FlyJSim announced on their official website, that they will bring multi-crew pilot operations to X-Plane. That basically means that they are working on something like SmartCopilot, but better!

Hosted servers

FlyJSim promises hosted servers for Shared Flight which would mean, that you could fly with your friend even on slower internet connections and without huge synchronization and connection problems and such things, which SmartCopilot has huge problems.

Conclusion?

In my opinion, if this would work as well as FlyJSim is describing, it would totally wreck Sky4Crew with SmartCopilot. I wish the best luck to FlyJSim with their new addon and I’m looking forward to reviewing it when it’s published.

Q&A

source: FLYJSIM

Q. How difficult is it to use?

A. 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.

Q. How good is the connection?

A. 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.​

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

A. 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.

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

A. 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.

Q. What FlyJSim products will this be compatible with?

A. 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.

Q. When will it be ready?

A. 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.)

Q. How much will it cost?

A. Shared Flight will have a tiered subscription-based model (final pricing TBD).  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.