My Fun Career Experience of the Day was my attempt to get the Passenger Transport Turboprop ATPL endorsement (I don’t remember what it’s called). The golden mission was a multi-hour flight in the PC12 to Nice (France).
So many opportunities to hear the mispronunciation /naɪs/ (rhyming with ice),
instead of the correct pronunciation /nis/ (rhyming with fleece)!
So I plan my flight in LNM, as I usually do, copy it manually to the EFB, and get going. I do my passenger briefing during taxi and notice that someone has put the wrong dialog there. Asobothesda jank. Everything is fine, I’m slowly getting used to the Primus Epic, I even find out how to zoom the navigation map (I can’t believe that’s how it works on the real thing, but who knows).
Halfway through the flight, I get the “you crashed or something else went wrong” sound effect, a black screen, then I’m back in the air close to my departure airport and I’m told I had to be brought “back on track”. I ragequit, as I do so often when using MSFS24. I try a flight, I run into a bug I can’t circumvent, I ragequit, fire up XCOM2:WOTC and shoot some aliens. On Veteran difficulty, of course – Commander difficulty would just add to my frustration.
A few dozen dead aliens later, I try the same certification again. This time, I don’t touch the route, the altitude, anything. I fly like the mission wants me to. I occasionally turn on the blue rectangles to make sure I’m where the mission wants me to be. Halfway through the flight, I hear the dreaded sound effect, my VR display goes black, I’m “back on track” close to the departure airport.
For the first time since I started flying in career mode, I use Alt-N to skip the cruise phase of a flight and skip to “Descend”. The Primus Epic doesn’t remember some of the stuff I set up, and while I recover, something happens and, again, I’m put “back on track”. Wait, what? Nevermind. I tell my passengers that we’re flying “at an altitude of and a speed of and the temperature is” – yes, all the variables in the dialog string are missing, thanks, Asobothesda. I descend and fly the approach.
I lower the gear at an appropriate speed (I don’t remember the numbers, but I checked the placard before I did it), which is fine at first, but then the barber pole comes down, puts me in the red and my co-pilot tells me that we must have forgotten to put the gear up after departure. Whatever. I land, taxi, park and shut the plane down, expecting a devastating rating.
I get -13% (yes, a negative number) for not following “Airline procedures”. Apparently, I missed two ATC transmissions, I only remember one that was pending when it put me “back on track”, so I didn’t have a chance to respond. I mishandled the landing gear. And I got put “back on track” twice, so the overall rating was a solid C. A successful day after all!
