neilends

I'm a dual US-Canadian and almost got a college summer job working in Iqualit. Maybe one of my biggest regrets in life is turning it down. I've flown around a bit in the Canadian Arctic and I agree it can seem hit or miss, though I'm not sure. I've spent time in real life in isolated parts of Alaska and found the MSFS depiction of them to be pretty fair. I was surprised from real-life trips to see how sparse and barren the Arctic tundra landscape can be. It's mesmerizing and beautiful in its own way, but I was surprised by the visual landscapes.

On a humanitarian mission to deliver blood (I sometimes partake in the missions planned by Skypark, to amuse myself), I needed to fly from Mechuka, India to Nyingchi, Tibet--which the government of China insists we call China. That's a topic for another type of forum. For this forum, my Cessna 172 had to climb from Mechuka (elevation 4,000 feet) to an unknown altitude of X in order to land at Nyingchi (elevation 9,974 feet). It turns out that "X" was approximately 16,000 feet. The 172's service ceiling is listed in various locations at 13,500 feet. I think MSFS lists it as 14,000 feet. Through a series of treacherous and near-death canyon climbing maneuvers, including one moment when I was probably about 20 feet over the trees on a ridge, I got to a high point of 16,380 feet. The weather was clear with wind at 2 knots, so, near-perfect conditions to accomplish this. To reach Nyingchi from Mechuka you can scrape by at about 16,000 feet. After I passed that highest ridge, I let the 172 float as high as it was willing and that's how I got to 16,380. I snapped a pic as I approached 16K because I knew the Guiness Book of World Records would demand proof: I did this flight in VR, which was amazing, but while in VR you really can't "pose" your plane for cool-looking screenshots. It's possible but annoying to do so. Instead, you end up "taking pictures" from the vantage point of your own eyes, as though you have a camera sitting right on your face. So that's all I've got besides the dashboard pic: For anyone wishing to attempt this challenge, here is the route I managed to follow, which relied heavily on the G1000's topographical map (it helps to be a real hiker if you are not a real pilot) and my basic strategy of following river canyons: Same route map but with terrain view (a little harder to see the route):

The actual dials on the G1000 are tricky to use via the mouse, but that may be where you are having trouble, because I struggled the same way. If you don't place the mouse-cursor exactly at the right location on the dial, it will rotate the inner dial when you want the outer one or vice versa. It helps to magnify the dial as much as you can to reduce the chance of rotating the wrong dial.

You actually cannot literally recreate Earhart's flight with a Cessna 172. She had a specially-designed Lockheed Vega 5B just for her big mission, so it had giant fuel capacity. Many of her route legs were 1,500 miles or so, and her final stretches were designed to be over 2,000 miles with no refueling. I am actually in awe at her courage for even attempting that Pacific stretch, given the lack of technology and the extreme high risk caused by those primitive navigation techniques. I suppose you could just skip the Pacific by reaching North America from Russia. I have flown a Cessna from Wales, Alaska to Lavrentiya, Russia. (Note: There is a real-life airport at Lavrentiya but MSFS failed to include it. I found an add-on for it instead).

What's your plan for the Pacific? I've been fascinated by small Pacific countries ever since I got MSFS so I think it is may be possible to plot a course from Asia to Hawaii with the Cessna's fuel limitations. I've flown so far from Fiji to Samoa, Samoa to Tonga, and from the Kiribati islands to the Marshalls. But it could be tricky. I went down an Amelia Earheart rabbithole recently. Her navigator, Fred Noonan, used celestial navigation techniques since they didn't even have VORs at the time. On most of their global legs, despite Noonan being one of the best navigators in the country, they would routinely miss their target by dozens if not hundreds of miles. It's no surprise that when departing from Papua New Guinea for the microscopic Howland Island, wind currents threw Noonan off course and they never showed up. Her radio messages indicate that they did successfully reach the line of coordinates along which Howland was located, but they were unable to find where on that line Howland was specifically. You might be interested in flying to Nikomoruru Island where Amelia is believed to have died, but it's extremely difficult to reach in a 172. MSFS has a very realistic rendering of Nikomoruru though.

Thanks. Interesting to see how you approach this since you're a real pilot. I've been toying with ideas like this myself so I like learning how others are doing it. If you have a thread where you are posting all your updates and pics, let us know because I will follow it. This thread is perfectly fine too as far as I'm concerned.

