[OFFICIAL] Community Fly-in Event: Grand Canyon Razor Run

Hey, thanks for the shout out! I’m glad to help. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: Looking forward to more events in the near future. :sunglasses:

The IP address it gives you should work on any device with a browser. Is your iPad connected to the same network as your PC?

Best of luck everyone!

What are the rules if we crash? (hopefully not :slightly_smiling_face:) Also, in the event of tech issues like a disconnect?
DNF? Restart if there’s time?

Should be able to just respawn on the ramp at 1G4 and request another slot from 1G4_TWR. I’ve just clarified that of course crash detection needs to be on, but stress failures can be off, so GO FOR IT!

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Anyone being interested in some additional ATC; Feel free to make normal flight between any of the event airports or Los Angeles area and tune to 124.850 :slight_smile:

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I can’t believe I flew the whole race with flaps half down :upside_down_face:

First time TBM pilot

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Callsign GRBDD or N341SW hit me up.

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whats up @IngoPlane ?
i am N341SW

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Cool! I can see my aircraft! (I did not finish the race though, after a technical problem, which I eventually figured out how to fixed so I had another bash but ended up overstressing the aircraft! and I just read I could have turned stress failures off!

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At least you finished it!

The leaderboards are up on the flightevents-site. You have to click on the event.

Thanks to all who joined this event.

Special thanks goes out to @RobGeebivi, Hy (FE bot developer), @maxdergottliche and many others. I look forward to organizing the next event with you guys!

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I will be honest, I have very mixed feelings about the event.
I understand, that the sim is new and it has a few flaws regarding multiplayer and the API for external software, but for most of them there are workarounds.
I am flying nearly every evening with a community-event, mostly the around the world-trip with the great Footy and I know how to set up the sim, the flightevents-tracker, and everything was working fine on my side.
A few other fellow simmers and me waited for over two and a half hours for take-off-clearance only to see my time now as “unconfirmed”, because there was no visual confirmation of my plane / gamertag from GND - while we could see him and each other.
At one time after my request for participation in the race I was transferred to the FE-Preparation-Channel to get the visual confirmation sorted out, but there was no “official” there. So after a while I transferred back, now out of the loop.
I am very sorry for GND, since he really tried to get everybody of the ground and had a rough time apologizing for the technical difficulties.
The race itself was ok, all three ATC-Controllers were a great fun to talk to, especially race-control who had some kennedy-steve-vibes going on. But the rules were not clear enough.
As stated above, you should stay within the walls of the canyon, race-control then said “fly max 1000ft above water level” (there is no radar altimeter in the xtra), so the race came down to guessing your height in a way that you could cut the most corners…
I did not know that I was not confirmed, since all controllers were replying to my first contact with postive radar contact.
At the time I was requesting landing clearance from TWR we were 3 1/2 hours into the event, landing clearance was not really clear and GND was already out of service (with still at least five planes behind me).
Hm… overall it felt a little bit as it was mainly organized to get a good official twitch stream, not for the whole community.
I understand that this event was just for the fun, since there was no prize or anything, but I am now worried that the big cannonball-event next week will be suffering from technical difficulties as well.

A few suggestions for future events:

  • As GND or TWR:
    Do not spawn on a place where participants could also be, planes are not visible when you are standig on the same spot and gamertags are not visible within a certain radius around you.
    Switch between Servers to reload planes that are not visible to you, no need to restart the game.
  • Talk to Asobo, there needs to be a spectator-mode for events like this, with guaranteed visibility of all planes and without a limit in how much tags are visible
    Better: Do not rely on ingame-visibility
  • Choose an airport with more than one active runway, with a GND for each of them.
  • Put out a schedule: TBMs at 1900Z, Xtras not before 2130Z OR choose different servers for different planes. (If it is possible for one controller to monitor two airspaces on different servers)
  • There is no way such an event with this active (multi-)playerbase will be finished within 2 hours…
  • Let us help. You need an airport with 50 planes sitting there for an hour or two? Just ask on the forums, I would be happy to help you developing the tools this sim needs for a great multiplayer future.

