Thank you for purchasing Passenger and Crew Experience, or PACX! In this document, we will cover installation, usage, and general knowledge of the product.
This document was last updated for version 1.2.20.0 of PACX on May 3rd, 2022.
To find answers to common questions or to look for community support, visit the PACX forums, located here.
For one-on-one support from TFDi Design, please open a support ticket here.
In order to download your product, sign into your TFDi Design account then access the Client Area. Click on “Software – PACX” under “Your Active Products/Services” and on the right, click "Downloads". If you have purchased the product from Orbx or SimMarket, sign in through their respective clients and download the product. There are two types of installers you can download for PACX.
The PACX installer (pictured below) will install the application, as well as runtime dependencies automatically. It will also ask for your activation code. A guide to finding this is below.
Your activation code can be found via the client area on our website. To find it, go to the client area (located here, once logged in), and click on “Software – PACX” under “Your Active Products/Services”. This will open the management page for PACX and contains your activation code, as well as other online features.
The first time PACX is run, it will go through its first run setup process. During this, it will attempt to install PACXBridge into your simulator(s), ask you about X-Plane usage, and attempt to install FSUIPC and/or XPUIPC if required. Once this process is complete, you will be presented the PACX main interface.
This interface consists of five core elements. The center of wheel is menu button. Left clicking and dragging on the green start/end button will allow you to move the PACX wheel around your screen.
The shapes on the edge of the wheel are buttons used to access other parts of the application. Clockwise, from the left, the buttons are explained below.
The menu will appear when you click the green MENU button. This menu allows you to start or end a flight, open the IFE, access career options, view awards, see past flights and records, or close PACX.
When you are ready to embark on your first career adventure, simply click “MENU” and then choose “Manage Careers” and “New Career”.
Fill in your name, airline name and airline code in the top three boxes. You can then choose the ticket prices for the airline and your service quality. Choosing your reputation lets you set your target customer base, such as Economy, Balanced or Business. Bear in mind that each of these options attracts different passengers and can affect the likelihood and nature of in-flight incidents or complaints and comments.
Restricting your aircraft by rank allows you to fly more aircraft as you progress through the ranks in the airline. Hardcore mode means that every flight will be automatically recorded at the end, slewing and time acceleration will be disabled, and a crash will end your career.
Once completed, you will be taken back to the manage careers page, where you can choose to modify any aspect of your airline, as well as the opportunity to archive a career.
When ready, click menu and start a flight.
On the first page, you will set your flight itinerary.
Selecting “Next” at the bottom will take you to the next menu to choose your aircraft and some other flight settings.
The second page provides a preview of the cabin of the aircraft you have selected, as well as aircraft options.
When ready, click “Next” again to advance to the final page of flight setup.
The final page provides some additional options for in-flight announcements and passenger experience.
Once a flight is in progress, the flight status page becomes accessible.
This page will show upcoming times (departure or arrival), passenger satisfaction and percentage, and conditional information. Conditional information includes responses to boarding status inquiries, emergency or incident status, and items pending response.
Clicking the people icon on the top left will open the cabin view.
This allows you to view the cabin and passengers on the flight, as well as information about them. Clicking a passenger in the list selects them in the cabin and vice-versa. This information is updated in real-time throughout the flight.
The interaction system is what allows you to notify the crew and cabin of various information.
The first box is the type of announcement or interaction. In the example above, we are notifying the passengers of a delay. Depending on the first selection, the boxes below may ask for different information. For a delay, the cause and the length of the delay are required. The passengers will react based on this information.
The type of interactions you can select vary throughout the flight, and depending on what events are occurring. Some events will cause the flight attendant to make a public address; others will not.
Public addresses or emergency operations where you need to reply will not have any sounds, as they come from you, the pilot of the aircraft. Interactions can also be made through vocal interaction with PACX.
The vocal interaction portion of PACX has two primary features. The first is the ability to pre-fill the interaction menu with what it heard from your announcement. The second is to allow playback of your recorded audio through a public address style filter (this is an option).
After PACX has processed your spoken audio, it will open the interaction menu, automatically filling in the menu based on what you said. If it were able to identify the announcement, it would show a preview of what was detected and provide a chance to modify the announcement if needed. When you are ready, or when the auto-accept time has passed, the announcement will be made. Pressing the Escape key while the “Listening” popup is open will cancel vocal interaction.
A “General” type of “Public Address” announcement type exists as well. This is intended to be used when giving a public address via the vocal interaction system that is not one of the other types. It does not have any effect on the passengers (outside of potentially waking them up if they were asleep).
Vocal recognition uses your system default microphone. The recognition quality can be improved by using Windows Speech Recognition training.
