I’m Level 175, only done Career Light & Medium Cargo, have 3 X 172, a 208B and a PC-12 all for cargo. I’m going to expand into Charter-VIP. I see the available planes are Cessna CJ4 & Longitude, Beech C90-GTx & 350i, Pilatus PC-12 & 24.
Having done many Medium Cargo missions, I understand that not all planes are capable of all landing strips or conditions. I would like a plane that can:
1. Land on all airstrips,
2. Spawn a good number of missions in the USA area,
3. Have the fewest bugs,
4. Have a decent credit per mission score, &
5. Have decent maintenance costs.
I’m sure a lot of forum members have explored this, and if willing, I’d like to take advantage of your experiences (before spending hard grinded credits on a plane).
PC-24, Longitude, CJ4, PC-12, all good in their own way, though again all have their own mini bugs and irritations. I would suggest you try flying them in Free flight and make a choice to best suit you. They will all earn more in VIP than cargo, also leave live weather on and you get weather bonus. Once you get to these, they all cost a lot to maintain.
The Longitude can fly the longest with best range but uses modern avionics, the CJ4 is a little of a challenge with different avionics in the beginning but is a nice plane to fly, the PC-24 has the same avionics pretty much as the PC-12 so that should be easy to slip into but it has its throttle issues and TOD issues down to final. PC-24 is the most expensive initially but is, with the CJ4 one you can buy 2nd hand and repair. Not PC-12 or Longitude - those will be new.
To examine maintenance costs for those that exist in used, click on them and have a look for yourself - honestly, its the best way so you can decide what suits your preference.
PC-24 and 12 can land everywhere and have shorter field capability, not the others (to my knowledge anyway).
Medium cargo missions are in short supply pretty much everywhere in the world for C208 up except in the USA and EU, South africa has a few. When you buy you will see in world map feint markers where the most missions spawn for the aircraft you decide on. Spend some time looking around and put your aircraft there.
IF you fly private missions those are only EU and USA - once you go to VIP there are a lot more of them throughout the world map.
I’m currently using the Cessna CJ4 for money grinding as I don’t have a commercial airliner yet. I mainly operate in the USA on my career. Base pay is anywhere from $1m-$3.2m per flight. From take off to landing with no skips and getting S rating on my flights, I’m averaging $6m per flight and 6m exp. With sim rate, a 1500 mile flight can be completed in less than 1.5 hours. 17 of these flights would give you the $100m needed to buy a brand new Boeing 737 for passenger airlines company. That is my end goal
WOW! That’s exactly what I’m looking for…and THANKS!
However, knowing how MSFS 2024 Career works…do we have to land a Citation on a short rocky cow pasture, or does it respect the proper landing strips? I know we have to pre-screen all arrival airstrips, but are there many reasonable runways available?
I really don’t care (yet) about giant airliners, I’m more about GA and rotor crafts. I’d like to squirrel away a few million credits, just for Career stability.
Many CJ4 vip flights go to proper airports. I like this plane a lot. No autothrottle though. The cdu teaches you to handle the 737 mcdu logic. So a great intro to airliners.
I’ve been flying all of these quite a bit, and my personal preference for ease and fun flying without bugs is the PC-12, it’s an absolute dream to fly. The jet aircraft are much faster though, so I usually use those if I’m trying to bring in cash. For that purpose, my favorite by far is the Longitude. As a non-pilot, it’s been the easiest jet to fly, has the most modern amenities, and most importantly it’s the one that seems to land easiest. The CJ4 felt antiquated, and for some reason I have a much harder time landing the PC-24 smoothly than other similar aircraft. I also noticed that I get a lot more “cow pasture” destinations with the PC-24 than with the Longitude, although that might have been with Medivac or cargo.