neilends

This looks awesome! I will definitely give this a try when you are ready with it.

I second this. Little Navmap works great. For looking up ILS coordinates I just bookmark the Sky Vectors website. I don't understand the ILS data for some international airports so I just google it and plug in what I see. It works most of the time. Also, the G3000 itself can load the ILS in for you if you've loaded the correct airport, on the fly.

Just nailed the toughest landing I think I've ever tried. Right in Denali National Park, Alaska (where I lived for a breathtaking summer), I took off from the tiny but mod-improved strip in the town of Kantishna (5Z5). 20 nm away is a 2,000 foot strip of grass, if that, called "Stampede" (Z90). You fly through a valley, climb just a few smaller mountains, and then do your best to spot the Stampede strip. I failed at first, and had had to turn around and spot it along the river. I am not sure it can be landed from both directions in a Cessna 172, because you can barely see it. But from the other direction, the strip is right off a ledge making it pretty challenging for an inexperienced sim pilot (like me). I highly recommend, for anyone seeking a short adventure with gorgeous scenery to boot (I recommend simulating to July summer flight--Alaska being pitch dark and covered in wintery hell right now).

Now set up with an Oculus Quest 2. Spent hours configuring it to recommended specs on this and other forums--not easy to do with my limited tech skills, but it got done. Pretty amazing. Flew my wife and 15-year old daughter around our city of Phoenix for a while, and they couldn't believe it. Flew from Montreal to Quebec City, in one of my favorite Canadian provinces. I've installed some great freeware which I recommend for those cities. There were at least 4 or 5 spots along the St. Lawrence River have those MSFS water-level anomalies I've read about in Alaska. Other than those spots where it felt like Salvador Dali was trying to tell me something, the flight was as beautiful in MSFS as the car drive is in real life. Then I returned to my Arizona bush trip, taking off from the tiny Monument Valley airport on the Utah side of the border. There was a 737 or something on the runway for some reason. He managed to take off from the strip. Impressive. I then flew over Navajo tribal land through what may have been the Painted Desert area into Farmington, NM. [update: This was not the Painted Desert, which is further south than where I was.] The scenery on this stretch was absolutely spectacular, largely matching what I've driven through in real life. I recommend this flight: UT25 to KFMN. Almost died in KMFN because I am not used to turning autopilot off while wearing a VR headset. A violent struggle between man and machine ensued just a couple hundred feet from the runway. I managed to prevail.

The description on Dell's website says this. No comment by me on whether it's persuasive or not, but just passing it along: "Extensive cooling: Our new thermal design includes quad 10mm copper heat pipes with integrated vapor chambers – our largest diameter heat pipe design to date – designed for exceptional gaming performance. Innovative airflow: Another added boost for graphics performance is made possible by a dual-axial fan design with positive rear pressure relief – a new Alienware first for graphics cards. The positive rear pressure relief allows heat to escape from specially located vents designed to aid with flow and thermal management. This new approach is built with gamers in mind."

I've wondered about this. All I can tell you is what seems to be a reference to cooling in my invoice: "321-BFSC Lunar Light chassis with High-Performance CPU Liquid Cooling and 1000W Power." With time I'd be interested in upgrading this if necessary, so I hope it's not an insurmountable problem. The reason people like me purchase pre-built Dell devices is that we just don't have any know-how at all, and don't know people who do. We're paying for the convenience of not being totally lost and confused, really, so yeah there is a trade off.

