I’d really like PAL (Pilot Activated Lighting) to be implemented in MSFS too. Simply by an ATC option or more realistically by tuning to the PAL frequency for say 10 seconds. I’m sure there’s someone at Osobo that would love the challenge.
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This is a point I think the producers are MSFS will need to talk through. From a simmer perspective, the expectation is going to be that it behaves like it does it real life - you’d need consult your charts or similar.
From the games perspective, they’d need to make it more accessible as you point out - probably will require a change to the ATC system to prompt with an option to enable/disable PCL when a field has it available, e.g.
“Tune to PCL Channel xxx.xx mhz”
“Send PCL Signal / Key Mic”
Something along those lines, anyways. I’m not a pilot, but a pattern like that in ATC would likely work well.
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And Australian airports as well
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There is a a nice arcal add-on in XP11 I use all the time at my home airport (CZBA). So yes this would be great to have in FS2020
Is PCL implemented? If so how do you control it? I see no way to sim a mic click.
One of the most unrealistic things about lighting is that runway lighting is on day and night. Really cannot get the logic behind it. Even FS5 that was 25+ years ago had runway lights off during the day.
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Any update on this is going???
on HOW** this is going?
This is pretty far down the wishlist so doubtful any work on this has been done. More people need to upvote it first.
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Bring out your dead…
IRL, you read the NOTAM’s before a flight, in which it tells you the destination, airports along the route, have issues with the airport lighting.
The chart Supplement (AFD) gives lighting information about an airport, too. does it have it, what type, times and/or pilot control. (clicks on the mic)
Third party sites, AOPA, Foreflight , etc; also have such information.
It would be a nice touch to see the airfield light up on that 5th click when night flying.
I’ve used this at my local airport in real life. Nice to see this in the sim.
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I’m not sure if it’s in the default NAV data, but with Navigraph installed, I have seen maybe 2 airports with a frequency listed for PCL. It doesn’t do anything of course, but it would be cool to add.
I’m not sure how widespread it really is, and how often I’d actually be able to use it.
In real life, PCL is on the CTAF (in the US) or the aerodrome traffic frequency (sometimes UNICOM) in Canada. Not sure about the practice in Australia or New Zealand. Simply click the microphone 3 to 7 times to set the brightness ( if different brightness is available). This is applicable even to towered airports sometimes because not all towers are manned 24 hours. If you fly only to towered airports (24 hour tower ops), there is no need to worry about PCL.
Not sure what the rules are in UK or EU.
In MSFS, I have noted that the airport lighting appears to be on at night in rural Alberta. The lights were off in small airports in Japan, even in urban areas. The bottom line is that for small aircraft, you need to fly around a bit to find out if PCL is needed for a given area.
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It would be really nice to see PCL on MSFS. It’s not a crucial priority considering the other major bugs and missing features but it will be certainly another immersion for us.
Kind regards.
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This would be great to have
Any update on this? seems like it should be pretty straightforward to ad some ARCALs K or J into the game.
+1 from me👌🏼
Not only lights. At Lake Hood Airport, gates on taxiway are controlled by pilot button too.
So globally, it is better to ask for having possibility to trigger animation/property of an airport by PushToTalk button.
(perhaps it is already possible for the gates with script, i’m not a scenery dev)
something like this could be simply programmed into an airports AFCAD under the NAV/COM info.
+1! This would be such a great feature, however I feel this would need a complete rework of the ATC system.