Talking Flight Monitor 9.0.0

Baseline: 8.1.0. This file covers only what changed since then. For the previous release, see release-notes-8.1.0.md.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 works properly again

If you fly MSFS 2020 with the PMDG 777 and do not run FSUIPC, TFM could not tell which simulator it was connected to. After a 30-second pause it gave up and loaded no airport data at all. Everything built on that data went quiet, and nothing said why.

This affected 8.0.0 and 8.1.0. The workaround was to run FSUIPC; you no longer need to.

MSFS 2020 with the 777 and no FSUIPC no longer loses every airport-data feature.
The gates and runways lists no longer say “Airport not found” for airports that exist.
TFM identifies the simulator immediately instead of pausing 30 seconds first.
If TFM still cannot identify your simulator, the log now records what it was told.

Using the right simulator’s airport data

If you have both simulators installed, TFM keeps two sets of airport data. It used to answer from whichever set had been loaded most recently rather than from the simulator you were flying.

Your location, ILS callouts and destination now come from the simulator you are flying.
Browsing the other simulator’s gates no longer changes the answers for your current flight.
TFM now names the simulator when it could matter, and refuses to move your aircraft using the wrong simulator’s coordinates.
The airport box and the list now say which simulator’s data you are reading.
A destination you saved is now restored on Flight Simulator 2024 as well, not just 2020.

Jumping to a gate or runway

Jump to a gate or runway now works on MSFS 2020 without FSUIPC running.
It no longer answers “Not connected” while TFM is perfectly well connected.
A successful jump now says where you were moved to, instead of moving you in silence.
If the move fails, TFM says so rather than leaving you wondering.

Knowing where you are

The current location key works on MSFS 2020 again, instead of “No location data available”.
ILS position announcements and the First Officer’s runway checks read that same position, so they have what they need on MSFS 2020 again.
Your location is reported from the airport database you already built. Nothing new to install.
On MSFS 2020 TFM names the airport, runway and stand, but not the taxiway you are on.
On the PMDG 737, your position no longer depends on the MSFS 2020 airport database being loaded. It previously came from that database whichever simulator you were flying.
So on MSFS 2024 the 737 reports its position reliably, rather than only after you happened to open one of the MSFS 2020 airport windows.
The PMDG 737’s ILS distance was measured from the wrong place entirely. Now it reads your aircraft.
The repeating approach callouts need “Read ILS” switched on.
TFM says “distance unavailable” instead of announcing a distance it cannot measure.
The Local time key speaks again on aircraft that run without FSUIPC. It had been silent, clock included.
Teleporting to a gate or runway from the MSFS 2024 lists now refuses while you are airborne on the PMDG 737, as it already did on the MSFS 2020 lists.

Picking a runway in Mission Setup

The departure and destination runway lists read MSFS 2024’s scenery and nothing else, so on MSFS 2020 both were empty — and neither list lets you type a name, so there was no way to set either one. They now read whichever simulator you are running.

⚠ The lists come from the airports database, so it has to be built first. Tools, Airports database. If a list is empty the log now says why instead of just showing nothing.

Setting a destination runway

Ctrl+D on the runways list now actually stores your destination on MSFS 2020.
It no longer confirms a destination it did not save, and no longer reads back the previous flight’s runway as though you had just chosen it.
If it cannot set the destination, it tells you, and says the airport database may not be loaded.
The destination box no longer shows “Not set” for the rest of the session after a successful set.

ILS glide slope

The ILS glide slope now reports the real angle instead of always saying 3 degrees.
Steep approaches read correctly — London City is 5.5 degrees, Lugano 6.65.
Where no glide slope is published, TFM still says 3 degrees, which remains the standard.

Distance and bearing to a gate

Gate distance and bearing now read real figures instead of 0.00 and zero.
This works without FSUIPC, so the 777 has it back — it had been reading 0.00 miles and bearing zero since 8.0.0, when that aircraft stopped needing FSUIPC.
If TFM has no aircraft position, it now says so when the gates load.