Appreciate this. I don't actually know what PSU specs are--what should I look up? I do have monitor specs so I'll dig those up. And glad to hear you're impressed. I'd waffled on making an investment for a new PC for literally months solely for MSFS, and finally struck a budget deal with the wife to make it happen. :)

Some of you put your computer specs into your sigs, which seems like a good idea. I am not tech savvy so as best as I can tell these are the relevant specs I have, taken from the Dell company invoice I have. Can any of you tell me whether it lacks any important details, or contains any dumb ones that I should edit out? 10th Gen Intel Core i7 10700KF (8-Core, 16MB Cache, 3.8GHz to 5.1GHz w/Turbo Boost Max 3.0), NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3070 8GB GDDR6 1 EA, 370-AELS 32GB Dual Channel HyperX(FM) FURY DDR4 XMP at 3200MHz 1 EA 398.46 398.46, 400-BHPT 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD 1 EA, 555-BFPT Killer™ Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 (2x2), Windows 10.

Took off from Amritsar, India across the border to Lahore, Pakistan on a peace mission. Took advantage of my dual citizenship and persuaded a buddy in the Canadian Air Force to lend me an official Government of Canada CJ4 so I could cavort around Pakistan without causing a diplomatic stir. (He's a good buddy. He also owes me a lot of money.) Stopped in Dera Ismail Khan, a small military town which has some connections to family members of mine. Then decided to take advantage of the Canadian colors and fly to Kandahar, Afghanistan. The mountains in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region were not as scenic as I thought they might be (per MSFS recreation, I mean). Pretty funny when I landed in Kandahar: upon taxiing to the parking area, I parked right next to a plane flown by the Government of the United States!

Larry, that’s fascinating and I appreciate the detailed explanation.

Good research. I only looked at the FS internal database for what FS labelled, I think, Rudrapayag. Many of these small villages are considered holy. My dad went on a religious trip that involved hiking many of them by foot.

I see! Today I wanted to fly from Anchorage, Alaska to a small cabin on Kenai that my family actually stayed in one summer trip. I saw that there was still some sun out at the time in Alaska in real time, so I picked live time and weather conditions. See, I live in Arizona. It didn't occur to me that Alaska in late January is a wintery hell. I took off anyway and quickly saw how dead I would be IRL. Ice on the windshield was the least of my problems. The Cessna 172 could not get any higher than about 5,500 feet, which is a fatal problem in Alaska, on top of which I had zero visibility. I managed to barely escape a bunch of mountains and actually land the plane in Girdwood. Why could the plane not climb higher than 5,500? Was it the weight of the ice that glommed on to the plane?

Can't wait to try it out! doering, I enjoyed your video and subscribed. I would really love to see you or anyone successfully land a plane at Rudraprayag. Wiki claims that there is no airport, but that's not true and MSFS has an air strip in the town.

Very nice! I'm waiting to get a little better to attempt Lukla but it's on my bucket list. I've read that the challenge is similar when flying to the capital of Bhutan, Paro International, so give that a try also if you're in the mood for more Himalayan challenges.

After learning the hard way that a Cessna 172 flown by an amateur pilot cannot land in a remote Himalayan air strip surrounded by canyon walls, I lowered my target. From the airport in Pantnagar, India (which they slyly call "Nainital" airport to draw tourists--but actual Nainital is an hour car drive away), I quickly gained elevation to 8,000 and re-entered the Himalayas and actually found Nainital. This is a lake town, where you can sit on a paddle boat and float through clouds on the water, literally, with houses perched up on the steep slopes above you. MSFS has recreated it perfectly. I couldn't believe my eyes. You can't land there and will fly over only. As long as you're over 8,000 feet, you're good. I then left the mountain range and headed west with the Himalayas to my right, to the ancient, temple city of Haridwar along the banks of the river that is sacred to Hindus, the Ganges. This is actually where I scattered the ashes of my dad many years ago. Again, the recreation is stunning. I couldn't spot any colorful temples per se--maybe a developer should think about that for an India project--but the development along the river banks, including bridges, and small installations that are in fact religious shrines, were all spot on. From Haridwar I used ILS to land at Dehradun. I thought I got ATC permission to do so, but I guess not, so I was reprimanded by a controller guy who did not sound very Indian. How cool would it be if Microsoft could figure out how to implement international accents based on the country you're flying in?

