Flying the 737 Blind: The Toronto Developer Making Flight Simulator Accessible

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Pilots do not really fly airliners any more. They programme them. That turns out to be very good news if you are blind and want to fly one.

Jason Fayre, from Toronto, has spent years building software that makes Microsoft Flight Simulator usable without sight, alongside Andy Porca in Virginia. The pair talked Double Tap through the project.

“Aviation has always been something I’ve been interested in,” Fayre said. “I’ve always sort of known about flight simulators and known what they were. And I figured it’s the closest thing we’re ever going to get to actually flying a plane, most likely.”

What drew him in was not the flying so much as the engineering underneath it. “When I started looking into the amount of add-ons that are available to flight simulators and the rich programming environment that they give you, it just seemed like a neat challenge to see how much we could actually get into it and pull information out of it.”

Why the 737 is the one that works

A flight simulator ships with a set of built-in aircraft, but the serious ones are bought separately — what the community calls payware. One of those turned out to be the key.

“One of the payware aircraft has an extremely rich software development kit that we can drill into that is far, far more integrated than the free planes that come with the simulator,” Fayre said. That aircraft is the 737, and it is where their support is strongest.

The team has built an accessible version of the flight management computer — the system real crews use to programme a route before departure. “Pilots don’t fly airliners any more,” Fayre said. “They programme them and say, go.” There is manual control on takeoff and landing, he added, though even that does not have to be.

The payware 737 is licensed by Boeing, and its manual is a stripped-down version of what real airline pilots receive. It is, as Fayre put it, massive.

Do not call it a game

Fayre was straightforward about the commitment involved, and about the culture around it.

“You’re probably not going to just jump in a cockpit and take off and go,” he said. “You’re going to have to do some reading.” He also noted, with some amusement, that describing flight simulation as a game to enthusiasts does not go down well.

Andy Porca’s route in was different. He remembered loading one of the earliest versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator and looking out of the cockpit windows thinking it would be interesting to fly. “At the time I had the sight, but not the know-how,” he said. “Later on, I somewhat had the know-how and the interest, but didn’t have the sight. So it’s kind of flip-flopped backwards.”

What brought him back was an email to a flight simming list from a blind user. Porca watched practically every how-to video that person had made before touching the software himself.

Where to start

Two sites matter. The software itself lives at talkingflightmonitor.com. The wider community repository of tutorials, videos and documentation is bvipilots.net, run by a community member, and Fayre suggested it as the better first stop.

One important limitation: this is PC only. “You can’t do this on Xbox,” Fayre said, “just because on Xbox you don’t have the add-in infrastructure that the PC has.”

The project runs a stable release plus a preview channel for those who want features as they land, at the cost of some stability.

Resources

• Talking Flight Monitor: talkingflightmonitor.com
• BVI Pilots: bvipilots.net