Ah thanks, didn’t know that, haven’t tried the career in VR yet!
Not sure where it’s pulling weather from. It’s always been more or less randomly generated for me. It does not match Live weather. As such, I’ve been trying to use the in-game AWOS/ATIS.
Finally added the key bind to disable the visual assistance (the floating blue boxes and taxi arrows). And I also closed the objective window. Hand tuned the radio, used the ATC window for all communication (instead of pressing Enter). Then I hand flew a cargo flight by the book, got a briefing for the flight from ForeFlight, and used my actual checklists for the Skyhawk.
What a breath of fresh air not having any floating graphics and mission objectives up on the screen. Just the plane and blank sky and scenery up ahead. And taking responsibility for everything in the flight. I was worried the mission might be break or I’d get a bunch of penalties following my own plan, but passed with an ‘S’. We’ll see if this works on other mission types, as I’m assuming A to B VFR cargo runs are the easiest to follow your own plan.
You still can’t disable the hold short and parking stand boxes as far I can tell. I would love to be able to do that too, but for now this suffices. I’m assuming on some missions those are absolutely required as you can’t advance the mission objective without hitting those boxes.
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You are playing like I like to play in career mode. I have had a few missions to break playing in this manner. The mission wanted a visual approach, it seems, however ATC cleared me for a RNAV approach and the mission broke. I think if you dont ask ATC for any special clearance, you should be OK.
Am sure some people have noticed this already, but in the sightseeing missions it’s not necessary to fly through the boxes at each location.
There’s no minimum distance you need to be from the centre, and can get the 360 orbit done much quicker.
Thanks, I played with this some already and was taking penalties for flight seeing quality, but it might have been dinging me for altitude or inconsistent bank angle. I’ll try it again holding altitude but tightening up the circle a lot. For fun, I’m going to try it with no visual assistances either and see if it’s even doable.
I consider myself a casual simmer. I have maybe two hours a day for hobbies, so setting up and flying pretty much any aerial route is untenable if I follow PPL/CPL procedures to a tee.
I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that career mode wasn’t made for folks like me.
You think we know minimum altitudes for airport overflying, by heart? Or the max speeds allowed when using different degrees of flaps on each of the 20+ aircraft usable in career mode? Career mode expects that from players. PASS!
To be fair the flap speeds are posted somewhere on or near the panel of every aircraft…
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Not to mention both of those checks are utterly broken in many cases.
I imagine it’s hard for devs to know how to engage the widest amount of people and also be faithful to it being a simulator. It’s not a fantasy game - it’s based on real-world things, some more loosely interpreted and implemented than others. But they could take it to the nth either direction - let people fly however they want or lock it down so hard that it makes a CFI checkride look tame. It’s somewhere in the middle (and still full of bugs).
I’m probably not in the majority here, but I don’t mind that it has you stick to a semblance of procedure. What I don’t like is that it really doesn’t do a great job teaching it and judging it. There should be more of a ground school module. Granted, there are a ton of third-party resources and suffice to say, a lot of people are really taking to learning this stuff. Hopefully they’re learning it correctly - that’s the biggest problem to me and probably the hardest thing to overcome.
There should really be a handful of modalities ranging from “free career” to “hard mode” so people can come at it in the way they prefer.
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Ok, I just flew a First Flight with zero visual assistance and with the mission objectives windows closed. It went way better than I thought it would.
I planned the flight using ForeFlight and flew the POI circle by visual reference to the ground alone with quick glances back at airspeed and altitude. Per @BeardyBrun’s suggestion, I flew a tight circle like I was doing a turn around a point maneuver.
And surprise, surprise it worked flawlessly.
I think it helped knowing all gotchas and expectations going into the mission as I’ve flown this one a bunch already. But it’s vastly better with the arcade mode turned off.
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That’s a good point, yes. What really frustrates is how it flouts realism in some aspects and really sticks to it on others, and it’s hard to know which is which. If you want me to memorize flap speeds, 1) teach them -as you said very well- and 2) have me manage propellers and mixture while I’m at it, right? Or don’t do both. Career mode just chooses some weird hills to plant its flag at
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You absolutely nailed it with this post.
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100% - their biggest problem other the lack of proper pedagogy is the inconsistency in how it’s applied. And it’s probably the easiest to fix in the short term for a lot of gain.
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So, just free flight and you are up and flying faster and flying how you wish
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For the “you crossed a runway unannounced” warning, I wouldn’t be surprised if an appropriate “quick reply” function was planned, to facilitate that communication, but, apparently like quite a few other features, they just didn’t have time to finish it. They’ll have left the warning in, perhaps out of forgetfulness or just because they couldn’t be bothered. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they just forgot it was there. 
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Back to cartoon land. My First Flight POI was right next to KSUX, which I thought would make for an interesting flight using real life procedures.
So I had Sioux City Tower on standby. Only to discover in the air that the frequencies don’t match in the game vs real life. So I had to go through the nearest airport list. I grabbed ATIS from KSUX, but the weather didn’t match what was being drawn on the screen. I asked Sioux City Tower to transition to the Delta airspace, but was denied because the field is IFR.
Look at those IFR conditions:
/le sigh
Fool’s errand anyway as I could just fly right into the KSUX Delta without an issue or a “overflying the airport” penalty. Apparently I didn’t hit the target altitude either as I heard a couple complaints from my passengers, introduced as “Jessica and Jessica’s fiancee John”:
NIce job, John lol.
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Is that Bill Gates in the back?
That would certainly explain it. But not why he’s doing a sight seeing flight in a Skyhawk over Sioux City, IA lol
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The only thing I have seen measured on sightseeing mission is speed, altitude and staying within max distance of the point of interest - I would guess an extreme bank angle of over 30 would be problematic, but constant bank angle isn’t a requirement.