When the airport database is not built

An unbuilt airport database now says so, instead of “Airport not found” for every airport.
The message names where to build it: Tools, Airports database, Build database.
The gates and runways lists say it when you open them, not only when a search fails.
A database left incomplete by a cancelled rebuild is now named as incomplete, not missing.
Both lists load the database on demand, so you can browse airports with no simulator running.

Help and polish

Press F1 in the gates, runways or airport database windows for help on the focused control.
The help browser has a new “Airport data” section covering all three.
TFM no longer repeats “No running flight simulator detected” throughout the log.
When FSUIPC is running, TFM no longer takes its word alone for which simulator you are on. It now also asks the simulator itself, which matters if your FSUIPC predates MSFS 2024.

Rebuilding the airport database

Abandoning a running rebuild no longer leaves you with no airport data at all.
Your existing data is set aside first and put back if the rebuild does not finish.
Your existing database is protected too, not just the scenery scan it is built from.
Closing TFM mid-build now really does just mean starting the build again later.
A rebuild stopped by a crash or a power cut is repaired the next time TFM starts.
Starting your simulator while a rebuild is running no longer disturbs the build.
The log now records how many airports a rebuild found, for when you report a problem.
The Airports database view now reports your real airport and runway counts with no simulator running, instead of always saying the database is not loaded.
It also tells you whether the database is missing, incomplete, or simply not loaded yet.
Arrowing through the gates or runways list after editing the airport box no longer crashes TFM.

The takeoff briefing gives you a departure runway heading on 2020

The First Officer’s Before Start briefing reads back your departure runway heading. On MSFS 2020 it could only say the heading was unknown, because it looked in MSFS 2024’s scenery and nowhere else — so the one number that tells you which way you are about to point was missing on exactly the simulator this release is about.

It now reads whichever airport database belongs to the simulator you are running.
With no simulator running it uses whichever database is loaded, so you can still plan on the ground.
The log names which database answered, if you ever need to check it.

The SimBrief uplink says when it cannot tell which 777 you are in

If TFM cannot identify the 777 variant, it puts the flight plan in the 777-300ER’s folder — and if that is not your aircraft, the uplink then reports a missing flight plan file with nothing to say why. It now tells you out loud that it guessed, so you can fix the cause instead of hunting the symptom.

The usual cause is that aircraft’s own options file missing its SDK section. TFM offers to switch that on when it starts, and asks only once.

First Officer

The First Officer no longer talks about the wrong item

On a page where items check themselves off quickly, the voice fell further and further behind — by the time you heard “battery, checked” the flow had moved on several items, and nothing told you which one it was really on. It now waits for each callout to finish before moving to the next item.

Pages where a lot of switches are already correct now take as long as they take to say, rather than racing ahead of the voice.
Safety callouts — V1, rotate, minimums, go-around — are not paced, so they are never held back waiting for the voice to settle. They still take their turn in the queue like everything else.

The empty tab is gone

The First Officer window had a ninth tab containing nothing but the words “session preferences”, left over from an edit. It has been removed; the window is back to its eight real tabs.

Clearing the speech queue

Press the First Officer key then space to drop everything waiting to be spoken. It is the same gesture as your screen reader’s control key: not a mute and not a pause, just a clean sweep of whatever is queued at that instant. The First Officer keeps working, nothing is skipped, and the next thing it says comes through normally.

It answers with silence. A confirmation would be the one sound that survived the request for quiet.
⚠ You only need this if you use the SAPI or Azure voices. On the screen-reader setting — which is what TFM ships with — your own control key already does it.
⚠ Not on the 737 yet; it arrives with that aircraft’s First Officer keys.

Master warnings are no longer muted during First Officer flows

If you have “mute other TFM output” on, TFM used to silence everything while a flow ran — including master warnings and fire warnings. Those now come through.

