Flight Simulation developers shared news today, including a free airport for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and MSFS 2020, and an update for the ATC suite BeyondATC.
Before we move on with the news, below you can find a story that received its own individual coverage.
Without further ado, I leave you with the news.
Southwest Georgia Regional Airport Released for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and MSFS 2020
danielsjam released a free rendition of Southwest Georgia Regional Airport (KABY) serving Albany, in the United States.
It’s available on Flightsim.to for the rather affordable price of zero dollars, and you can see what it looks like above. It works for both MSFS 2024 and MSFS 2020.
BeyondATC Gets CPDLC and ACARS
The ATC and AI traffic suite BeyondATC received a significant update, adding CDPLC and ACARS support, which will work with selected aircraft.
Below you can find the update notes directly from the application’s Discord server.
CPDLC / ACARS
- Now available to all our users, please see the announcement for full details of what is available and how to use!
Traffic
- Player airports now use a much wider traffic time slice, giving much more complete traffic at airports including cargo aircraft not leaving for a long time. In addition fix bugs that reduced the amount of traffic in 1.7.0 – in general traffic volumes will be better than ever before now, while being more accurate.
- Fixed traffic turnarounds not working
- Read airline parking codes from scenery (Asobo added an API for this) when they exist and combine them with our data for increase in parking accuracy. These are often incomplete – even in payware, so they are supplementary not the source of all truth!
- Fix overlapping traffic on top of player if the player starts a flight at their destination airport
- Fixed gate allocation timing for traffic which was causing runway turn off directions to often be wrong since 1.7.0
- Update AIG registration to livery mapping file from @MarceloNahas – reminder this only applies if AIG is top priority in your traffic list
- Taxi pathing adjustments to better keep arriving and departing aircraft on separated paths and general pathing improvements
- Improve traffic crossing runways more readily by separating timing rules of crossings vs takeoffs.
- Improve stuck traffic due head to head taxi routes or deadlocked taxi paths, this is still work in progress.
- Stop aircraft holding for ever to takeoff because of another aircraft is waiting to cross runway
- Fix low traffic volumes after you press Esc to load a new flight
- Improve deceleration calculation for landing traffic to reduce turn offs that are too early and over safe speed
- Guard to prevent duplicate aircraft with the same tail number being injected.
- Traffic sequencing distances are now dynamic based on the wake turbulence combination of the leading and following aircraft
Improvements
- Better altitude handling in STARs that do not end in an altitude constraint, which could often lead to arrivals being too high [26978337 + others]
- Improve handling of WinWing SimAppPro ghost events in binding and input control, should now be 100% reliable and no longer requires the 2 second button press process during binding.
- Frequencies: Changed callsign of center frequency 131.100 from Brindisi Radar to Rome Radar
- AIRAC 2512 pronunciation data
- Latest airline updates from pilot portal
Bug Fixes
- Fix very old METARs potentially being loaded when using MSFS2024 24 hour historic weather.
- Fix GSX arrival integration not working after the recent 3.7.2 GSX patch, that changed various menu names and flows
Airport Ops Updates
- NZNP, KMCO, LEBL, VAPO, UUDD, VLVT, RPVP, YBAS, SBBE, CYYC, KDEN. KBDL
CPDLCY/ACARS
- Receive PDC and CPDLC-DCL over text instead of having to call up the controller, especially useful at busy airports
- Logon to center controllers using their unique logon code (viewable under the frequencies menu in BATC), allowing you to receive applicable instructions over text instead of voice
- Request altitude changes and directs via text
- Receive D-ATIS and METAR over ACARS*
- Important!! D-ATIS and METAR lookups are a very new feature and developers will need time to add support for it, feel free to ask them but be mindful we have reached out to our developer contacts with the information and they are most likely working on it already.
A few notes:
- The BeyondATC integration for CPDLC and ACARS requires third party developers to add support for it within their products, this is not a plug and play system, the aircraft developers that already support our integrations are below, if you do not see your favourite aircraft on the list they may either already be working on integration, or they may need instructions on how to integrate – we’ve tried to keep it as painless as possible and any developer looking to add support for our CPDLC and ACARS system should reach out to support@beyondatc.net.
- Not all aircraft will support CPDLC, in such case you shouldn’t expect to be able to use the system – please refer to the aircraft developers for such information.
- While plane specific support should be directed to the relevant developers support channels we have information on CPDLC and how to use it on our Wiki here: (please note, this is in the process of being updated)
- You are always required to be tuned in and to vocally contact controllers on first contact for CPDLC to work – we do not support MONITOR messages and sending CPDLC requests to a controller you are not tuned into will not be processed until you are tuned into that station.
Supported Aircraft The below aircraft already support CPDLC and ACARS integration with BeyondATC ⦁ Fenix Simulations A319 / A320 / A321 ⦁ iniBuilds A340/A350 ⦁ Fly the Maddog X MD–82 / MD–83 / MD–88
If you’d like to read more flight simulation news, you can find plenty in our previous roundup article from yesterday.
If you want to go further back, we have a handy overview video of the major flight simulation news in the past week. You can watch it below. As usual, leaving a like and a comment and subscribing to our growing YouTube channel is extremely helpful.
