This is a great thread... I have several ideas I haven't seen here...
I'm always looking for new aircraft and sceneries I haven't seen or flown before. Recently I've been having fun with Piglet's Boeing 7072 spacecraft. I tweaked the .cfg to get it a lot higher and faster, pretty much to the limits of FSX.
I'm in the process of gradually flying every aircraft on every route ever flown by Pan Am. I have most of the aircraft and recently completed a round-the-world trip following Pan Am's routes from the 1930s-1960s. Switched aircraft along the way, flying different aircraft that flew those actual routes in history. Doing a few "what if" Pan Am routes such as Rock Sound-Tokyo in the 7072 and many Concorde routes.
The Tacpack combined with Tacpack-enabled vintage military aircraft such as the F-4, A-4, F-8, A-1, etc, the excellent Vietnam War scenery, and the CCP "Campaign Planner" allowed recreation of major air campaigns in Southeast Asia. I've accurately recreated many of the most famous air strikes in North Vietnam.
There is also fantastic freeware scenery of Laos and great freeware aircraft from Air America. I've recreated many actual Air America missions from the 1960s.
Using good freeware scenery with mostly payware aircraft with free repaints, and Active Sky Next, I've recreated the conditions of many famous airline mishaps from history, including all of the Pan Am 707 crashes in the 70s. I've also recreated most of the recent mishaps, such as Air France 447, Egyptair 804, the FlyDubai crash, etc. That is extremely educational and reveals much about how not to crash an airliner.
I've done Amelia Earhart's flight several times, modifying the standard FSX Electra to match the weights and performance of her L-10E Special, validating the hypothesis that she had enough fuel to reach Howland then turn south to Gardner. On the most realistic simulation of that flight I reached Gardner with about 12 gallons of gas.
Finally I fly a lot of real aircraft and have modified the FSX versions to be perfect copies of the real planes, including paint, panel, and even my face on the pilot. I often use these to simulate and plan real flights, or re-create memorable past flights. Once I was debating a real flight in bad weather, flew it in the simulator first using ASN, and decided to stay home and continue to fly the sim...
