FlyJSim Announces Shared Flight

May 15, 2019

Alex John

X-Plane

OTHER

MSFS

DCS

FlyJSim pride themselves with the aircraft they have developed for X-Plane: their 732 TwinJet Pro, 727 Series Professional, and Q400 (re-branded Q4XP in a current major redesign) have set very high standards in the X-Plane market over the last eight years.

Today, after years in development, the developer has announced their newest product: Shared Flight. The plugin enables individuals to connect with others around the world and fly together in "popular and quality aircraft." Billed as the ultimate shared cockpit tool, it sports a modern interface, support for passengers, seamless motion, ground clamping, and much more. It is even possible to fill an entire airliner with passengers and a full crew.

The official announcement can be viewed below (source):

"Flight simulation has seen amazing improvements in the past 25+ years with improved scenery, flight dynamics, and aircraft complexity and simulation depth. But even as the aircraft have gotten more complex and more accurate, flying them has been largely an isolated experience. Not only is it unrealistic to fly a complex aircraft by yourself, it is far more fun to share in the experience. A crew can take on greater challenges, have better results, and far more fun while doing it! Sitting in the cockpit of the FlyJSim 727 Series Professional V3 and looking around, its daunting to handle piloting, navigation, communication, and monitor engineering station systems. Especially while flying complex procedures or handling irregular operations! We feel this is not a realistic experience, and worse, it is just way less fun than flying the plane with your buddies. Real world pilots spend a long time getting to know their planes, but one of the joys of flight simulation is learning new aircraft. Flying a new aircraft with a friend, or learning from someone with a few logged hours in the plane, is a really great way to learn and experience new planes."

‍‍"FlyJSim’s Shared Flight aims to enable multi-person crews and flights in a seamless shared cockpit experience. It seeks to eliminate massive pain points with existing solutions that have so far discouraged people from enjoying a shared cockpit experience. A client-server model eliminates firewall and P2P networking issues. Terrain mesh and scenery differences are smoothly accomodated. And aircraft will be actively supported by the Shared Flight team so that users will never have to manage, make, or distribute their own “config” files, nor wonder why things just don’t work. Throttle and controls can be handed off between pilots effortlessly, so that one person can fly the departure and another the arrival, or different legs of a long haul."

Some examples of how the plugin could be used includes:

Be a CFI to your friends
Explore CRM procedures and realistic airliner operation, including with your real world pilot buddies.
Tackle complex approaches together with your friends
Do long haul operations with realistic crew shifts

The developer also included a Q&A to address several questions:

How difficult is it to use?

Shared Flight is incredibly easy to use, and we take care to automate as many functions for you in the background as possible. We’ve designed the application to allow you to connect/host a flight in the shortest amount of clicks as possible.

How good is the connection?

Unlike other products, we employ dedicated custom servers for you to host flights on. This empowers us to do several functions including automated syncing, large-scale connections, and eliminate all the painful network hassles and port forwarding of P2P implementations.

When you mention “large-scale” connections, how many people can connect?

When you create the flight you can set the maximum number of crew and maximum number of passengers. Depending on the aircraft, you could have a standard 2-pilot cockpit, or perhaps add an additional Flight Engineer. You can even have people ride jump-seat. Or a large crew for a long haul.

Will it be also be compatible with <<insert aircraft>>?

Our goals are YES! We plan to work to support all popular and quality aircraft. This depends a bit on the developer. FlyJSim is eager to work with any aircraft developer to ensure compatibility with their aircraft, and to provide a dev kit with an API for complex systems to be fully integrated. We encourage any developer who might be interested to please contact us. It is absolutely our goal to make the Shared Flight experience as open and inclusive as possible.

What FlyJSim products will this be compatible with?

Both the FlyJSim 732 Twinjet Professional V3 and the FlyJSim 727 Series Professional V3 will be included in the list of launch compatible aircraft, with the Q4XP to follow when it is released.

When will it be ready?

There is no set release date but we are announcing the product now so we can move towards beta testing and make our remaining development work and beta testing as open and public as you have come to expect from FlyJSim. Including our streamed dev work on Twitch. (If you aren’t already, be sure to follow jsnapp1982, FlyingJackal, Delta_Who, and Valdudes on Twitch.)

How much will it cost?

We don’t have final pricing to hand at present but are certain that Shared Flight will be a tiered subscription based model. We believe a subscription model will best support an actively maintained network, and constantly expanding and improving service. The goal of tiered pricing is to meet the needs of users, and to minimize arm twisting between friends that want to go flying together.

I have an idea that might benefit from/with Shared Flight and would like to develop for it.

Please contact us at : justin@flyjsim.com This product has been in development for many years, and will hopefully become a common way to enjoy flight simulation, and we would love for your ideas and help to make the experience even more fun and the simulation even more immersive.