Fire, overheat, APU, electrical, fuel, hydraulics, engines and the rest — sixteen warnings on the two aircraft.
Everything else still respects your mute. Only master warnings are exempt.
⚠ GPWS, traffic and runway callouts are not exempt yet.

The log records why the 737’s APU faulted

When the 737’s APU faults, the log now records its temperature and switch positions at that moment, which is the only evidence the aircraft offers about the cause.

⚠ The spoken half — the First Officer saying “it is faulted” rather than “it is starting” — arrives with the 737 First Officer in the next version. It reaches you through the checklist engine, which does not run on that aircraft here.

Checklists

The First Officer now opens the First Officer checklist

If you had not opened the Electronic Clipboard, the First Officer used to fall back to the clipboard checklist — which is mostly items for you to read and confirm, not items it can fly. It now opens the First Officer checklist instead.

Those two checklists are different in kind. The 777’s First Officer one is 68% things it does for you; the clipboard is about half.
The clipboard checklists are now called “PMDG 737 Clipboard” and “PMDG 777 Clipboard” in the pickers, instead of “Default” — they were never the general-purpose one.
⚠ This is a 777 change. The First Officer is switched off on the 737 in this version, so it opens nothing there — use the Electronic Clipboard.

Reading a display with Claude works again

If you had picked Claude as your display-reading service, every request failed — TFM was asking for a model that was retired in June. It now uses a current one.

⚠ This does not fix “it doesn’t read my display properly.” That is a separate problem with how the screen is captured, and it is not fixed in this version. This only fixes requests failing outright.
There is now a “Test display reading” button in Settings, Vision API. It sends one small picture and tells you what came back, so you can check the service works without loading a simulator. It uses your API key, so it costs a fraction of a cent, and it only runs when you press it.
Failures now say what is actually wrong. A retired model, a rejected key and a busy server used to all read as “API error” and a number, which sounds temporary. TFM now tells you whether to try again or report it.
Retries after a busy or failing service now actually retry. They could not before — this affected all three services, not just Claude.

Your checklist ticks now save reliably

Ticks sometimes stopped persisting between sessions, with nothing said about it. TFM was writing the same file from several places at once and colliding with itself; whichever writes lost were logged and forgotten. On a preflight checklist you are using to keep your place, that is the worst possible thing to be silent about.

Saves are now queued and written one at a time, so they cannot collide.
Your ticks are written out when you close TFM. Nothing did that before.
Ticking an item no longer writes the file twice.
If a save genuinely fails, TFM now tells you once, instead of only writing it to the log.
If your saved ticks are ever unreadable, TFM says so and keeps the old file rather than quietly starting you from blank.

“Restore default checklist” now actually restores it

The button replaced the file on disk, said “restored successfully” out loud, and then kept flying the old copy. It has never worked, on either aircraft, since it was added. The only way to get the restored checklist was to restart TFM — and nothing told you that.

It now reloads the checklist you are actually using.
The checklist dropdown no longer goes blank afterwards. Same for Ctrl+F5 (refresh) and, on the 777, changing the aircraft filter — all three had the same fault.
If the First Officer window is open, its phase and page lists now follow the change too. Before, the window kept running pages from the checklist you had just replaced.

Your 737 and 777 checklists can receive updates again

TFM only refreshes a bundled checklist when it can prove you have not edited it, by matching your copy against a list of every version ever shipped. Both 777 checklists — including the First Officer one — had fallen off that list, so recent installs were treated as edited and would never have received another checklist update. All four bundled checklists are listed again.

The 737’s APU start switch works properly

Starting the 737’s APU needs the switch moved twice — to ON, then to START. TFM only ever made the first movement, so the APU did not start. It now makes both.

This reaches you through the overhead panel’s APU button in this version.
⚠ The checklist item that used to do it belongs to the First Officer, which is switched off on the 737 here, so no checklist starts the APU for you until the next version.