This looks like fun! Question just for curiosity sake: How do you handle these long haul flights? Do you set things on autopilot and attend to real life stuff somewhere else? Or are you actually flying the plane for 5 hours at a time, etc.? Hope you enjoyed the Du Rocher-Percé stop, which is in a beautiful national park of Canada. I was just there (and it almost killed me)!

Do you even have a lit runway up there!? I love flying in Alaska, having lived there and also, well, having an ex there too. Summer is a lot more fun though.

I'm not happy with whatever MSFS has set this to. If you go to any crowded city, the screen fills up with name tags of planes that are not even very close to you. The distance range strikes me as pretty large. It is more than a few miles. Maybe even 10 miles or more. This reduces the realism by such a large degree that I've just turned the name tag feature off. I do participate in a couple of group activities now and then, and for those I turn the feature back on so I can see who else is in the group. Aside: a very chillaxed, small group I will recommend to anyone interested in group flights is a weekly flight by Jules Altis, who explores and flies through a new national park once every week. He's a real pilot but the emphasis is not really on flying or the planes, but it's a cool way to learn about the national parks he randomly picks every week and enjoy the visual graphics of MSFS. Link: https://flightsim.to/profile/JulesAltis/uploads

I had a few lengthy work matters to focus on today so I picked out a long trip (long for me anyway), with help of the "Skypark" game. I just set things on autopilot and look up every now and then; it works well for me. I departed from Ontario, California in a Beech Bonanza. Although I don't like flying in airplanes that I'm pretty sure I will never actually fly in real life should I get a PPL, I didn't want to mess around with altitude problems given the several mountain ranges between SoCal and Central Arizona. Note: Earlier in the day I fiddled with MSFS's failure settings, which are super confusing and not very impressive. My route had me landing at Lake Havasu, Arizona as my one stop. As I was approaching Havasu, MSFS decided to short out my electrical power, followed by my engine failing. I floated around a little bit looking for a flat space where I would presumably glide to, and it was not looking good: Arizona hikers know that our state is famous for its "sky islands," which basically consists of miles of flat terrain interrupted randomly by mountain ranges that shoot up to the sky. I happened to be above the Chemehuevi Mountains Wilderness Area, which is actually on the California side of our shared border, when the failure happened. I suspect that a failure in real life at this location and given my altitude of 8,000 feet or so would carry a very high risk of fatality. But in MSFS land, as I continued to glide down to possible death, the engine suddenly revived itself. Alrighty? I landed at Havasu safely. The second leg from Havasu to Prescott was uneventful. I used ILS at Prescott but had a pretty miserable-looking landing despite the ILS assistance. My criticism of MSFS's failure features: This was the very first time I had tried turning it on. So, as soon as you activate it, you immediately experience a failure on the first flight? Will I have a failure every single flight then? That's lame. Also, the wording used for this feature is incomprehensible, as confirmed by a search of forum questions about it. One option you choose is to activate failures, and then a second one is to "arm" for failures, with no explanation of either. What does all of this mean? MSFS offers no information. And it appears true that the failure function is not randomized. Very annoying and almost pointless.

Wow. It sounds like exactly what you do when turning your body to stop or slow down while skiing.

I love, love, love Kauai. All of Hawaii is a commercialized tourist trap but Kauai still feels just a tad more real to me. Also, the wild chickens roaming around everywhere? Did you fly in to Waimea Canyon at all? I've driven through there and look forward to sim-flying there soon. On a topic Aptosflier would know about, there is an excellent cultural museum in Kauai that tells the story of the island from the Native Hawaiian perspective. Me being me, I forced my wife and kid to give up one day at the beach so we could visit the museum, during our vacation there.

Did a quick hop today from a small airport in the Canadian Arctic, using live weather. This was the take-off from Fort Simpson, NWT (CYFS). Fortunately the weather was nice, though cold. The moon looked alien at 8:30 a.m. local time. All lakes and rivers frozen over.

Also not sure I get your frustration here. A real pilot is checking the flaps before take-off, so this isn't a real world issue at all no matter where the flaps are set when you "get into the plane." You would always be checking the flaps, every single time. You should try out the Microsoft checklist that's built into the sim. The one for the Cessna 172 is one of the best ones Microsoft has, compared to other planes (as I understand it).

