Hi,
I did actually start a petition, but its actually against the rules to share so I removed it. The thing is, our best bet is to get people to upvote this thread here.
That post on reddit is useful - thanks for sharing. My only issue really is “how long is a piece of string?” - nobody knows haha.
Yes, please go and take a big cake!! 
Cheers
Difficult to tell, when it is presented to you as a "Ball of String "…
Or presented as a game, that has been “planning” to implement something for two years. Some of the first commenters on this have long since left the forum. Lets hope this request becomes more than just a ball of string without an arbitrary end point.
A big airplane-shaped cake for our developer friends with a nice message on the chocolate livery: “Shared cockpit, please”.
Fortunately for them, this cake will not be a lie…
Ok I’m going out
The main way we can get an answer from Asobo would be to submit a question to the next dev stream, and then share the post in this thread to get everyone to upvote it so it gets asked.
Otherwise we are just waiting for the new dev update and hoping!
Im still amazed such a fundemental part of aviation is not a focus at all for a flightsim that considers itself the best out there in 2020+
People talk about realism, realistic this realistic that, yet we dont even have the option to be more than 1 person in the aircraft. Shared cockpit has been on the table since even before launch. 2 years later and almost no info or talk about it is just sad imo.
That’s true, only having one person in a lot of aircraft isn’t realistic.
In real life, most of the non-GA aircraft in the base sim require 2 people to fly. Some add-on aircraft require 3! (Such as the DC-6 by PMDG)
Shared cockpit has been around since 2008 (FSX), and it’s really missed by the community on MSFS.
So in theory, since it was in FSX - it should be too hard to implement into MSFS? 
No, it’s very different in MSFS 2020,
FSX MP was peer-peer, MSFS2020 is Server-Clients
That makes a BIG difference and a lot of added complication (and Lag)
So FSX MP was actually better?
It was different… Number of MP players in the session was limted by the Upload Bandwidth of the Peer Host … unlike in MSFS where the MS servers with a very high bandwidth, are sending out data to all the planes in the session… typical as many as a 100-200
In FSX / P3D, it was a struggle to get much more than 10 players in a session. better now, that most have higher bandwidth that 15 year ago, but still a limitation.
FSX was very much a limited “your small Group” MP system, where as MSFS 2020 is an EVERYONE near you system.
Ah I see. Thanks for explaining it. So the challenge may be having a shared cockpit in a game with lots of other players? Or perhaps the way to mitigate this is by having smaller shared cockpit lobbies?
I’ve collated some of the comments over the last year of extra ideas and observations that might be useful to the overall consideration.
Collated ideas
“But maybe in MSFS2020, there should, be some Built In Voice Communications for pilots in a Shared Cockpit plane, which is really necessary, rather than having to rely on some random 3rd party voice communication system, like Discord, Teamspeak ? or other.” - N6722C
"I posted a suggestion here some time ago about about there being two different kinds of shared cockpits that MSFS could choose to support in the future:
"My Copy/Paste wishlist for shared cockpit functionality:
Waaay down the road, it’d be cool to have FPS-style player aircraft walkthroughs, and the ability to leave the aircraft on the ground and do a “real” walkaround, or start outside the aircraft, etc ( walk anywhere within the airport fence? )" - SPERABrentH
“And more advanced features to help in the cockpit could be added, such as a visual pointer that would show a specific button/switch that both pilots could use and see, or even just support for more than 2 people in the cockpit (with modes like captain seat, copilot seat, view only seat).” - FlyingCookie650
Regarding how long it has taken - in 2020 this guy said this:
Oh yes, good to hear they are at least planning this feature. Can’t wait. So hyped 
"
I just put this down because it shows there has been a long time since this has been planned.
“There should be a warning or error for incompatible Airac / Navdata however, that’s the only thing I could see that may be causing problems.” - NixonRider
"Interesting note on realism “It’s MANDATORY to fly this beauty (the PDMG DC6) with a a copillot to obtain the maximun performance and all this mighty plane have to offer.” - Delihus
On 3rd party plane compatability:
"Unless Asobo is able to come up with some incredible system that can carefully filter out per-frame updates of local vars (which is certainly possible and I wouldn’t bet against them) then there would probably need to be some kind of rating info in the marketplace for every 3rd party aircraft, like:
“Second, there must be an option for a ‘private’ server session so that only invited players can join. Nothing more annoying than some 10 yo buzzing your plane with an F 18!!”
Cheers
@N6722C @GunnerRat
You can still run the shared cockpit Peer to Peer(P2P) even if the multiplayer is Server-Client.
Like using shared cockpit Vatsim on FSX. You are connected to each other using P2P, but flying on Vatsim using Server-Client multiplayer.
Yeah I see what you mean. It will be interesting to see how the devs decide to do it. I suppose it gets trickier say if you have one server with lots of other shared coop planes going around?
It depends how they implement it and what the server limiting factors on their end are.
If the limit is on streaming world data: Let’s say you can have 300 people on a server at any one time so that could be 300 single player aircraft or 150 two player shared cockpit aircraft or 100 three player aircraft…
If the limit is on rendered real player aircraft in your vicinity: It doesn’t matter whether the 50 aircraft around you are solo or shared cockpiting because you still only see one aircraft for the people that are sharing!
Would love to see shared cockpit/crew flying.
I wonder which option is more likely do you think or too hard to say?
I hope this feature gets implemented in the sim.
Yes mate! The good news is that it is being planned! Just for when…we don’t know…YET! But hopefully very soon. 