PMDG 777

TFM can switch PMDG’s data broadcasting on for you

Without it, a PMDG aircraft is completely silent in TFM — no switches, no readouts, no callouts — and nothing said so. There are two separate switches inside it: one for the aircraft’s panels and one for the FMC screens. Turning on only the first gives you a working aircraft with a dead FMC, which is easy to mistake for a broken FMC. TFM now checks every PMDG airframe on both simulators at startup, names any that have it switched off, and offers to turn it on. It always asks first, backs up each file before changing it, and changes nothing else in them. The setting is per aircraft and per simulator, so a working 777-300ER tells you nothing about the 777-200LR beside it.

⚠ If TFM set this up for you before 25 August it switched on the panels but not the FMC screens. It will offer to finish the job next time it starts.

TFM now tells you when the 777’s data feed is missing

If PMDG is not broadcasting its SDK data, every panel readout on the aircraft is inert — and TFM used to say nothing at all, so the airplane simply appeared dead. It now says so fifteen seconds after connecting. Usually the airplane simply is not loaded yet; if it is, the log names what to check. That setting is separate for each 777 variant and each simulator, so a working 777-300ER tells you nothing about your 777-200LR.

The First Officer no longer confirms flaps it never moved

Three ways the flap items could report success without the lever moving, all of them silent — you would hear the item confirmed and find the flaps where you left them.

If the flap lever cannot be read — no data from PMDG at all — it used to report up rather than unknown, so the First Officer skipped the flap items as already done. It now says it cannot read the lever and leaves it to you.
If your flight plan has no takeoff flap setting, the First Officer now tells you to set the lever yourself instead of confirming the item and moving on.
If the plan asks for a flap setting the 777 does not have, it now names the setting it refused rather than passing over it in silence.

The First Officer raises the flaps for you on the ground

Three checklist items waited for you to raise the flap lever instead of doing it: cockpit preflight, de-ice setup and the shutdown checklist. They now raise it, the same way the after landing flow already did, and say so.

If the flaps do not move — a hardware flaps axis holding them, for instance — the First Officer says so instead of waiting in silence.
⚠ The after takeoff and go around checklists still wait, on purpose. Flaps come up on a speed schedule in the climb, and those items are there to check that it happened, not to do it.

Five more items that used to wait now act as well: the alternate pitch trim levers, the parking brake, both air conditioning packs and the emergency lights.

PMDG 737

The First Officer is switched off on the 737 in this version

The 737 First Officer is being built the way the 777’s was — the whole flight, gate to shutdown, as one piece. Only the first two ground pages exist so far, and shipping that much on its own would give you something too incomplete to judge. It arrives properly in the next version.

So on the 737, this version behaves the way it did before this work started:

Use a third-party First Officer, or the Electronic Clipboard for checklists.
TFM’s automatic announcements still work. Several of them were fixed this version — the flaps readout, the GPWS inhibit switches, the meters and the autobrake are all described further down.
Panels, readouts, hotkeys and ground position all work as normal.
TFM will not move a control on the 737 by itself. That includes the automatic taxi and logo lights, which are off for now — they were the last thing TFM did on its own on this aircraft.
If you open the First Officer window on the 737 it now says it is not available. The lists in it are empty, which is why it says so rather than leaving you guessing.
⚠ Runway awareness and taxi guidance are not affected by this, because they have never run on the 737 — they are 777 features. Nothing was taken away.

The 777’s First Officer is untouched by this. The other 777 changes in this version are described in their own section above.

The 737 reads its panels straight from PMDG now

The 737’s MCP, electrical, APU and forward panels used to get PMDG’s data by way of FSUIPC. They now read it directly. Nothing changes for you — it is the same data over a shorter path, and PMDG has to be broadcasting it either way, which it already was or FSUIPC could not have shown you those panels before.