Palm Springs to Yuma, AZ using ILS, now that I've figured out how it works. Then down the Mexican coast to Puerto Peñasco (or as the tourists call it, Rocky Point) (*eye roll*). All of it using live weather, which was beautiful and sunny.

I have to tell you a story about this exact runway and a plane that looked just like this one. In the early 90s as a college student, I had a part-time job delivering flowers around the Tucson area. Davis-Monthan AFB was a frequent destination for deliveries, so I would often pull up to the military entrance of the base and receive permission to actually enter the base and complete my delivery. One day, I got lost on the base looking for the delivery spot. Looking for residences on the base is a lot like entering a gigantic apartment and townhouse complex, so it can be confusing. I pulled my delivery truck over (small pickup with a refrigerated storage area in the back) to study the base map. Unfortunately, the location I pulled onto to do this was the runway. I had no idea it was a runway until I heard gigantic booming noise. A fighter jet flew right over my head to land just yards from my truck. Adrenaline and the passage of time make it hard for me to estimate how close this was, but I was staring right at the underbelly of an F-16 or whatever the plane was. And I am sure that the pilot was angry as hell that some rando idiot in a stupid-looking pickup truck was suddenly on his runway while landing. Both of us dying that way would be a really embarrassing way to go--more so for him. Obviously this was terrifying for me. I got the living hell out of there, found my delivery location, and drove out of the base pronto. No one tried to contact me as far as I know, and the entry guards did not stop me for questions as I exited.

All of us come to this software application from totally different perspectives. Some are real pilots. Some (like me) are pure gamers who have never flown a real plane. Some are retired pilots. And everything in between. I totally get it that Rupert has expectations of FS that aren't the same as ours, and for him that sucks on a personal level, much more than the game's technical flaws bother someone like me. Hopefully with time it will get better for you Rupert.

And this:

Longest flight of my sim flying career today, at the expense of some serious work projects I need to finish. Used live weather to fly from Kanab, Utah to Palm Springs, California. The weather in Kanab and northwestern Arizona was severe, so I almost died several times and probably should have. I could not figure out why my Cessna 172 would suddenly go haywire when it was on autopilot and a huge wind gust would alter its direction or altitude. So a few times the plane stalled, but I managed to live. Another few times it wound up screaming toward the earth at breakneck speeds that probably got close to disintegrating the plane, but again, I got lucky. Tried IFR for a while but while I was fighting for my life in the storms over northwestern Arizona, I could not possibly keep up. Arriving in Palm Springs the weather was beautiful. The city lay-out by MSFS2020 is beautiful and very close to real life. Palm Springs is where me and my childhood guy friends go once a year for reunions, but we haven't since the pandemic, so the landing made me feel nostalgic.

I live in Sedona and can actually see my yard in the sim! House was only recently built so the sim only shows an empty lot, but that is amazing. Anyway, I took off from KSEZ yesterday (which has a fantastic hiking trail you can circle the airport with while watching planes). Headed up to Flagstaff and then on KGCN at the Grand Canyon. My normal trip there is in a minivan filled with in-laws. Flying would have been so much more tolerable. A little disappointed by the Grand Canyon, but no one is to blame. Having hiked in it just months ago, it is not possible to simulate those views. Hope someone proves me wrong soon! I work in law enforcement and my colleagues investigated some low key shenanigans going on in Page, Arizona some years ago, so I decided to head up there to park for the night. When I woke up this morning I turned on live weather and the rain was so heavy I had zero visibility. Certain death if I was flying for real given my skills, but sim me happily took off. Destination: another target of work I have done in the past, cult territory of the Fundamentalist LDS folks like Warren Jeffs. Jeffs actually lived and owned land around Colorado City. But I’ve always wondered about another area adjacent to FLDS land so I stopped there instead, at Kanab Municipal, just over the Utah border (KKNB). Desolate land out there. God’s country. Just not sure which God.