With Ai Shadow Aircraft, you will start from, and make a flight to, only regular airports that are compatible with Ai Aircraft, so they will have lots of parking spaces and big enough runways.
When the simulation starts, the Ai Shadow Aircraft may already be backing out to taxi, or will engage ATC at any moment, or more rarely will wake up 3-6 minutes from the simulation starting. So you can follow out, wait a little, or get on with your flight. If you travel more than 60 km away before Ai Buddy takes off you may never see it as it will fall outside FSX's radius of simulation. If lost this way, the Ai Buddy can be returned to fly alongside you by making a save game and restoring.
Ai Buddy uses ATC and talks all the way to the destination. It works with Save games, Advance and Go to. If you advance too close to the destination the plane will be found already parked at the airport, (a limitation of the landing procedure code).
Ai Buddy follows your plan and tries to keep to the ascent, cruise, and descent speeds set in your briefing (within limitations), he knows where you are and tries to keep up, and slows down to stay with you. Then if you get too close, maybe right into his wake he may dive out of the way and come up behind you, or strafe past, it can be quite absorbing. There are some parameters to experiment with in settings.ini, although they are nicely set as default and need never be worried about.
Near the end of the route if you want to land first, set out ahead before Top of Descent to get approach vectors before Ai Shadow, otherwise drop back and allow your Ai Buddy to get approach vectors first.
I’m watching to see how things go with this release, and I can introduce more Ai Shadow Aircraft controls in the next release.
But he is sometimes hard to see. May be it helps to increase the LOD.
