After close to two years I finally tried some of the bush trips but I’m finding them rather bland/dull. There is no planning, starts are hot on the runway, no fuel management, no radio, flight ends when you come to a stop, etc. It can be relaxing for a bit but not so much for the hundreds if not thousands of hours of routes available.
I think I’d enjoy being able to craft multi-leg routs from the world map with state saving way more. Also, allowing them to load into the world map to get a better view of the routes would be nice.
I’ve crossed US to Europe a few times in state saving community airplanes and that was way more fun.
I fly a lot of bush trips but I modify them with MissionChanger to enable live weather and multiplayer or switch aircraft.
What’s also fun is to load the PLN file into LittleNavMap, then change the parameters to what I want, like re-fueling adding ATC, checklists, weather etc…using BushTrip Injector.
Pretty much my thoughts. I’ve always seen the bush trips as a different type of adventure that is separate from regular flying. It doesn’t bug me that you start hot on the runway. After all, there isn’t much planning to do because it’s already done for you in the flight info screens.
It would be nice for an option to see landmark reference images to know what I’m looking for during the flight (many landmarks are easily mistaken for generic scenery), but that is a minor inconvenience and I can look on Goggle Maps if things aren’t clear.
BushTrip Injector? I figured there should be something like that. I didn’t want to have to go into the SDK to make content. I like the flight planning phase so that may help. The BushTrip system doesn’t really let you see the plan, maps, or any major details until you launch into the flight.
I have a solution for the hot starts. I usually do it anyway for my normal airplanes. Replacing the runway.flt with the apron.flt file does the trick.
I still hate the sudden end, it’s jarring in VR. I feel like I just got a CTD or crashed the airplane.
Even when flying bush trips by timing and finding landmarks visually there are several issues that are detrimental to the experience.
I still quit to menu after every leg. Contrary to all release notes, bush trip legs still don’t count properly against your flight hours. The only way to “fix” that is by flying each leg individually.
1.1. This is of course annoying as hell, you have to reposition windows, etc.
1.2. G1000 flight plan gets messed up very easily when starting any leg others than the first. You have to use Direct-To functionality so that it points to the proper one
1.2. VR windows get messed up all the time
Many bugs in the text descriptions and waypoints overall. From the roundabout 30 bush trips that are available at the moment, maybe one or two are without issues. Some waypoints are wrongly labelled, some have bad headings, text are wrong etc. Several bush trips duplicate waypoints from other bush trips, sometimes waypoints have an off-by-one issue. The list goes on…
Fueling. This has been changed countless times and is still not acceptable. It would be ideal if you’d had the option to manually refuel.
Weather. It’s always fixed. While I get that this makes it easier to recreate a certain mood or time of day it’s often really dull default weather, i.e. no weather at all.
No ATC or any radio chatter. It feels sterile.
Always the same planes. This got a little better with recently released bush trips but not too long ago it’s been always either 172, XCub or G36.
I still tend to do all the bush trips as I am a completionist, mostly the keep 100% in the menu. The one bush trip that I really loved was the California bush trip that has an achievement. The choice of route, plane and weather was just perfect. It had legs of 30 to 45 minutes in length, not those 10 minute jumps that you see in other trips. The Patagonia bush trip comes second, it’s been beautiful as well.
I agree that the Bush Trip POIs should be marked, such as the Discovery Flights are now doing. I have a problem with CRS which works intermittently during a bush trip. Some work most of the time, some never, and some off and on. None of these are from 3rd parties. I reported the CRS problem to Asobo’s Zendesk. Sometimes I can get it fixed if I crash and restart from latest way point. Sometimes the CRS is 180 degrees off, like a reverse flight, and sometimes a second intentional crash with a way point recovery will correct the CRS to match the Navlog. Bush trips are much nicer when CRS works.
I submitted a support request to Zendesk about this problem that I am also having. They will try to reproduce it. From what I understand, the more people who submit this problem the more likely they will review the bug. Anyone else having this problem, please submit support request to Asobo’s zendesk.
I’ve not experienced it myself but I haven’t done much in terms of bush trips since I created the topic. I did Alaska.
I’ve come to realize what I don’t like about the bush trip system is that I’d rather make my own flight plans. Examining the maps and making careful plans gives me much more awareness of where I am and what I’m seeing. I find it disorienting to just be dumped onto the runway.