Which X-Plane 10 add-ons should I get for my vanilla XP10?

[skyhawk1254D]

Thank you all very much for the feedback! I appreciate it!

There are better 172's from Carenado and Jason Chandler (http://air.c74.net) for X-Plane if you're in the market for a 172.

I've always found it beneficial to fly aircraft which are a bit faster in the sim to be able get the flight done in shorter time, experience more frequency changes and workload, etc. Aircraft like the stock Baron are good examples. There was a time when I was flying the Piper Warrior non-stop, though, while I was learning the basics of instrument flying.

I still have only a little over 100 hours in real world flying and changing to new type always made me leave my comfort zone.
I see your point about a faster airplane, and I guess the simulator is the best place to try something new.

Regarding the ATIS, back when we only supported the COM1 radio, you could tune the ATIS on COM2 without issue. However, now that we support both radios (in the Windows build, the next Mac build will have it, too), we've lost the ability to monitor both radios at once. Just let ATC know that you need to go off frequency to get the ATIS, or use a separate solution for checking remote weather (such as ForeFlight). The runway information that's given by the ATIS may not match what we're actually using, so you truly only care about the weather at the field, which can be obtained from numerous other sources as you know.

Thank you for the explanation. That makes perfect sense to me. Considering the limitations I also prefer the solution you picked (you need ATIS only once on your flight anyways).
In the real world I never flew in a single radio airplane and always wondered how that would work anyways...

For photoscenery, go here: http://simheaven.com/?wpfb_s=los+angeles&page_id=322 and here: http://simheaven.com/?wpfb_s=las+vegas&page_id=322 Massive downloads but very worth it.

This is very cool! Thanks a lot for the hint!
I am going to check out the airport files next.

I use FSEconomy, PE and that's it in terms of plugins.

I just had a quick look at FSEconomy. Looks interesting. Thank you!
Reminds me of a plugin for FS2002 called FSMaintenance from Lago that had a financial system and simulated system failures based on how you treated the aircraft.
I have to read more about it.