I played around some more with FS2004 last night. The ATC is much
improved, and you can now see approach plates in the GPS moving map
display.

However the approach plates are not complete. For example, the
approaches to LAX do not have all of the legs of the approaches shown in
the plates, and some are absent. Instead of the names that they have on
the plates, they are named by the first waypoint. For instance, the
Northeast approach to LAX is FIM, and begins at the FIM waypoint. This
is a minor quibble, there are enough wayponts for a realistic approach;
but one should get the plates if one wants to practice the whole
approach thing like in the real world.

The online documentation does a pretty good job of explaining how to use
the GPS and the approaches, but newbies may find it tough sledding and
should consider learning about approaches from another book before
delving into this.

You can call up the approaches fromthe GPS, where the legs are displayed
on the moving map (you need good eyes, it is small and you can't scroll
the moving map). You can add the approach to your flight plan before
takeoff or on the fly, but here it gets a bit confusing if you are using
the autopilot. If you use the GPS to follow your flight plan, you have
to manually shift to the approach at some (any) time during flight, and
if you are using the autopilot, you have to remember to change the
autopilot from "nav" to "heading", otherwise it will not follow the
approach. The GPS will not land you, so if you want to follow the
glideslope in, you have to switch back to "apr", change the switch from
"GPS" to "CDI" (or whatever).

In the meantime the runway frequency has not been entered automatically
into the CDI, so you have to do that manually (If you are using ATC,
that can be done automatically in the usual manner by acknowledging the
ATC instructions - but I am not sure if the ATC will or will not follow
your flight plan-probably not).

It is also unclear to me that if one is flying autopilot (not GPS) and
adds the approach to the flight plan, will the autopilot follow the
approach by itself when it reaches that point, or does one have to do it
manually? The easy way would be if the autopilot just keeps following
the waypoints added to the flight plan, then all one has to do is to
press the "apr" button at some point to lock on to the glideslope (after
adjusting the correct frequencies and bearing).

The above should make it clear why correctly flying IFR requires years
of training...

The ATC is improved, but has at least one of the irritating bugs of
FS2002, namely the multiple handing off back and forth between the same
two controllers after takeoff. Anyway now the ATC will vector you around
your destination in a ralistic way, and there are additions like the
ability to request a different runway or a different altitude.

To get around the unrealistic idea of having a moving map GPS display in
the Spirit of St louis, there are two versions of the Garmin, the normal
one and the handheld one, for use in older aircraft. So if you are so
inclined you could fly Lindberg's flight to Paris with the help of a
handheld GPS device.

Holy mackeral! I never realizd that the top speed of the Piper Cub was a
measly 85 mph! That's slower than a car, and it could be embarrasing to
fly a Cub along an autobahn in Germany with cars zipping by...

What is missing in FS2004? Well, the 3D scenery is still inferior in
accuracy to some addons for FS2002, and I am sure that updates of these
programs like the one that has true altitudes for North america (forgot
the name) will have FS2004 versions out soon. The panel for the heavy
metal is still the same generic one, which doesn't bother me too much (I
bought the detailed 747 and 767 ones for FS2002 (forgot the name again),
but found them too complex and didn't use them much. For modern planes
there are no new ones that were not in the FS2002 Pro package; seems to
me thay could have added at least one medium size short-haul commercial
turbojet.

As far as I could detemine, there is no tutorial for using approach
plates. Perhaps it was considered that this would be too complex and is
better learned from a book. The excellent addon FS2000 book by the guy
with the Chinese name (forgot the title-sorry) or the thick Flight
Simulator 2000 Handbook can be used for that. There are also good
tutorial sites on the web, but I have forgotten their names also.

Henri