OK, I'm off...

"The OTHER Kevin in San Diego" skiddz "AT" adelphia "DOT" net wrote in
message ...
I'll have to check that out.. I wonder if we can hook up the sim here
at work to the net and try that out. I know I'll be practicing
instrument procedures in there pretty much every day once we start
flying under the hood..

It's definitely worth taking a look at. You might have to jump through a
few extra setup hoops if you're running behind an overly aggressive firewall
though. The number of pilots flying, ATC's open, etc largely depends on the
time of day, but you've got the whole world there, so there's always traffic
and towers open somewhere. You also get the live weather fed into it to.

I'm surprised that flying schools haven't got wise to it. Granted, it is
primarily supposed to be entertaining and there's no guarantee of the
quality of tower you'll get (most are very professional, but I swear
Stanstead Tower was drunk last night!) , but with the ATC client software
they could always get someone knowledgable to man their own local tower
within the game and have students fly from that as RT and procedure
training. It's certainly helping to build my confidence at RT. One cool
feature is with the use of a USB headset, you can have the aircraft noise
coming out of the regular PC speakers, and the voice only coming out of the
earphones. When voice isn't available you have a text window, which is kind
of difficult to use when you're trying to hover taxi or concentrate on an
approach!

Si