As the title suggests, it would be great if MSFS has its own live air traffic control system built in. VATSIM is great but I imagine a seamless experience if something similar is available by MSFS out the box. As a bonus, it would also be available to XBox users. If air traffic controllers are employed and paid for by MS (but not even necessarily), then many, at least larger airports, will have live ground and air traffic controllers!
The idea is great, but to have a reasonable coverage ms will have to make it community driven or hire people to do it.
If it’s community driven, then there will need to be a lot of training and moderation for the volunteers. And coverage and quality of service will be very variable.
If it is paid by MS, then they will have to hire and keep paying a medium sized project worth of people to cover even the most busy airports of the globe. So, it won’t probably be a free service like vatsim. If it’s a monthly paid subscription, a lot of interest will dwindle. Serious simmers, who tend to pay for services such as navigraph and this, think they are very large in number for a project to be viable in terms of cost and profitability, but that number is not that large I believe. May be 5-10 percent of the active MSFS userbase is very serious about this kind of features. But since the user base is said to be in millions, I don’t think even that is the case. We can get a rough idea if navigraph publishes how many people actively subscribe to charts and fms data subscription.
What MS can possibly do (and I know they have the resource, technical knowhow to do it) is to develop a competitor solution to BeyondATC, which will also be available in Xbox and should use some cloud based AI model for proper ATC and will work with multiplayer. They may already be doing that in the background, who knows. But that would kill off beyond ATC and I am not sure if I want MS to have a monopoly over everything flightsim even if having competition means the cost is 10-20% higher.
May be a serious overhaul of the current ATC system with support for proper traffic seperation, holds and diversions if necessary, multiplayer suppor and some other basic atc related items can be done. And this can still use AI and cloud. This will still leave beyondatc and such services to add other bells and whistles for example atc over acars etc.
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