Thank you and keep it up!

[Avwriter 0]

Greetings! I recently purchased GATC and just wanted to let you know what a pleasure it has been for me. I have enjoyed a number of ATC sims over the years, but never found one that really worked well for me. All of the serious ones that I came across heavily relied on the Microsoft Speech engine, even if the user had no interest in using voice commands. I never found this to be satisfactory, because while it worked most of the time, it never worked all of the time, even after training it. Secondly, there are times when I just want to play quietly, especially if there are others in the home, and typing all those text commands really slowed me down. Worse still, a year or so ago, something went wrong with my WIndows 7 installation that caused the speech engine to stop working. Consequently, the ATC simulator would not work at all. The only suggestion that was given to me by the developer was to reinstall Windows, which I did not want to do, since everything else worked fine and I just did not have the time to fool with sorting all this out.

GATC resolved all of these issues for me. Thank you! I love the point and click method of interacting with aircraft, and also appreciate the straightforward way that procedures are displayed. Here are my suggestions so far for improving the product further:

1. It would be nice if each departing aircraft had a planned altitude shown on the flight strip that it needs to be cleared to prior to leaving the airspace.

2. Occasionally, departing aircraft need to be vectored to a final fix that is extremely close to the airport, too close to be clear to a much higher altitude. This seems odd, though perhaps I am missing something.

3. It would be nice if there were a button on the screen to silence the "Caution" alarm, but still leaving the aircraft in question in red. This is especially distracting when I have cleared a pair of aircraft for parallel approaches such as KATL or KSFO, and I can already see the aircraft are stabilized on approach and not in danger of colliding. The "Caution" message is repeated for a full minute or longer, and is distracting when I am trying to handle other aircraft in the area. What I am suggesting would be along the same lines of the button that pilots can press on the annunciator panel to silence alarms in most modern airliners.

4. Have you considered developing a separate ground control simulator, perhaps just using the radar image instead of trying to create a 3D view? If it used the same interface that you have here, I think it could be a neat way to continue what you have started, and I am sure it would appeal to many of your customers.

Thanks again for what you have accomplished!

Andrew