neilends

In Fiji, where I have visited, the main international airport is actually located on the opposite end of the island from Fiji's largest city and capital (Suva). Since I actually hung out in Suva, I decided to take off from the airport there--Nausori International--though I didn't land there IRL. I used live weather, and the raw strength of this amazing software really muscled its way through my experience. When leaving Suva the weather was sunny and nice. As I got closer to my next destination of Koro Island though, a storm blew in. First, in sunny conditions, I saw clouds and then amazingly I saw lightning strikes, horizontal ones, as I approached the storm like a suicidal idiot. Graphics for this: incredible. Then of course I entered the storm, and visibility dropped completely to zero. I could not find Koro Airport at all, no chance in hell, so I decided to quasi-pretend I was IRL and move on to another airport. At Savusavu (NFNS), the clouds parted just slightly enough for me to get my bearings and spot the airport. It was just barely enough to properly land. I did one more stretch to Labasa (NFNL), which I barely survived, before stopping. Oh, did I mention that there were rainbows too? See below. These experiences from a mere computer simulation and game/program are memorable, and mind-blowing. The game is simply amazing.

I guess it's in my nature as a trial lawyer to read this and immediately recognize it as one of the most easily provable absurdities claimed in this thread. Here is the Simpsons cloud: And here, from my flight in Fiji today in live weather, are MSFS clouds: Your Honor, I rest my case.

Very cool. I intend to revisit that area in FS some time. As I mentioned earlier, I've been to the area in person but I was pretty young, so I asked my mom for details and she took out the ol' photo album. We actually drove from our home base of Jaipur (Rajasthan, flat desert) all the way to nearby Manali, which is a horrendously long journey in Indian conditions. We then hired a driver who took us up those canyons in an old jeep, to what is called the Rautang Pass. That I remember clearly because there were moments when I looked down from the jeep and there were only inches to go on the road. It was terrifying. Not sure if a plane would be any less scary given those canyon walls.

That's awesome. Maybe I should do a slow study over the years so, whenever I do go for it, I can get the highest grade in the class. :cool:

Our most famous citizen. Talk about a small world: in his very last episode, my daughter's teacher from here in Arizona was one of the contestants. RIP.

Just thought of one more suggestion: The official MSFS "landing challenges" will also automatically set you up for landings. Each time you just hit "restart" and you're situated right in the air. There's a different landing for different airplanes, so you can choose the Cessna 172 challenge, or the different challenges for larger planes if that's your preference.

There's probably an old thread somewhere where we should continue this if it keeps on :D ... but, yeah TIGHAR's research is pretty impressive. Amazing coincidences that skeptics have not been able to explain away: * Physical artifacts at Niku including an American skin cream product used only by white women. * Bones on the island analyzed by British doctors in 1940 who concluded they belonged to a European-origin male. Except they were wrong. It was a female. * Confirmed radio transmissions by the U.S. Coast Guard and professional radio operators of Earhart's distress signals, for days after she was lost. * Lockheed Corporation confirming that it is not possible to transmit distress signals if their plane was in the water. It had to be on the ground somewhere. There's much more. I'm persuaded.

Pretty cool to hear that. I was born in Sudbury. Lived there through grade school before my parents moved us to the US. I still have family in Toronto and Calgary who I visit often (pre-pandemic anyway). Lucky enough to be a dual citizen.

Went down a major rabbithole regarding Amelia Earhart. I'm even halfway done watching the movie with Hillary Swank. Research by TIGHAR seems to virtually confirm, in my opinion, that Amelia crash-landed at Nikumaroro Island in the Republic of Kiribati, which is precisely along the "157 337 line" she mentioned in her last radio transmission from the air. Nikumaroro is about 350 nm distance from Howland Island, her planned destination. The direction from one to the other? Very close to 337 degrees going north, or 157 degrees going south (actual angles: 330 degrees going north, or 150 degrees going south). Both of these islands are among the most isolated land-based places on earth. I had a work project to tackle and several work phone calls. So I took off from Canton Airfield in Kiribati, which is the closest runway (though apparently unmanned) to Nikumaroro, and was mostly on autopilot while working away. Distance = 204 nm. Nikumaroro in MSFS world is stunningly close to real life. Maybe on purpose, they got the exact dimensions and even the general vegetation of this barren strip of land correct. I landed on it, probably close to where she actually did, and shut off the engine for a few minutes. It was a pretty wild sensation, and I felt real sadness at the thought of her and Fred Noonan landing here, surviving for at least several days (confirmed by evidence of radio transmissions), but never being located. We don't actually know how she died, since she survived the landing and was able to build fires, and eat fish, turtles and birds for a while. Since Noonan was evidently seriously injured, he may have died quickly, leaving her alone. Awful. I took off and flew to Howland Island in similar conditions. It's a US-owned island and is also realistically depicted, and easy to land on. In real life though, it would be extremely difficult to find from the air, using visibility only (no GPS). Really what killed Amelia was simply the choice to target, as her final destination of her world tour, the most difficult destination of her world tour in the middle of the ocean. Toldya it was a rabbithole.