Where did you get the Concorde modification?

My favorite Canadian province is Québec, so I decided today on a rural route through live weather in the Gaspé region. It being two time zones ahead of me this was a suicidal decision obviously, but I managed to survive. I did it in VR but still managed to take some photos. I took off from Rivière aux Saumons, a small airport on an island off the Gaspé peninsula. I tried to route it as realistically as I could even though the decision to fly was not realistic at all. To reach the mainland and my eventual destination, Bonaventure, I had to fly across a stretch of ocean for about 40 nm. I shortened it as much as possible, flying along the island's coast to the point that jutted out closest to the mainland. I had nice weather for much of this but with about 10 nm to go and the sun beginning to set, the Cessna 172 began experiencing problems. I recklessly decided to cruise on this trip at about 5,000 feet altitude. Ignoring the weather patterns made this choice an especially poor one. At 2,000 feet I was pretty much okay, but as soon as I climbed up to 5,000, the windshield became "crystallized" and I could see ice on the wings. Only after I had iced the wings did I turn on the Garmin 1000's weather radar function, to see clearly that remaining at 2,000 may have prevented the icing. Still, I plugged along but the weather grew continuously worse. Also, in real life I had some work matters to do and this high-risk flight that was demanding my attention full-time was not letting me do it. So I decided to find the nearest airport--again using only the Garmin 1000---and found that I was almost on top of an airport for one of Canada's national parks. Name of the park... are you ready for this, francophiles?... Parc national de l'Île-Bonaventure-et-du-Rocher-Percé. Visibility was good enough to land comfortably. I pulled up to the fuel pump and turned off the engine and all power. After addressing my RL work issues, I decided to go back and try and depart in live weather and time even though this was an even more ridiculous choice than the first one. Not only had my plane iced up en route to the Parc airport where I was now parked, but it was 630pm and therefore pitch black. Compounding my difficulties was the truly lame AI behind Microsoft's ATC. Since I literally had no visibility... I would obviously rely on IFR to reach my destination, right? But MSFS ATC is especially useless in emergency or high stress situations. It kept telling me to climb to 6,000 feet for one thing. Since I was physically incapable of doing so but I didn't want to turn IFR off, ATC repeated its "please climb to 6,000 feet" instruction probably 20 times in a row. Also, right in the middle of my desperately flailing away with the controls to keep from crashing into the darkness, ATC would demand that I acknowledge its instructions, which you can only do by hitting keys on the keyboard. There is not even an attempt by Microsoft here to simulate how real ATC would respond if you called them up and said, "I'm in huge trouble. I think I might die. Please help me." For complex reasons that I don't understand, the Cessna would often sink to as close as 200 feet above the ground while almost stalling, in this weather. Other times, it would get a seeming jolt of energy and be able to climb up to 1,200 feet for a while, which kept me barely alive. The strength of MSFS graphics plus VR really shone through here, as I could see tiny houses with their lights on just below me, helping me avoid total visual disorientation. You can see one little house in the middle of this screenshot: Despite ATC doing everything in its power to murder me, and despite autopilot not working because I was constantly stalling, I finally managed to get within 1 nm of the Bonaventure airport. The only problem was that I couldn't actually see it. What happened next can probably be best described as a fish flopping around on the ground and accidentally falling back into the water. While violently pitching from one angle to another, I magically saw the runway lights show up right below me when I was at an almost-stall speed. Miraculously, I managed to nail an almost perfect landing. I won this round. Final scene:

Absolutely true. I am digging into my first several hours of real ground school coursework, and am pretty fascinated by the idea that many of these concepts make complete sense within the game alone. I have not been climbing in the sim correctly. I have not been descending or landing correctly. Dealing with cross winds? hahaha! My knowledge level about the engine: about the same as my fluency in the Greek language. Didn't even know what a magneto does--much less what two of them do--until this course.

I can't help you with the technical info as others have, but just wanted to chime in to say that I'm not sure I am happy I paid for premium-deluxe. It depends on your personal simming habits and preferences I suppose. I am a Cessna 172 loyalist, so having the few extra planes that are not Cessnas is fine for toying around with now and then. But I still mostly fly the 172. So why did I pay for the others? And if I really want others, I can buy them individually as add-ons anyway? Same thing with the few airports you're buying with premium-deluxe. Maybe you do really want them. My habits turned out not to justify them though: I either fly to (a) very random, obscure places around the world, or (b) places with connections to my personal life, including my city where I live. Neither benefits from the MSFS deluxe airports I guess I bought. I still haven't flown to most of them--or even any of them? I don't even remember which ones they are. What did I pay for exactly?

