When I first thought to a software similar to the Reality Expansion Pack, I wanted a tool that would be useful for my personal training. As a real life pilot, sometimes I cannot fly for a long period of time because of personal commitments or the bad weather (especially during the winter).
In those ground periods I need some realistic simulator to keep me in touch with the real life procedures, in order to not loose the good habits I developed in my years of fliyng.
I started to think how such a software would have been developed and then, step by step, I decided to build something that would have been useful for others too, as a learning tool for instance.

The Reality Expansion Pack can teach you what to do (and how to do it) when you fly an airplane in X-Plane. This because:

  • It provides high fidelity flight dynamics (correct engine power output, correct speeds and fuel burn)
  • It simulates a large variety of advanced systems onboard the aircraft
  • It has a “hangar” view that reports the status of your aircraft
  • If something went wrong, it warns you and tells you how to avoid the problem in the future.

The last point is the one on which I want to focus now.
If you do not manage your aircraft correctly, you may incurr in a sytem failure. If you are an expert pilot you may understand what happened and how to recover but if you’re still learning you may want something like the following screenshot.

REP Failure Message: a useful learning tool

That’s right. REP tells you what happened and how to avoid the same problem to re-occur in the future.
So, together with the software manual, you will also get a kind of a “personal” instructor that tells you what you did wrong: the learning tool I was thinking about.

PS: The hardcore simmers will be able to disable this feature in the settings menu of REP. 😉

REP as a learning tool for sim pilots
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