If any of your aircraft do have broadcasting switched off, TFM offers to turn it on at startup and asks once.
Readouts with no data now say “unknown” instead of guessing a position. See below.

Two 737 readouts now come from the MobiFlight module

The speed brake position and the ground power light used to be read through FSUIPC. They now come from the MobiFlight module, which TFM bundles and offers to install when it starts.

If you told TFM not to ask about that module, those two readouts will say “unknown” until you install it. Everything else on the 737 is unaffected.

Guarded switches on the 737 now really are guarded

⚠ This one changes what you have to do. Four switches — battery, both IDG disconnects and bus transfer — sit under a guard on the real aircraft, and TFM used to let you operate them directly. It now refuses and says the guard is closed, so you open the guard first.

Standby power sits under a guard too, but is chosen from a list rather than pressed, and lists do not yet check the guard. It still moves without one.
⚠ TFM cannot read most of these guards from the aircraft; it tracks what it believes the guard is doing. If one gets out of step, open or close it again to resynchronize.

The flight control switches moved the wrong way

Choosing a position in the FLT CTRL A or B dropdown walked the switch in the opposite direction — toward the far end of its travel instead of where you asked. Fixed.

TFM can work the 737’s flap handle, but nothing uses it yet

TFM can now command all nine of the 737’s flap positions and confirms the handle actually traveled before reporting success. This is groundwork for the First Officer, which is switched off on this aircraft in this version — so nothing calls or moves the flaps on the 737 today. It becomes useful in the next version.

The flap positions are available in the checklist editor’s control picker, so you can use them in a checklist of your own.
Asking for flaps 20 says the 737 has no such position instead of waiting silently. Its detents are up, 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 25, 30 and 40.
If a flap command does not take, TFM re-sends it once and then says so out loud.

The 777 is unchanged — its flap calls and handle work exactly as before.

The flaps readout gave landing speeds on a takeoff

With Enhanced Hotkeys on, pressing the flaps readout at flaps 10 or flaps 15 spoke the landing VREF instead of VR. Both are ordinary takeoff settings on the 737, and this is the readout you use to check your takeoff speeds.

The flaps callout can be turned off

The flaps position callout ignored its own setting, so it could not be silenced. It now obeys “Left flaps needle” on the verbosity page — and that setting, which used to ship off, now ships on, so nobody loses a callout they had.

The GPWS inhibit controls are named more briefly

They now read “GPWS terrain, inhibit” rather than “GPWS terrain inhibit inhibit”. Same for the flap and gear inhibits.

The GPWS inhibit switches were reporting the opposite of the truth

The flap, gear and terrain inhibit switches said “normal” when the warning was suppressed, and “inhibit” when it was live. All three are corrected. The buttons also now read as “pressed” when the warning is inhibited, which matches what their names imply.

The autobrake no longer reports a position it never read

If the simulator’s panel data was not arriving, the autobrake selector reported “RTO” — armed for a rejected takeoff — and the N1 set selector reported position 2. Both now say “unknown”. This also affected two preflight checklist items, which could tick themselves off against the invented position without the switch ever being read.

Blank meters now say so

With the battery off the electrical meter displays go dark, and TFM used to announce the label with no reading after it — “DC amps”, then nothing. It now says “blank”, which is distinct from “unavailable” (that means TFM has no data from the simulator, which is a fault).

The AC meter was reading volts as amps

The AC meter announced the bus voltage as amperage and vice versa — “AC amps 115” when the 115 volt bus came alive, and “AC volts 0” beside it. Both numbers sounded reasonable for the units they were given, so there was nothing to catch it by ear. Now corrected. The DC meter was checked at the same time and was already right.

The IDG #2 button disconnected the left drive

Pressing IDG #2 on the electrical panel disconnected the LEFT integrated drive generator, while the button still read out the right one’s state — so you heard “left drive disconnected” from a button called IDG #2. Fixed.

