Introduction: totally blind flight sim user

[jfayre]

Hello all,
My name is Jason Fayre. I have recently signed up to Pilot Edge.
I am totally blind. as a result, I use an amazing add-on for FSX called Its Your Plane (http://www.itsyourplane.com).
This add-on allows me to control most aspects of FSX by way of speech recognition and text-to-speech responses.
I've been flying with the standard MS ATC for several years and am really eager to try live ATC!
I have some questions about filing flight plans:
1. What is the best site to obtain routes? I've tried myflightroute.com, but I'm having some trouble with it. I'm sure it's just something I'm not understanding. When I enter my start and destination airports, it isn't filling in the route on the flight plan. Maybe I'm missing a step.
2. Due to some of the limitations of Its Your Plane, I am not able to easily fly SIDs and STARs. Is it possible to ask the controller to just vector me after take-off and for landing?
3. I am not able to taxi from the gate to a runway. In order to accomplish this, Its Your Plane will slew the aircraft. I know this is generally not allowed.
What I was planning to do is put some remarks in my flight plan asking for vectors and permission to slew. What do folks think?

[Keith Smith]

Welcome to the network! We should be able to accommodate your requirements.

Place "No SID / STAR, vision impaired" in the remarks of your flight plan and that should do the trick. As long as we don't have too many pilots requiring vectors during departure and arrival, it should work out.

You will need to be able to fly the enroute portion under your own navigation, though.

It's worth mentioning that socal has a mature tec route system and some of the routes are complex. If you would like some help with advanced planning, feel free to post the city pair here and if there is a mandatory tec route, we can locate it for you and review it ahead of time so you're prepared to fly it.

By this I mean that there might be a lot of vors, airways and radials in the cleared route.

Regarding slewing, this was asked by another vision impaired pilot recently, it shouldn't be a problem, just advise the ground controller that you are unable to taxi in your simulation and request a reposition to the departure runway (be clear that you'll be on the runway after reposition, not holding short).

Good luck! Post a city pair if you would like the help!

[Keith Smith]

Btw, you can skip filing a flight plan if your city pair is served by a tec route, will post a followup after i land.

[jfayre]

Thanks Keith!
It will probably be the weekend before I can get to this. I'll probably stick with smaller airfields in a GA aircraft first, just to get my feet wet.

[Matthias Geiss]

Welcome Jason!

I think it's really great that you enjoy flight simming despite the many difficulties and obstacles that being blind must add! And I find it very interesting that you can do a regular IFR just fine with your tools. If you don't mind answering a question regarding your way of flying: How do you keep aligned to the runway when doing take offs and landings? Is there a plugin that provides aural clues or do you need to rely on the co-pilot pluging and/or autloand?

I'm sure you will enjoy PilotEdge very much. I also came directly from the FSX/X-Plane ATC and never did a flight on VATSIM or IVAO before joining PE, and it was a night and day difference!

[zkline]

Hi Jason,

I'm the other blind pilot Keith refers to. I have yet to fly a proper route, but I think it should be possible with a bit of work. The TEC routes actually look promising, if I can get IYP's VOR navigation features to work properly.

Good luck when you decide to fly. I'm happy to see more blind pilots giving this a try.

[Keith Smith]

Btw, you can skip filing a flight plan if your city pair is served by a tec route, will post a followup after i land.

By this I mean that you can request IFR in Socal for city pairs served by a TEC route without a plan on file. I'm not sure how inconvenient it is for you to file IFR flight plans, but if we give you a heads up as to what the route is going to be, then when you call clearance and say, "N123AB, Skyhawk, slant Golf, tower enroute to <field name>," and ATC issues the route (either as a full route clearance or via the TEC route ID), you know it's coming and you're prepared to navigate along the route.

I'm offering more help than we would normally give ahead of time because of an assumption I'm making that interpreting VOR radials and airways without the aid of sight would be pretty challenging. By having some guidance as to what fixes and VORs those airways equate to, I'm assuming this makes the operation more likely to be doable as a solo endeavor in real time.

Let me know if those assumptions are off base or incorrect. I don't have much experience in this realm, but it's pretty inspiring to know that you can conduct these flights at all. Hats off.

[stealthbob]

Frankly I am very fascinated with the technology and technique that must be employed to be able to fly in a sim blind. Furthermore the ambitious nature of using live ATC in general is daunting, I am very inspired by the notion that you want to take on this challenge.

[zkline]

Keith,

Thanks for clarifying the TmEC routes issue. This brings to mind a question for PE in general, how much use do you make of the FS flight planner?

Traditionally, blind pilots seem to load plans, either auto-generated or from third-party sites, into the GPS and fly them that way. It strikes me that this is a bit harder in the live environment, if the auto-generated route doesn't quite agree with what ATC wants.

It's possible to fly without a pre-loaded flightplan, especialy with newer versions of our software. I've just been wondering about this today, because we find manual use of the FSX flightplan dialog kind of a bear. Then again, it's possible we can find .pln TEC routes online somewhere

[damien]

1. What is the best site to obtain routes?

Kudos to you. For for my route planning I use FlightAware, as well as MyFlightRoute for the local TEC routing. Sometimes I have to refresh the TEC route page for it to work.

http://flightaware.com/statistics/ifr-route/
http://myflightroute.com/inputtec.php

I use the P3D (same as FSX) in-sim flight planner and also use Avare on an android tablet. I can't recommend Avare enough if you are able to use and read charts. I have to use the P3D/FSX flight planner however to get the autopilot to follow any portion of the flight plan as Avare doesn't connect into the sim for flight plan following. Where the P3D/FSX flight planner doesn't have the correct waypoints I use my Avare flight plan to see where they are at and make a custom way point at that location. I find the P3D/FSX planner very cumbersome and not user friendly, and when planning long flights often the red course line won't grab and drag like usual and I can't plan some long flights. Other times it works. Can't figure that out.