First Flight preparation, need help

[Jaime Rodriguez]

Greetings,

 

So I finally got vPilot working 100%. Tonight I will be doing my first flight on VATSIM. I've read through almost all of the PRC information (it's a lot to go through). I do understand the concept of the ATC flow of 1.DEL (clearance delivery), 2. Ground, 3. Tower, 4. Approach, and 5. Center, but I could use some help with the following.  

A: Upon connecting to vPilot, what's next after I obtain the current ATIS information? vPilot shows COM: 128.300 and COM2: 127.800 in the upper corner. Do I enter those frequencies in my airplane's COM Radio's first? Or, do I enter the Clearance Delivery freq? Also, I've setup a Push to Talk button, do I just tune the Radio in my airplane and then talk (when no one else is talking)?

B. What about weather? Do I have to manually configure the weather in the P3D v5?  

C. What are the Tabs for "Mode C" and "Ident" use for?

D. Is it best to file my flightplan before connecting to vPilot?

E. Lastly, I did a successful test connection earlier today. On the VATSIM Flight Track Map I could see several other aircraft on the ground at the same airport as me. However, I could only see one in the sim. Any thoughts? 

Thanks in advance for any help.

Regards, 

Jaime

Edited August 8, 2020 at 05:37 PM by Jaime Rodriguez

[Craighton Miller]

A. You can use your radios in your airplane to tune the frequencies. Starting with Clearance Delivery if it's available for the airport you going to take off from if there is none on then move on to Ground, Tower, Approach, then Center as everyone will provide a top down service if one isn't online.  

B. You can use whatever weather you'd like to fly. For the most realistic experience you'd want to select real world weather when setting up your client or use a 3rd party addon for weather (such as Active Sky).

C. Mode C is your transponder (it let's ATC see you when you have it turned on). ATC may sometimes tell you to "ident" in which you would press that button or press the ident button in your aircraft. It flashes your data tag to the controller to positively identify you. (https://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Transponder)

D. You can either file your flight plan online before hand (https://cert.vatsim.net/fp/file.php) or you can use the flight plan button in vPilot to file your plan.

E. Make sure you have AI models installed or you won't see everybody correctly. A very good tool is FLAi which has a good AI model matching toolkit (http://flai.bvartcc.com/). Once you install it be sure to follow the post installation guide so that vPilot knows where your AI models are: http://flaicdn.bvartcc.com/version/FLAi_vPilot_Post_Installation_Guide.pdf

 

For more the PRC should help you out: https://www.vatsim.net/pilot-resource-centre/general-lessons/airport-atc-procedures-cd-gnd-twr

Edited August 8, 2020 at 08:20 PM by Craighton Miller

[Jaime Rodriguez]

Thanks so much Craighton. I appreciate your help.

 

Regards, 

 

Jaime