What sfjimbo said. And just to add: before I finally got my joystick (HOTAS) I was playing the sim on a keyboard and mouse. This was almost a waste of time, because the simming "skills" needed to land were so distorted by the artificial distractions of hitting keyboard keys to maneuver the plane into position and land it. The joystick finally allowed me to at least somewhat pretend that landing in the sim resembles landing in real life. The same is definitely true of VR headsets. I find that the ability to only use my head and eyes to situate and position myself relative to the runway vastly improves the realism of actually landing. And that actually makes it easier. In 2D mode, you are unrealistically stuck staring at 1 or 2 angles at best in the final minutes and seconds, and you have to use up your fingers to change those angles when they are supposed to be busy with the throttle and pitch of the plane. VR headsets still have some progress to make but it's something to think about in the coming year as MSFS works on this technology (we hope).

This game is awesome. The graphics are amazing. The clouds are incredible, not to mention the experience of flying VR through them during a thunderstorm when you can hear the thunder, which corresponds with lightning, which is specific to locations of actual clouds around you. I can't even grasp how much work it took to program those effects into the game. Wow. I've been to some obscure places around the world so I've pushed MSFS to its graphics limits by visiting them here, and yeah, there are let-downs. These are tiny corners of the planet that aren't on people's radars, so it's understandable that the company hasn't built them up just yet. But there are always add-ons to look forward to. And the popular locations to fly through are, again, incredible. I understand that some people genuinely hate everything about this game, because they see it completely differently. The sim is not for everyone, like anything in the universe.

In my early 30s I took a solo trip to Fiji for a couple of weeks. At my hotel in the capital, Suva, I ran into a crusty old Vietnam vet and a buddy of his who was from the country of Senegal. Unbelievably, the Senegalese man and I were both students at the University of Arizona at the same time and had met each other before, in Tucson. Anyone want to debate whether it's really a small world or not? Anyway, the two of them persuaded me to go with them to a small resort they were trying to build up on a remote island. So off we flew to the Fijian island of Kadavu, from which we took a tiny motorboat to the smaller island of Ona. It was awesome. This evening I noticed that it was raining hard in Fiji and the sun was going to set. So I set out to find out what the airport in Kadavu looked like. Ugh, such a disappointment, Microsoft. The airport is not there. Neither is the modest village, the boat docks, or any of the human life that exists on the real island. It was just a plain grass field. I did manage to land on it and then take off. I flew to another island at which there is also supposed to be a small airport, but again, nothing but flat grass. Fiji in general is pretty screwed up in MSFS land. I'm guessing most of the Polynesian, isolated island countries are. That's too bad. Attached is the Kadavu airport on Google Maps. On Bing.com, it's not visible at all. The storm and rain effects were absolutely spectacular, with the VR headset. The clouds are amazing to float through.

I appreciate each of your heartfelt responses, and also the amazing personal stories of your connections to flight. How fortunate that some of you got exposed to aviation at such young ages. If I do ever choose to learn how to real-fly, I'll be pushing retirement by then. It sounds like Stick and Rudder will have to be my first buy in any event.

Lol My wife is from Michigan and I was actually born in Ontario, Canada. I’m doing short flight hops from my Canadian birth town all the way down to her hometown. I guess it’s cold as hell in central Michigan today.

I appreciate these great responses, and each of the perspectives. Any others please chime in. Larry I definitely hear what you're saying. I've actually stuck to a Cessna 172 rigidly all these years specifically because I felt like fake-promoting myself to flying a 747 or whatever was too unrealistic for my tastes. The CJ4 is the first time I've flown anything other than a 172 (on a regular basis). I also think that in a few years, I might be one of those people who was fascinated for decades by flight simming and then one day takes the plunge and enrolls in flight school. I've got a busy career in a completely unrelated field at the moment but it's in the back of my mind, as a possible future hobby. So I am quite curious about these questions not just from a simmer perspective but from the viewpoint of real pilots (thus the way I worded the thread title).

I know there are differing opinions about VR right now, and I'm probably somewhere in the middle of many of them: flying with my VR headset (Oculus Quest 2) has its annoyances, so depending on my mood and my simming objective for the moment I don't always use it. The 2D monitor has its benefits so I often use that instead. But after crashing all day long during bad weather, trying to land in Grand Rapids, MI in 2D, I decided to try it in VR. Amazing. My perspective probably matters here: I have been a simmer since the original 1982 MSFS, which my dad got for me when I was a kid. But I'm not a real pilot and have never sat in a real cockpit. So the feeling of being inside one in VR, with the absolutely incredible Microsoft graphics regarding icing on the window, the barely-visible ground below, and the thick snow and clouds, was literally my first time even remotely experiencing what this might be like for a pilot. It would be terrifying and daunting, by the way. But a 2D simulation could absolutely not replicate that sensation. I had not felt that way when ever simming before, in supposedly scary weather. Landing the plane when the ground was still barely visible was also easier because I can look all around me by just turning my head, and therefore more realistic. That's why my first VR attempt at this succeeded whereas I had crashed in 2D the four previous tries. Some hard-core simmers/pilots don't think that VR works for them because what you gain in visual amazement and head-turning ease for navigating yourself, you lose because you can't really click away on an airplane dashboard (keyboard) for all of the plane's complex functions. No argument there. Probably true. Some simmers probably love that aspect more than the stunning visuals. Nonetheless, this was amazing.

