Instruments
The HUD
The HUD in the top left corner reads:
| Readout | Shows |
|---|---|
AIRSPEED | Current speed, in knots or mph |
ALTITUDE | Height above sea level, in feet or metres |
V/S | Climb or descent rate per minute on the same scale as the altimeter, signed, rounded to the nearest 10 |
HEADING | Compass bearing in degrees with the nearest of the eight compass points, counting clockwise from north |
THROTTLE | The lever setting as a percentage, not the speed it has reached |
CAMERA | The active camera mode |
The scales the first three are read on are set from the settings panel. They are conversions of the same reading rather than a second set of tuning numbers, so the flight model never learns which scale is on the dial and the two can never drift apart.
The minimap
The minimap in the top right corner is a north-up chart: north runs up the face, east runs across it, and the marker turns under a fixed card rather than the card turning under the marker. North is the world's +Z and east is its -X, which is the frame the aircraft flies in, so the face runs the world's x axis right to left - a marker turned by the compass heading has to point along the track it is leaving, and it only does that if east is the side of the face the aircraft moves toward on 090. The world itself has no bounds to draw, so what the chart is fitted to is the tile being flown over: crossing into the next one moves the marker to the edge it came in over and the chart on to the new square, which is a chart that says where in the country the aircraft is rather than one pinned to a world that does not end. The red off-map reading it still carries is for a host flying the Pilot API over a world of its own with bounds the aircraft has left.
A course of loops is drawn on the chart the moment its stage is laid out, in the same three colours the hoops themselves are drawn in: dim green for the gates already behind you, green for the one the course is waiting on, and amber for the ones still to come. It is laid before the flight starts rather than as it is flown, so the first gate is not the only one you have ever seen. A gate past the edge of the square the chart covers is held hollow at that edge, the way the aircraft marker is held at the edge it left through.
The attitude indicator
The attitude indicator in the bottom right corner is the artificial horizon. The ball rolls against the bank so its horizon stays where the real one is, and the ladder slides against the pitch, carrying a labelled rung every 10 degrees with a tick between them, out to 60 degrees either side. The marks around the rim read the bank angle at the index on top of the face, at 10, 20, 30, 45, and 60 degrees either side of level, and the amber wings across the middle are the aircraft itself.
It reads the direction the nose and the wings are actually pointing rather than the pitch and roll angles behind them, so the ladder shows what the aircraft is doing rather than what it was asked to do.
On a machine flown from the glass the corner it sits in is under a thumb, so it moves to the top left one for as long as the pads are out - and the readouts move down the page to below it and the chart, rather than being drawn over by an instrument that arrived in their corner.
Tab clears the instruments, the minimap and the artificial horizon with them, because they are one set of instruments rather than three overlays that happen to share a screen.
The banners
Three banners share the middle of the screen, and only one of them can be true at a time. LOW ALTITUDE blinks whenever the aircraft is in the air and within 200 ft of the terrain directly below it, which is measured against the ground rather than sea level, so a run up a valley warns while the same altitude out over water does not. It says nothing about an altitude the aircraft has not flown to: a flight held on the strip is as low as the warning ever gets, and taking off is the condition rather than a timer, so a flight that never leaves the runway never raises it however long it sits there. CRASHED appears when the ground has been hit hard enough to wreck the aircraft, and stays up until the flight resets itself. LANDED appears when the aircraft is down on a strip after an arrival that was a landing, and stays up until it leaves the ground again or until the breakdown of that landing goes up on the objective card - the card names the landing and reads the score off it, which is everything the banner said and four lines more, so the banner steps aside rather than being drawn over the top of it. Both of them replace the low altitude warning, because once the ground has been arrived on there is nothing left to warn about. All three stay quiet while the simulation is frozen, whether by the pause menu or by a start screen whose menu has not been answered yet: there is nothing to be done about any of them while the world is holding still.
The objective card
The objective card along the bottom of the screen belongs to a flight being played rather than one being flown, so a free flight never carries it. It names the mode, what the mode wants, and the stage and the gate the run is up to. On a machine flown from the glass it moves the way the instruments do: lifted clear of the pads on a narrow screen, and hung from the top of the middle band on a short wide one, which is the screen where the readouts are in that band themselves.