> Is it a priority to have a voice comm at the moment? A voice comm would serve > no purpose if there is no one being the ATC.
The primary purpose of ATC is *separation* of planes. Not navigation assistance, not terrain avoidance, not weather advisories. These are secondary functions. Until we have collision detection between planes, the *need* for ATC is nil --- the planes fly through each other w/o creating a collision hazard :-) With the current pigeon's map in place, even I could play tower and approach occasionally and juggle up to 4 *VFR* planes :-) separation-wise. Incorporating SID/STAR/IAP knowledge would be much more difficult task, but VATSIM et al show that once the framework is in place, a lot of people step forward to help, and there are ways to peer- certify people capable of doing it, as well as tutoring newcomers. There is one caveat: the VATSIM services are not completely free in the FSF sense --- one has to accept some license that allows them to terminate services and has them get one's agreement not to abuse. I wouldn't mind accepting such, but I don;t know if it's OK with the GNU spirit of the Flightgear project. IMO, as long as the software is free, it's fine, but actually logging on to some such network that the FG project endorses could be guarded by smth like the VATSIM approach. > I think we should focus on text-based ATC first. With text, it would be much > more easier to create an automatic ATC. We can always expand it to include > some sort of speech-to-text engine later on. You meant text-to-speech, didn't you? If you are talking about automatic tower/plane comms, then fine. Otherwise, it's pretty useless during actual flying low and slow (i.e. around the airport) since it would require alternating typing with flying. Unless we can include some sort of speech-to-text capabilities :-) V. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