The panel now tells you when it has no data to show

The 737’s electrical and APU readouts now come from the simulator’s PMDG data feed. If that feed is not arriving, TFM says so instead of reading out default values that happen to sound healthy. It says it once when the data goes, and once when it comes back.

Announcements can be turned off per reading

Unchanged, but worth knowing if the electrical panel gets talkative: Settings, PMDG 737, Overhead, Electrical has separate checkboxes for AC volts, AC amps, DC volts, DC amps and both meter selectors.

Your settings file no longer carries your keys

The Export settings file — the one we sometimes ask you to email us — contained your API keys in plain text. It listed every setting TFM has, credentials included.

Exported settings no longer contain your TFM API key or your Azure Speech key.
Importing a settings file no longer restores keys from an older export either. If you move TFM to another machine, enter your Azure Speech key there once.
An old export you have already sent still contains them. If your Azure Speech key is in one, regenerate it in the Azure portal; that key is billed to you.
TFM also clears a leftover copy of your API key that an older version stored and nothing used.
Importing a settings file no longer overwrites what TFM knows about your license.

Checking your license

TFM used to check your license with the server once, then trust the stored renewal date for as long as it lasted. It now confirms that date every few days.

TFM confirms your license with the server if it has not done so for three days.
If your simulator PC has no internet, TFM still starts and tries again next time.
Nothing changes for you when you are online. You will not be asked for anything.

Checklist items that quietly did nothing

Some checklist items named a control that was never built. The First Officer looked it up, found nothing, and the item failed without a word.

The 777’s air demand hydraulic pump items now work, in both checklists that use them.
If a control will not reach the position asked for, TFM now says so instead of failing quietly.

The 737’s share of this — the trim air item, and the windshield wipers, which had never been moved at all — is fixed in the same way, but reaches you in the next version: these are First Officer items, and the First Officer is switched off on that aircraft here. The controls themselves work from the panels now, including setting either wiper to intermittent, low or high.

The clipboard was reading the wrong control on most manual items

TFM guesses which cockpit control a checklist line is about by matching the wording, and the match was far too loose — it would settle for a single shared letter. So “Flap Lever” was reading the autopilot’s COMMAND A light, “APU FAULT light” and “CABIN ALTITUDE light” were both reading a flight control switch, and “ADF radios” was reading COMMAND A as well. Measured on the shipped checklists, 203 of the 737’s 207 guessed lines and 110 of the 777’s 117 were pointing at an unrelated control, and nothing on screen or in speech revealed the swap.

A line now only takes a control when the whole name matches, and says nothing when it does not. Across both aircraft that turns 377 mostly-wrong readings into 47 correct ones.
Around six lines that used to guess correctly now say nothing instead, among them the 777’s ALTERNATE GEAR switch. Those want the control named on the item, which is a later fix.
A short generic word no longer swallows a longer specific control: “APU” no longer reads APU BLEED, “Fuel” no longer reads FUEL CROSSFEED, “Trim” no longer reads TRIM AIR.

Writing your own checklists

The control picker no longer offers controls that do not exist on your aircraft.
Picking flaps on the 777 now gives you the seven lever positions, and they work.
The 737 no longer lists cabin and flight deck temperature, which it could never set.
Picking a 777 warning light now offers the words that light really uses. Forty-three of them — the fire bottles, the cargo fire warnings, the hydraulic pumps, the fuel low pressure lights and the window heat lights among them — were offering “on” and “off”, which none of them ever says, so an item built from one of those lights could never tick.
Picking a two-position switch now offers the two words that switch really uses, where they are known, instead of always ON and OFF. Several of the broken preflight items came from that seed: it was not possible to build a working item for those switches from the picker. The 737 fire test items came from a different list, which was corrected for the picker in 8.1.0 and never carried into the shipped checklist until now.
Validating a checklist now warns when an expected value is not a position the control can report, which is the check that would have caught every one of them.

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