The PACXBridge software facilitates direct integration with the simulator and select third party aircraft. To determine if PACXBridge is functioning properly, check to see if the “PACX” menu item exists under the “Add-ons” menu in your simulator.
If PACX is not running, an “Launch PACX” option should be available. This will start PACX directly from the simulator. Once PACX is open, more menu items will become available.
The four menu items will open PACX (if it has been minimized to the system tray), activate the vocal interaction, open the interaction menu, or open the PACX in-simulator HUD.
In addition to its default features, PACXBridge adds additional in-cockpit integration to the following aircraft:
In these aircraft, pressing the appropriate cabin/PA buttons will begin a vocal interaction in PACX, allowing for an immersive public address to be made. PMDG aircraft requires enabling of their SDK data broadcast for in-cockpit integration to work.
PACXBridge also provides native seatbelt sign control to the products mentioned above, as well as many other aircraft, and can display in-sim messages (if enabled).
PACXBridge provides an in-sim overlay called PACX HUD. Via this overlay, you can see passenger satisfaction, estimated departure or arrival time, and a dynamic text field on the right. The dynamic field will show information like in-flight service, flight phase, incident status, or other relevant data.
When the window is large enough, an interaction box will be shown to the right of the dynamic text. Via this box, you can use the up, down, back, next, and send buttons to interact with the passengers and crew without leaving the simulator.
The HUD can be toggled via the in-sim menu (if applicable) or by right-clicking the PACX icon in the system tray and selecting “Toggle HUD”.
PACX simulates an AI flight attendant, as well as AI passengers. This means that actions like in-flight service are performed without pilot input, as they would be in the real world.
Although PACX attempts to monitor and detect the phase of flight to the best of its ability, it will adapt if it determines this is incorrect. For example, if you are in the “boarding” stage, but other software has determined that boarding is complete, proceeding with the flight as expected will cause PACX to skip the remaining boarding process and move on with the flight. This will not have a negative impact on passenger satisfaction. Similarly, cruise altitude changes will be detected automatically.
PACX reads from the default seatbelt sign variable to determine if the seatbelt sign is on or off. Some aircraft do not report this information correctly, meaning that PACX cannot determine the state of the switch. To accommodate those aircraft, PACX offers the ability to control the default seatbelt sign variable via the interaction menu.
An in-flight entertainment (IFE) system is also provided. This can be used to view a flight map and details, access relevant news articles from FSElite, or listen to JetStream Radio.
After a flight, PACX expects the engines and seatbelt sign to be turned off to begin deboarding. Regardless of the seatbelt sign, deboarding will begin 30 seconds after engine shutdown. Once the flight has reached the deboarding stage, the flight can be ended without waiting for deboarding to finish.
After a flight is completed, PACX will present the end of flight report.
This report will show you the necessary flight information, any notable events that occurred, various comments from passengers and a list of your passengers on the flight. As well, it will provide the ability to upload the flight and subsequently view it online.
The settings page offers a variety of options to adjust the behaviour of the application to your liking. From top to bottom, the settings are explained below.
1: 'Mute Audio in External View' is ignored when connected to X-Plane as the feature is incompatible.
PACX offers the ability to earn various awards. Selecting “MENU”, then “View Awards” will display all the awards you can work toward during your PACX flights.
Each award has its own unique badge and is tailored specifically to you. Once you have earned an award, simply clicking on it will take you to the unique webpage for your award, which includes the option to share it.
Every award on the system has the requirements written underneath it.
On the records page, you can choose to show all flights in all careers or narrow it down by career. When selecting the drop-down underneath “Career to Display”, you will be presented with a list of careers to choose from. Depending on whether you choose to show them all, or just per career, the information below will be tailored to what you select.
There are multiple records that you can view through “Record View”:
It is possible to add your own passenger names, airports, flight comments, and aircraft layouts to PACX. Using this system, you can customize PACX to support any airline or region configuration.
To learn more about adding to PACX, visit the guide on the forums located here.
PACX also provides web-based options for sharing-related features. It is on the same page that the activation code is found. At the bottom of this page, there is an option to hide your name from the flight reports.
As PACX uses FSUIPC as its simulator connection, WideFS and/or XPWideClient will allow it to communicate across multiple computers. The process for configuring PACX to work across a network is as follows.
An example of the Settings.xml file is provided below.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<PACX>
<Settings>
<NetworkIP>192.168.0.3</NetworkIP>
<NetworkPort>9000</NetworkPort>
</Settings>
</PACX>
Be sure to replace “
192.168.0.3
” and “9000
” with the appropriate data.