Dash 8: please keep an 'easy' option for beginners

Dear IPACS

I'm looking forward to the Dash 8 but worried it's going to be too complicated for a beginner or for people who are not remotely interested in, nor have time for, 'cold and dark' start ups and the like. I'm also worried you will copy across some of the Dash's complexity into other aircraft whether some of us want that or not.

I use AF2 and not the other simulators because of its beautiful scenery, simple interface, fluidity and easy to fly aircraft; I'm not a real pilot and never will be and don't want to spend hours working out how to start the engines and manually entering waypoints into a flight computer.

I know you designed this simulator for beginners and experts alike; so please try to keep both camps happy by building in a 'lite' option for those of us who prefer simplicity and aesthetics over hardcore realism.

AF2 has given me hours of pleasure, so thank you for that.

Quote from Jet-Pack

Hi,

You've come to the right place. Aerofly is designed to be easy for beginners. There will always be an option to use a navigation dialog to create a simple route from A to B or place the aircraft on the runway, ready for departure. The Q400 won't be any different, if you select the runway the aircraft will be in a takeoff configuration with engines running. If you created a route with the navigation dialog the route will be loaded when you start flying. Later on we will (most likely) add options to create a new route from within the aircraft, via FMS and that FMS will probably be fully functional and realistic. But it will also have a "virtual data link" to be able to inject a new route create from outside the aircraft. That makes it easy to copy paste existing routes or create a custom route from within the nav.-dialog and you won't need to sit there and type each waypoint if you don't want to.

Right now (at least in my version) there isn't an option to start "cold" so you won't need to be able to start the engines. I don't know if there are plans to add a button to initialize "cold and dark" or just "cold" into the sim right now, it probably will come at some point though. But you will be able to turn off the engines of the Q400 and then make them spool up and relight using the real world procedure. At this point in my developer version there isn't a fully automated start procedure (press one button and you're golden type of thing) but this might also come in the future.

So to summarize: as you mentioned we design the simulator to be easy to use for beginners but also offer the option to go deeper for those that know how. The complexity of other aircraft will be increased in the future and we will probably implement intelligent features to assist non experienced users or those that just want to sit back and relax. A copilot that is capable of starting the engines or to change the configuration for takeoff and landing would be very neat and I think that would help a lot of our users.

The proposed "lite" version of the aircraft it not a good idea. We have had that in the past and it didn't quite work out for us. The amount of work was almost doubled and it slowed us down in development any added feature would have to be implemented in a two different versions of the exact same aircraft. And it took a long time to undo that split into "simple" and "real". Instead of simplifying the aircraft we should make the complex aircraft more accessible I think. Create more tutorials on the wiki, maybe even an inbuilt flight school for that or the mentioned copilot that will do does a good job in assisting you.

Regards,

Jan

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Thank you for your response and grateful that, while increasing realism and complexity for the experts, you'll keep the limitation of beginners in mind as well in the design process. I now very much look forward to the arrival of the Q400.