I completed tutorial #7. It’s a relatively long tutorial, something like 24 minutes and I would say the best way to succeed is to FIRST practice, practice, practice the required landing at the end of the tutorial flight at the Flagstaff-Pulliam airport. You can do this by taking off from Flagstaff-Pulliam in free flight, slewing around until you’re just before the downwind turn into the base leg (the “y” key option), resort to flying again, and then save an .FLT file while pausing in the air to allow you to spawn in the air repeatedly and practice until you’re familiar with useful landmarks, the right time to reduce throttle, increase flaps, etc. The trickiest part of the landing is there are some very tall trees on the final approach. It’s a very long runway (for a Cessna) so you can easily overfly the trees a bit and still have lots of room to land. By starting at the end, you’ll also learn something useful about the elevation of your destination (Flagstaff) relative to your starting point (Sedona).
In the actual tutorial just do the climb out from Sedona to 5800 ft, then do a 180 and head back over the center of the runway to Munds. Click the timer Start as the AI instructor advises. I have airport tags turned on in the Options, Assistance, and all the needed markers show up in the sky. Arriving in Munds by the golf course, the AI instructor advises to follow the highway, which is off to the left (343 deg heading). I reset the timer and started it again as advised. But for the longest time on the way to Flagstaff, the objectives still said I needed to follow the highway (I was flying parallel to it) and I still needed to reset the timer, according to the objectives list. Within a couple of nautical miles of Flagstaff-Pulliam, I decided to fly directly over the highway rather than just closely parallel to it and I think for good measure I may have reset the timer yet again. Maybe just because I was getting close to the airport, the Follow The Highway and Reset the Timer finally went out and the Downwind Turn objective appeared - I was flying parallel to the runway on the left in the downwind leg and with all the earlier practice flying around and landing at Flagstaff-Pulliam from that location, it was easy to recognize where I should be relative to landmarks and then complete the landing and after waiting, waiting throughout the 22 min+ trip to Flagstaff, I wasn’t suddenly surprised by the tall trees at the end of the runway on the final approach, screwing up, and then having to redo the entire 22 min plus tutorial again. You have to taxi a bit down the runway towards the control tower (on the right) before the AI instructor will give you a thumbs up (which came just as I was beginning a turn into a taxi lane near the control tower).
One other little thing is that the base altitude of the Sedona airport is about 5,000 ft. That of Flagstaff about 7,000. So if you just trimmed the aircraft out of Munds, pointed it in the direction of Flagstaff, and decided to take a 15 minute coffee break, you’re probably going to meet some trees well before the final approach to the Flagstaff runway. I have a terrible sense of how far down the ground is in the sim but I managed to climb to about 8500 to 9000 ft on the way to Flagstaff to feel safely above the ground (maybe there are some higher points than Flagstaff in between?). So if you fly by the seat of your pants like I did, you might want to descend to closer to 8,000 ft or less as you get within a few nautical miles of the Flagstaff airport so you won’t be dive-bombing the runway on your base leg and final approach.
Another weird observation is the Cessna throttle is a lot more quickly responsive in External View from behind the plane rather than in cockpit view. So during much of the base leg and final approach, it’s easier and faster to adjust the throttle from External View and just switch to Cockpit View for the final glide down (the END key will toggle between the two views). Perhaps all the instrumentation in cockpit view bogs down computer response. Turning on the cockpit dome light (1st toggle switch on left in switch panel under pilot yoke) also helps see the instruments a bunch more clearly as the tutorial is apparently taking place between about 6:10 to 6:30 pm local time - it’s pretty dusky by the time you land.
The tutorial #7 flight between Sedona and Flagstaff with associated elevation uncertainties makes learning to use something like LittleNavMap and associated navdata all that more appealing to me.