Open it with notepad, ans scroll down to the section "[FLIGHT_TUNING].
Three lines down, you will see disable_assistances = 1. Change the = 1 to = 0 , click on file in notepad, then click save.
If you can’t find the entry, click on edit in notepad, click find, then type “disable_assistances” in the field, then hit next. It should take you right to the entry in the .cfg.
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Glad I found this topic as I thought I had messed something up. I installed the latest FBW dev release and in turn the stable release this morning and found the assistance disabled in both. The place where I got more concerned was the navigating to the assistance screen itself via ESC → ASSISTANCE OPTIONS. The assistance options are grayed out and set to VOLOCOPTER as in the following screenshot, which makes it seem that the configuration/sim is fundamentally messed up. Not sure if this is possible, but might be a bit more reassuring if the options could at least default to A320N (or something like that) even if disabled
Perhaps it would also make sense to put a message in the scrolling aircraft info banner as the aircraft is being rendered at the destination warning users that the assistance options have been disabled. Something similar to what Aerosoft does with the CRj warning that it can initially take a long time to load
@VIPER883 - You may want to consider removing Experimental from the title as this issue seems to apply to all channels: stable, dev and experimental
Will disabling it potentially cause any issues? If so I’m fine just toggling it from the Pause menu.
If you don’t use any of the interfering assistance options (like takeoff assist, etc.), you shouldn’t have any problems.
I hope this can be fixed. I always keep all assistance off in the assistance menu. Then, after taking the runway for takeoff, I enable ATC assistance and allow the AI to take charge of the communications. This way, I can request pushback etc. until I actually needing the extra help. I hate messing with the aircraft.cfg files.
