Just saying. When I flew around and directly over the runway about four times, could see nothing except two faint lights at each end of the runway the first time I flew over it. The last time’, when I saw the other aircraft, both sides of the entire length of the runway were lit up. So something took place to cause them to turn on.
This is one feature that would give real life to so many uncontrolled fields and is very much a great training tool. It can be done as Bill Womack of iBlueYonder did it for Minute Man Field 6B6 but it was in XPlane11. Really would like to see more votes for this feature.
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I’m 99.9% certain it wasn’t, maybe in 3rd party addons like pilot activated hangar doors.
I was on the FSX beta team, the FS11 design advisory board and wrote game design documents for DTG’s FSFS and FSW. As far as I recall it was never a feature of FSX outside of the 3rd party community.
The dev process was FSX → Microsoft Flight [cancelled] → FSX → Dovetail Games 64 bit port of FSX for FSW → Asobo.
Having said all that I also vote for PAL. YBAF in Brisbane has it.
Archerfield Airport’s runway lighting is a combined Aerodrome Frequency Response Unit (AFRU) and Pilot Activated Aerodrome Lighting (PAL) that becomes available when CTAF procedures apply (outside air traffic control hours).
Archerfield Airport’s AFRU-PAL frequency has been changed to 118.1 – the same frequency as CTAF frequency.
Effective immediately during CTAF procedures, please activate the airfield lighting by using the 1 SEC MAX method as above.
Activating the Archerfield Airport PAL (AFRU+PAL) requires a reasonably quick activation to be completed
within 5 seconds during CTAF:1 SEC MAX
1 SEC MAX
1 SEC MAX
1 SEC MAX
1 SEC MAX
Basically key the mic 5 times within 5 seconds.
Bumping this as it has still not been implemented in MSFS 2024. Pilot-controlled lighting is an important, arguably crucial element of flying at small airports. As we now have many people flying into such airports in career mode, this would be another element of realism and that adds to awareness, interaction, and immersion.
Almost 400 votes in 2020 - please keep adding to this for 2024!
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Cool idea, but i doubt it would be so practical in the sim environment. To do that, they would also have to collect all the data to support which airport and which system.
It starts with making it available in the SDK. Just provide the framework, at minimum. Then World Hub editors and third parties can at least implement it. I would gladly do so.
Missing this feature, as well as the ability to raise or dim the intensity of the runway lights as needed, is a big gap in realism for several thousand airports in the US.
It was very useful in Flight Unlimited game. No need to collect all the data - just to implement this to every airport. This is realistic - In big airports pilots can ask ATC to do this, in small ones they use PCL. So, if there is a controller they can implemets this via ATC menu, if there is an uncontrolled one - PCL.
Indeed. It could even be made into an accessable SimVar via Simconnect so that ATC Clients from IVAO or Vatsim can implement it and the Tower controllers could actually control it themselves.
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Exactly. Would be great to allow NOTAMs to affect lights also.
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As a retired software engineer I don’t think PCL is difficult.
Is there a standard bit of equipment that triggers the lights? Maybe ping the runway with a preset code on a preset frequency?
As a guess, light up at 10nm?
Ah, just found the 5 mic clicks in 5 seconds comment. That’s quite achievable in the sim software.
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Agree. The hardest part would be implementing it correctly where it needs implementation. It’s such a routine, critical part of flying, though, that I’m amazed that all these years later, there’s still no foundation for it.
It would be amazing, for instance, if you could pair it with an API that shuts lights down when appropriate NOTAMs happen.
I would love this to be implemented but considering the things that are missing and problems within the sim, this will most likely remain a dream that won’t be coming true. 
Not anytime soon, most likely. I’ll keep bumping it from time to time - but understandably there are bigger fish to fry.
I wouldn’t see why such data points aren’t machine readable and have to be manually added in, FAA charts (I think NA is the main region that does it) typically specify if you need to key in airport lights and it can take data from that.
It’s literally in the data in stuff like the ERSA in Australia and Jeppesen etc. The data doesn’t need to be anything other than a quick query of official documents.
I wrote a lot of the game design documents for DTG Flight Simulator World which ended up at Asobo and have been implemented in FS2020 and 2024, it would be very easy to implement. Not sure why you’d think it’s complicated. Not had to do at all programatically.
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I only think it’s complicated because it’s a fairly critical part of aviation that hasn’t ever been done in this sim. I figure if it was easy, it’d have been done, and maybe the inverse is true. But going the intuitive route isn’t always a winning strategy with this sim.
Either way, the PCL doesn’t readily exist in a known public database in the US like the NASR. The best way to get it would be to scan through the Airport/Facility directory. I’m not a coder and don’t have experience with automated data scrapes, so it’s above my pay grade.
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It’s easy it’s just not been a priority. I wrote PCL into the game design docs for DTG FSW which are now in Asobo’s hands. They’e implemented basically everything else in the game design documents so at some point in future it will happen I’m sure. Maybe SayIntentions may be able to implement it, as it could probably be done via SimConnect.
As the great Hal Bryan from ACES Studions once said, they’re not going to spend significant time on less than 1% of the product. But as the sim continues to mature there will be a point it will happen.
It’s not complicated, it’s just a time suck that takes away from other more critical parts of the sim.
Data scrape is a 10 min job with AI generated code. I’ve snagged all the aircraft on the Australian CASA and USA FAA registries within minutes including registration, aircraft type etc etc etc to resurrect ProjectAI
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Very cool - interesting work indeed! I love the data side of things, but I’m used to having a dataset that’s pre-prepared and publicly available, then manipulating it from there. I would absolutely love to help curate the airports that need PCL via the world hub (if it ever gets implemented), but if can be done faster, even better.
There is a plugin for X-plane. The addon developer said he’d love to do the same for MSFS but the SDK won’t allow it.
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