New X-Plane user

[kneighbour]

I have just 'found' Plan-G after a lot of searching. Bit weird that it took me months to locate this excellent program. I have just a couple of simple questions.

Can you clear the tracks from the screen. After you do a few flights, the nice tracks that show where you have been become quite cluttering. I could not find a clear button.

Can you include SIDs/STARs in the flight plan?

I actually do not want to do too many flight plans - I mainly want to use the program as a moving map and airport information resource. ie finding out airfield elevation, alignment and QNH. Perhaps even Bearing To, etc. I do a lot of flying using FS Economy and fly to a lot of small airports. This is formation is good to obtain from a single source like Plan-G.


Excellent program. I have been using EFASS, but this seems better.

[kneighbour]

After using Plan-G for a little while, and having read the manual, I still have a couple of questions

1. The manual mentions a HSI. Is there a HSI in Plan-G that I am unaware of? It sounds like a very useful function if that is the case, but cannot find it.

2. The manual also mentions that you can right-mouse on an airport and select an instrument approach. I tried at several airports that had instrument approaches (ie YBBN) and the option did not show on the menu.

I am using X-Plane 10.31 - perhaps this function does not work with X-Plane?  Again, this sounds like a very good option if available.

3. I have found that the airport information boxes do not list the actual runway headings, only the runway designations (which can be a fair bit off). Can I suggest that for a future update, if possible, can we show this information.

4. The radio stack has a few command issues. Or perhaps it is just me. You can only toggle the radio/nav active buttons once. ie you cannot switch the active frequencies back an forth. The autopilot buttons do not seem to follow the autopilot buttons on the aircraft.


BTW, I am using Plan-G V3.1.1.94, which is the latest.

[tim arnot]

1. Go to the View tab. There's a popup with a whole bunch of telemetry displayed, including an HSI.

2. Yes, it requires data to be available, and this wasn't the case in X-Plane. I *think* it's starting to be available in the latest version (I know there's limited airspace data), but I haven't written code to read it yet. It will come though.

3. Good idea.

4. Not sure what's going on there. The program just relays the button press to XPUIPC, which passes it on to X-Plane, and displays whatever state information gets sent back. Maybe there's some garbled comms somewhere.

SiDs and STARs are not directly supported (it's a VFR planner...) but you can roll your own by saving them as snippets (the snippet file is described in the readme, and you can easily create them in TextEdit if you have the lat/lon of the waypoints)

Not the most obvious place, I realise, but in Options/User Aircraft, there's a Clear Trail button.

[kneighbour]

Thanks - I would never have found that Clear button!!

And I finally found the HSI - and it works very well!!  The descent bars are great.

All the other stuff - no problems. Loving this thing. I like the way I can just pump it into XP with a couple of mouse clicks. Entering stuff into the XP GPS is a real pain.

Many thanks.