Indeed. And the infamous young hillbilly who played the banjo in the movie, had no idea how to play a banjo in real life (and nor does he to this day... the actor is still around).

After crashing/disintegrating my CJ4 on 3 consecutive attempts at landing at Grand Rapids, MI in bad weather, I should probably try to figure out why I am still so confused about ILS approaches. I can usually make them work but not always. 1. The basic sequence I use for ILS is: (a) hit NAV for the desired ILS runway at the destination airport so autopilot knows where to take me in general; (b) when getting about 10 nm from the airport, and I have lined myself up with or without autopilot, hit APPR; © switch my NAV frequency so that the plane is now using "LOC1" as its navigation guide rather than the original GPS route. Assuming I'm doing this correctly, why does the autopilot often veer off and fly in a completely different, seemingly random direction? There are times when I thought it was just taking me into the expected, mapped loop to land the plane. But no, in this case, I was headed straight out over Lake Michigan for reasons that totally confuse me. Help? 2. Given that I kept crashing and/or my plane fell apart because I overstressed it through overspeed, is it fair to say that ILS approaches are not used in extremely windy conditions? The plane I was flying was the Cessna CJ4.

Woke up early this morning and decided to fly in India with live weather, since the sun was about to set there. Flew from Jaipur to Khetri, two places in Rajasthan that I have family connections to. The countryside scenery for India is pretty realistic, based on my driving those stretches in years past, and the overall lay-out of Jaipur (a huge city) is also impressive. But it is tragic that India's amazing and large palaces, forts and ancient temples can't be seen yet. Someone, somewhere needs to do an India scenery project.

Wow. Well, now I'll just have to find the time to drive out there some day, somehow. Although I live part-time in northern Arizona, this is unfortunately on the North Rim of the Canyon. Google says it's over 3 hours to drive there just from Flagstaff (and I'm an hour south of Flagstaff). I need more real-life pilot buddies.

I actually sprung for the super wide Samsung, C49RG9x, and I freaking love it. I primarily invested in this for work a long time ago. But I now really enjoy it for MSFS when using VR is inconvenient.

I don't know much about Little Navmap's database, but the author of the software has advised users to switch the elevation data so that you aren't using his original database for elevation information about a flight plan. He provides instructions once you see a warning sign on the elevation chart, which were easy enough to follow. I now have very reliable elevation data about all my flight plans, allowing me to plan ahead for how high or low I should stay for specific legs of my trip. (I normally fly smaller planes so I prefer to stay lower. I guess this is less relevant in a jetliner).

You got the best answers from people with geography know-how, so I can't top those. I will just add that I spent a couple of weeks as a volunteer on the Gulf Coast, about 3 years after Hurricane Katrina, helping displaced Americans who had still not found homes to live in after the hurricane wiped them out. The town I was in, Waveland, Mississippi, had entire blocks of houses in which every single person in those houses had died. While taking a walk one morning I met a resident who told me he was the sole survivor of the entire block. Every single neighbor he had, who had not evacuated, was dead. Many elderly did not have an easy way to evacuate so they were the ones who disproportionately lost their lives. He only lived because a tree managed to prop itself up against his house structure while the waves came in. He said there were so many dead bodies in his neighborhood that they brought out semitrucks and large trailers to serve as morgues. I walked through many ruins of what looked like beautiful homes that had been wiped out. Only the skeletons or foundations were left. The owners still owned the land but how could they possibly rebuild and take the chance again? Many houses in that area are to this day propped up on stilts. That, of course, is just the Gulf Coast along Mississippi and Louisiana. Other coastal areas have different geography and are thus not threatened by the same risks--for the moment anyway.

Right here: https://goo.gl/maps/RcbzwFWNzLGcKMid7 Pretty impressive that Microsoft found this, given the difficulty of finding it in conventional ways.

Took off from the Grand Canyon National Park Airport (KGCN) using live weather. Flew into the Grand Canyon presumably in violation of numerous laws and regulations. Discovered it is actually pretty easy even with a Cessna 172. Flew anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 feet below the rim, following the Colorado River. Then a storm began approaching, and also I got a little bored, so I exited the Canyon and landed in gusty conditions at some air strip I didn't know existed right next to the GC edge. It's apparently the Grand Canyon Airport (KGRM), as opposed to the Grand Canyon National Park Airport. I am unable to learn virtually anything from google about KGRM. Aviation sites list KGRM as another airport in Minnesota. Sky Vectors does not show it on the map. Very mysterious.