Kind regards and thanks for your work!

  • mo
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In game visibility is only to make sure you are on live weather and not getting ridiculous speed by changing the wind as there is no better way to confirm that. I guess we just didn’t anticipate that much problem with racer visibility (wouldn’t it suppose to just work :joy:) and didn’t prepare a good fallback.
I am appalled when hearing that someone have to wait that long; I would really have suggested to just proceed with clearance and double check the result later.

About the unconfirmed tag, I kinda agree with you that it can upset our participants when we put it along with the callsign. I would prefer those to be hidden from the public and only visible to whoever suppose to double check the result. I would blame myself for not providing the team with enough facility to do that (you can see that they have to litter the callsign with all sort of stuffs :frowning:).

Rest assure that ATConnect cares about the whole community and not just the twitch streamers. I think it looks smoother for streamers because we do have a practice test with some streamers beforehand, and have more time to settle their issues and get them familiar. Besides, we also stay long after the stream is ended to make sure everyone get a chance to complete the race. I am not sure how you did not get landing clearance as I believe the team tries to allow everyone to complete the flight. I guess there was some miscommunication at the end of the event.

Anyway, this is probably the first time we do community ATC along with an official stream. There is definitely a lot to learn and improve, but we do hope you will come back to join us next time :smiley:!

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Maybe a registration before the event would be a way. You could bake the settings of the event into an .FLT-File, which then could be downloaded from the flightevents-site. The only few lines which have to be individual in the file are the following ones, which a clever script could generate on registration:

TailNumber=[individual number]
AirlineCallSign=[individual number]
FlightNumber=[individual number]

You could verify the plan via the corresponding function “show plan” on the flightevents-map. And to verify I did not manipulate the FLT, just check for IAS on the ground which is shown via the “show info” dialog.

EDIT: There is a way to set the tailnumber via the API isn’t it? I think I saw something like that on some youtube-video about OnAir. Then you could provide one FLT for all players (well, one for each plane) and set the tailnumber via the flightevents-client.

There is some really good feedback here. Not too critical but also not “fluffing” just for the sake of it.

The long delay at the beginning was obviously the main thing we need to improve on and we already have a number of ideas to make it far slicker. What I guess we don’t want to do is make things too structured because the main goal is enjoyment rather than strive to be 100% real world procedure driven. Again the initial delay has to and will be improved and we really do appreciate that most if not all of you stuck it out and waited your turn.

Many of us (me included) are new to the ATC side too and there was most definitely some graceful swan outward personas being shown while under the surface we were running around like headless chickens for quite a while at the beginning. For me that’s character building and actually adds to the enjoyment in many ways.

Anyway, big thanks to ALL that participated and didn’t let some initial annoyances totally dominate their overall view, and providing real feedback just like yours. Hy and Rob put an enormous amount of effort into it up front, as did RKantos, migte, Max and several others. We’re talking many hours over many days.

Hope to be involved in the next similar event and even more hopeful the last plane lands before 07:30am local time (for me) as it did today.

TFSG (Race_Control)

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The whole verification in-game is simply to make sure you are using Live Weather, so you cannot change weather mid-race. Using a flight plan or a tail number or any amount of pre-registration wouldn’t help because you can load up a perfect flight plan with Clear Sky and keep changing wind direction to get ridiculous tail wind. We simply don’t want cheaters to spoil the fun of others, but we certainly overdid the restriction and made it kind of a pain for some.
If we don’t care about Live weather restriction, we don’t even need to see you in the game at all :stuck_out_tongue:.

7th place with flaps at half for the whole race. Not too shabby!

I do agree though the rules regarding “in the canyon” were a bit unclear. At one point I got told to descend even though I was below the ridge of the canyon, but not all the way down at the water level.

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