Many thanks to our friends at PC Pilots Ireland for the kind review published in the pages of their PC Flight magazine. 
To find out more - visit: PC Pilots Ireland www.pcpilotsireland.com
FS Flying School
By Peter Keenan
PC Flight Magazine
To date we have had a broad spectrum of add-ons for the various incarnations of Flight Simulator. There have been numerous additional aircraft and sceneries, new textures for air, sea and land, more realistic AI aircraft and even an add-on to enhance ATC; but I have never seen an add-on, up until now, which addressed my own personal interest in Flight Sim; Training.
I use flight simulator as a training aid and I hope to go over to the United States this year and complete a PPL course. I therefore use Flight Simulator to give me an overview of the theory of flight. I have used the default flying lessons and read the associated ground school material too. I think Rod Machado has done a wonderful job of creating some interesting lessons and he explains well the concepts and how the procedures are accomplished, all within the limitations of FS2004. However, like most of FS default stuff, there is room for improvement. How about bashing circuits at your favourite airport or carrying out your favourite flight with a virtual instructor beside you offering guidance? This is what FS Flying School offers.
I initially encountered an advertisement for FSFlyingSchool on AVSIM and thought that it looked interesting, so I paid their website a visit. I was very impressed by the website, it clearly explains what the product does and has promotional videos, an excellent FAQ section and very active forums. I was pleased to see that every customer query that was on the forums, was answered within one or two days. I also noted that a free demo version of the software is available, which allows you to see if this software is for you, or, as was my interest, would it run on my PC? It should, at this stage, be noted that because FSFlyingSchool offer a “try-before-you-buy”, they have a no refunds policy. I have a very meagre PC, with an Athlon 1800+XP Processor, 512MB RAM, and a 64MB ATI Radeon Graphics Card (I think a trip to Alpine Systems is on the cards when the SSIA comes through J). This is just at the minimum range of what will run FSFlyingSchool. I promptly downloaded the free demo (14.6MB) and installed it, which was painless and simply a matter of clicking “next” a few times.
FSFlyingSchool will work with Flight Simulators 2002, 2004 and FSX. However, if you are thinking of investing in new hardware with Windows Vista for running Flight Simulator X with FSFlyingSchool, you will need a pretty respectable PC; FSFlyingSchool themselves recommend no less than a 3.0Ghz processor, 2GB RAM and a 256MB Graphics Card. I found that on my PC, the performance of FSFlyingSchool (not that of FS itself) could have been better. For example, it would take a while to “catch up” with me and offer guidance i.e. a manoeuvre would be completed and about twenty seconds later the .wav sound file of the instructors voice would play giving me corrective action to be taken at the beginning of the manoeuvre. My own way to deal with this was to go to the Task Manager, right-click the program icon in Applications, select “go to process”, then right-click the process and go to “set priority” which I make high. I ignored the warning about system instability, as it has never affected me. I always do this trick with flight sim, and find it runs much, much smoother. Maybe the experts could comment on this technique? In summary, you will need a good system to run this software.
Back to the demo version, which has the exact same functionality as the full version, the only difference being you can only use it within a certain area, stretching from Chicago to Green Bay. In addition, you cannot upload the high “scores” your virtual instructor gives you at the end of your flights, onto the FSFlyingSchool website wall of fame.
Once the installation has finished, a thirty-four-page Adobe Reader document popped up with elaborate instructions on everything about FSFlyingSchool and how to use it correctly. I, being impatient and anxious to try the programme, only glanced at the documentation and immediately launched to FSFlyingSchool .EXE file and found a very friendly GUI, which works like this: while Flight Simulator is running, set yourself up in a flight of your choice (providing it’s in the demo area), you load FSFlyingSchool and click “Connect”. You will then go back to your flight to discover a virtual instructor is now sitting beside you. You can chose between an American chap, an American lady or two English chaps (whom I chose). Some say more than others and others sound angrier at times (notably the American girl). The program is compatible with all default aircraft, even the Wright Flyer (!?), and you can download from a huge list of profiles for popular third party aircraft, such as the PMDG 737-900 from the website.
I went for a spin around Chicago O’Hare and did some circuits. The instructor gave me bits of advice all along the way, such as ”you’re taxiing too fast”, “extend flaps if you intend to land” and calling out the various heights; “five hundred” “two hundred” etc. Each instructor has over three hundred individual phrases associated with him or her, including some funny phrases, such as; “Chicago is my kind of town!” Sometimes the instructor will say, “what’s that smell?”, which I think is ambiguous because he/she could smell smoke. A good sound card is necessary for this software because basically it’s a load of new sound files played at appropriate times.
Being satisfied that my computer would handle it (just about), I went and bought a registration key for the full version, which cost $44.95 and covers all 1.x versions. In a nutshell, because I downloaded the 1.5 Demo, when 1.6 comes out, with whatever improvements, I will download that demo and my registration key will work on it. This strikes me as being good value for money. It also shows that the developers are committed to improvement. Buying a registered key is easy, however, if you have a paypal account, you will be obliged to use it for the purchase. They say the key will arrive by email in twenty-four hours, but mine took roughly eight hours. Once you have the key, you simply enter it, along with your name and address in the appropriate fields in FSFlyingSchool itself then you can explore the world with your instructor. A word of warning though, you will need at least an intermediate knowledge of flying and how to use Flight Simulator in order to really get the most from FSFlyingSchool; i.e. you will need to know how to tune the various radio aids (OBS, VOR, ILS etc.) so FSFlyingSchool will know what you are attempting. Your flying instructor will do many things, including watching out for and offering advice on how to correct such things as, for example, during landing, landing too hard, landing too fast, wings not level, not landing on the centre line, throttle not being on idle etc. The instructor will warn you of the error of your ways and tell you how to correct them. The same guidance is on offer for taking off, taxiing, cruising, ILS and visual approaches.
In conclusion, this is an immense piece of software, which can be complicated but has great potential and is very enjoyable to use. It is also hard to do it justice in a review. If you have an interest in learning how to fly virtual aircraft, I would definitely recommend at least visiting the FSFlyingSchool website and seeing what they have to offer. If you are interested in improving your piloting skills, then download the demo and see what you think. I imagine you will be impressed, I was!
- Peter Keenan
PC Flight Magazine
Note from the Editor (Squadron Leader)
As Peter mentioned, there can be a delay in FSFlyingSchool's response to the actions of the pilot but only when the PC involved is struggling anyway with FS2004 or FSX, due to a low specification. As the pages of this forum show, this is not a general problem with FSFlyingSchool. If the PC is fairly current in its specification and can run FS2004 or FSX fine then it will have no problem running FSFlyingSchool smoothly. 