Yep. Per this 2018 article, a brand new Cessna 172 goes for a minimum of USD$369,000 (£262,146). https://www.flyingmag.com/story/aircraft/cessna-172-still-relevant/

Steve, if you persuade me to get a G2 after I've already purchased the Quest 2, I'll probably get divorced faster than Aptosflier. Maybe we newly divorced simmers can team up and join a flying club one day. ;)

For the sake of your marriage, there really are reasons not to get one right now. When you hear me say it's amazing, you're only hearing that about the flights where it properly works: I invested many hours figuring out how exactly to configure the Oculus to work with MSFS. The Steve Jobs principle of "it just works" is nowhere to be seen here. You can see from Microsoft's forums that there are people who owned their VR headsets for weeks or months and had just given up on MSFS, before discovering an obscure post sitting on the forum that happened to exactly describe the exact settings everything must be configured to for it to work. Once, in an effort to keep retooling the headset to be perfect, I screwed something up with the entire setup of my PC and I couldn't even use it, for any software applications. I literally had to re-install Windows and start over to reboot the PC as though I had just gotten it from the store. I have to reboot MSFS multiple times just to get one flight going with VR working correctly. If it was a short flight, that means I have to start all over, multiple reboots included, to get the next flight going. Mid-flight, I have had to change from VR to 2D because something went wrong with the headset. This happens maybe 15 to 20% of the time. I can't get too hooked to VR because the technology actually won't let me: 2D is less buggy and I often finish flights in 2D that started in VR. Long flights? I am not about to sit around for a few hours with a VR headset over my face. Yet, if I take the headset off, there's a risk that the VR session will get screwed up. I like to get my real-life work done with MSFS flying in the background, so for these times I am using 2D. The resolution is pretty darn good, but I feel like it could be much better. If I can one day see Ultra-settings graphics in VR with the same resolution I view in 2D, I might literally become hopelessly addicted and lose my marriage and all my friends. But it's not there yet. My expectation is that 2021 will bring improvements to these and other issues, but who knows if that's true or not. And will there be a new VR headset produced by a company that beats out the top products out there right now (Oculus, and the G2), in 2021? Maybe. It's going to happen sooner or later.

Don't get me started on the legislature and its ability to conduct "investigations" on diddly squat. :) As for an IRL plane, I do admit that I googled how much planes cost and ended up staring at the computer screen for a solid 2 minutes without blinking. Good lord. A flying club seems much more realistic for someone in my position, who will not be investing in this hobby interest for purposes of a career but just for the sake of a hobby. I mean, literally, a forty-year old Cessna 172 goes for the same price as a brand new Porsche. At least if I ever pitch the idea of a Porsche to the wife, she could drive it too!

My understanding of the logic behind this is that it relates to the preferences of what I will call hard-core realism-simmers versus newcomers to the game. Newcomers don't know diddly squat about flaps or even about taxiing. It would be frustrating if you are trying MSFS out for the first time in your life to be stuck staring at a gas pump for 45 minutes while you figure out how to navigate to a runway. Then, 45 frustrating minutes later, you crash 30 seconds after take-off because you didn't set the flaps. The average response might be, "Screw this game. Call of Duty is better." The "fly-now" option is primarily designed for this person. More experienced simmers, and certainly real pilots, might prefer to more realistically simulate the situation. Some people prefer to get into the plane "cold and dark" just as it might be sitting in the hanger in real life. For those people, you have to check your flaps as part of the checklist before taking off. No judging here, as I am somewhere in between those camps, partly because I just don't have time to simulate all the realistic aspects of a real flight, every time I take off.

That's great info, thanks. I will dig into this further as you suggest if it's the route it looks like I might be taking.

I appreciate these details and have a question about the way yours or other flying clubs operate: Since you charged yourselves per hour, does this mean you were typically flying the plane somewhere for day trips only? It seems like flying it to New Mexico for the weekend, for example, would make this whole arrangement not economically worthwhile, no?