Longer thoughts on career mode after getting some sleep:
Overall, it’s not what I had hoped for, but it’s about what I expected. There’s no real way to correctly quantify airmanship or aeronautical decision making without setting up rigid metrics that are often antithetical to the decisions pilots have to make. In some places, it’s downright nonsensical, especially if you don’t meet the right sequence of hard-to-communicate/understand prerequisites. And of course, this being a global simulator, it’s an amalgamation of the various regulations, practices, and procedures you’ll find all over - it’s not going to be right for any one country, much less when you get to how things are interpreted and taught by individual instructors (or schools).
I get that.
Some specific areas in which the career mode could be improved, based on my interactions so far:
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Use of private airports. Many airports are not required to meet standards of the regulatory jurisdiction, thus not meeting standards that are set forth in the sim (regardless of how correct they are or aren’t). Things like trees or obstructions in the way, hard-to-find soft runways, and the fact that hold short lines sometimes (especially on soft fields and private airports in general) don’t exist. Heck, sometimes the airports we can select don’t exist.
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Use of AI-generated routing. As I mentioned above, the demands of the “customers” are quite nebulous - I’m having a hard time finding them to begin with, but when they’re revealed they don’t make sense or would be illegal in several ways. This results in the command decisions being taken out of our hands in order to “game” the system and garner reputation and credits. If I flew in real life the way the sim expected me to last night, forget reputation, my certificate would be on the line.
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Passenger banter and demands. The passenger banter is sort of okay - not totally unrealistic, and kind of funny, though it’ll get old. However, there’s no way to “hush” them when they’re talking over ATC or during sterile cockpit (big problem here). But where I absolutely draw the line is the unrealistic, consistent whining that we’re too high or too fast. That is the “E” - external pressure in the PAVE checklist that we’re are taught to mitigate or avoid entirely when making good aeronautical decisions. Basically, sure, they’re the customer and I will try to give them a good sightseeing flight where they want to go, but it is my call how we get there, how fast we go, and how high we go. There are many regulations and overall practices that dictate that, especially considering loss of power, etc, and I did NOT see any of that on display last night, which is SUPER disappointing. There should be more of a way to plan the flight on my own - to still reach their objective area for a requisite amount of time, but the route, altitude, speed, ADM, that’s up to me and NOBODY else, and if they don’t like it, too bad. We can’t manage their expectations in any way, and that’s a serious flaw. When I take people up sightseeing irl, there’s some serious briefing that’s done (and required!!!).
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Use of guide boxes and overall pathing. This is distracting. It causes a ton of tunnel vision and objective-meeting rather than flying the plane. I found myself out climbing the boxes because I know how to lean at high density altitudes. Also, are they fixed in space to the point where wind doesn’t affect them? If I have a strong headwind on climbout, you bet that increases my climb angle, and vice-versa for a tailwind. It makes for poor, distracted flying. They need to be turned off, but further, they need to not be so stringently enforced. And some of it is dangerous - the insistence of climbing 500’ above the pattern while still in the pattern is a setup for a midair. 1 mile wide patterns in a single-engine is asking for trouble. And either I interpreted something wrong or it is wrong, but it felt like the pattern at Sedona was asking me to stay at 6000’ (which is almost 1200’ agl) all the way to the downwind to base turn instead of a 1000’ AGL pattern where you start your descent abeam the touchdown point. That’s a setup for bad flying.
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Use of ATC. Sigh. First, we generally do not call taxi out on CTAF. Oh my god, hitting a dozen other nearby airports on the same freq with every taxi in and out call would be chaos in real life (and be heavily derided). Remove that, please. Takeoff and pattern calls, yes, and there should be an initial inbound call around 10 miles and another at 5 miles out. Second - the UI and interaction is wonky. The return key did not work half the time, and as I said above, the logic of talking to the class D tower whose airspace I immediately flew into when I departed the private strip is wrong and I got docked for it. There also seems to be this idea that we call the traffic for every airport we overfly - I get that for actual airports with CTAF, but for private fields or heliports that don’t have a published CTAF? No. There seems to be a lot of bad data with frequencies and how ATC in general is performed and if we’re held to that, it’s going to be a no-go for me.
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weather. Life ain’t always 29.92/1013. The constant turbulence and major updrafts I’m fighting (also causing me to go too fast for the pax) would actually make most newbie pax sick and throw up. I was laughing when they said it was so peaceful and they were enjoying the flight. Also, shouldn’t their perception of how fast we’re going be dependent on ground speed? What if we’ve got a ton of wind? Speaking of wind, it seems to be coming from random directions that aren’t usual for those locations (and might cause issues with obstructions, etc). I’ll have to confirm that with more testing. Either way, the takeoff runway was basically auto selected and there’s no attention given to slope, weight, wind, obstructions, etc. Again, as PIC at a non-towered field, runway choice is MY call, nobody else’s.
Oh, and on my PPL checkride the proposed taxi route went right through a parked aircraft. I went around it and got docked about 20% on taxiing. Forget that we never did a runup, checklists, anything like that. Forget that I consider it pretty good ADM to avoid parked aircraft. Nope, the rails dictated that I lose.
So no, I don’t accept getting docked for any of the above, and I think it’s counterproductive to do so, frustrating for all walks of pilots, and promotes bad flying and decision-making.