I’m doing Career Mode (Hard) [have yet to advance sim rate - and never will] // Currently I manage and own “Be There Air”, a fleet of three PC-12s as a Freelancer Cargo Medium Company. One is operating out of the Midwestern U.S., one in the Pacific, the other on the Rim. So far, the PC-12 has been okay: only aircraft that ■■■■ works dependably and can take-off and land just about anywhere at 800,000 - 1,200,000 credits a flight.
Main gripes so far:
Often the next mission is at a different airport, so you are taxed a relocation fee. I was tired of flying two of my airplanes in the continental U.S. - so I took on a 600k credit Transfer Fee to operate one out of French Polynesia.
Flight planner often uses IRL PERMANENTLY CLOSED airports, otherwise sent to a field that has no lighting, markings, instrument approach - or even a place to park. Goodness knows if there is even a motel nearby for my pilots to sleep.
Wonky grading system and terrible “beyond the pains-of-the-underworld” ATC structure. I would give anything to be given an IFR Clearance and Release Time on the ground. Plus, you never have to acknowledge ATC “radar contact” IRL. I often take the hit on “Airline Procedures” because I refuse to deal with whatever “expert” developer responsible for Career Mode’s ATC. ^They should have hired a professional pilot as a consultant at least for a couple months.
What I’m enjoying most? I started my Career out of the Japanese Islands and now I’ve managed to operate from Russia all the way to Down Under on this side of the world, making notes of where I will IRL go on vacation next.
WHAT I LEARNED and I reported last week as a bug: Don’t try to adjust elevator trim using some keys like SHIFt-8 or SHIFt-2 like I did. A small amount of trim works OK but If I use too much then my cockpit viewpoint suddenly moves down to the floor and I lose all control of the elevators, so I crash. Reputation hit badly and lost all the time I put into this flight.
No other settings have been assigned to these key combinations. Yet it keeps happening.
FYI: After you logged 149 hours of actual flight time, you can no longer accumulate any more logged hours in Career Mode [the only mode I’ve played]. After several missions my “Flying Hours” are frozen at 149.
I learned that, while career can be a lot of fun, missions are not suited to all the planes in a company catagory or sometimes even any. The cruising altitudes and airfields they send you sometimes just don’t work with the plane you fly the mission with. Sure, I am completely new to the genre, but at least give me a hint that I should not try to fly the plane I got with the specific mission I want to fly.
My number 1 tip for career mode is to start a Firefighting company to protect your reputation bonus from the oddities of Cargo and VIP Missions. If your rating ever drops below S, 1 or 2 Firefighting missions will soon get you back up to maximum earning potential.
Beware though, even though the flights are short,sometimes the default set up leaves you with not enough fuel to even make it to the fire.
I did two missions in career mode and learnt that free flight is way more fun and haven’t gone back to it since and probably never will. I have a good enough imagination and fly with a virtual airline, that’s all I need.
Landing clearance may be for different runway than filed.
I learned I have to re-check my radio calls to check the correct runway to land on, and then either request a different runway, or land on the one I have clearance for, otherwise I get that “Undesignated Landing Area” markdown.
Sometimes the procedure tracking in a flight gets stuck: just today I made a Caravan cargo flight that got me to a destination with an RNAV approach as per filed flightplan. But short before arrival, it got stuck and I had no options to change procedure/cancel IFR or anything.
What actually “worked” was to land, take off again (as the taxi/hold short/shutdown options didn’t register either), and after take-off I got the usual VFR ATC options to select a runway for landing => that landing properly registered, with hold-short etc…
Loving career mode.
It is putting me in interesting situations I would never dream up for myself.
Examples: Dealing with icy conditions in the USA. I had to play with the air vent and heating controls in my C172 to stop the windscreen from fogging up, and stress about the wings icing. Or having to take-off in hot and high conditions in Denver (real weather off ) and I had to circle climb for 20 minutes to get above the mountains in my C172. Also having to pay attention to the wind direction when I land and/or listen to airfield ATIS, and verify if the clearance I got corresponds to the desired runway.
Having great fun flying, despite the difficulties to get some missions and confusion around passive income.
All the measurables are easy to achieve 100% in firefighting. The flights are quite short once you learn where to drop and put out the fire first time. The radio interactions are minimal so not much to ding your reputation with if you can land smoothly.
I’d recommend Florida for firefighting. Surprisingly therea are no missions in California.
yeah, Ive been doing this for the last 2 days - all I can say is thank you
this is the best tip for career mode.
to give back, I’ll add what I learnt doing this…
do this as an employee, you aren’t doing for money (ok, rep/xp),
they pay rubbish anyway… so not worth risk to crashing your own plane.
skip every step you can - this makes it very fast.
again your only after xp/rep, you’ll get max S, and about 300k exp (!)
put out every fire with your **initial drop load ** , no scoop - if you miss restart.
if anything goes ‘wrong’ - restart - you only want S rank!
keep speed up for fire attack (100 ish)
you’ll need some speed to manoeuvre after drop.
mission brief - free cam is your friend !
you can see the fire location and terrain , so can plan which angle to come in out, and how you are going to come out after drop.
you can pick n’ choose the missions, some can be challenging…
Ive had some fires that are a pain to get close to AND then be able to pull out after… others have a long glide path, so are trivial.
I learnt this the hard way, as first one I chose, proved to be in the ‘challenging’ category
Ive found east coast Australia is a great area, starting around Sydney.
theres 5 or 6 there in 2 ‘circles’. - also you can extend up n’ down the coast and theres a load more if you need them.
what I also like about these missions is, as well as being great to ‘top up rep’, I do lots of landing … so great time to improve those skills too.
also, whilst I skip to ‘grind rep’, they are quite nice flights to just enjoy, with the fire side as a twist.
btw: Ive only been using the ‘initial attack’,
Im not sure if it’s worth doing the ‘extended attack’
I need to check this out… though given the initial attack is 100% S, and quick I cannot see it being better?!
Been doing career mode almost from day one. It’s been rocky but seems at a reasonable good place now. VIP company flying the Vision. Has been rock solid. Am level 112 at the moment. Did try the twin Diamond thinking more seats/more credits but does not work that way. At least for me. Sold it and kept flying the Vision. Also did try buying multiple 172s and using the crew option but got hit with the mission outage and did not work well (for me at least) so sold it and back to one aircraft op. Found the northeast US area pretty good. Fairly easy to get 100K plus credits. I do use the Alt-N option for taxi in and outbound. The vision does a pretty good job IFR and the autopilot works well. I do use the sim rate feature when I get good weather and try to cancel IFR as soon as I can to reduce the back and forth with the subpar ATC. Enjoying so far. Looking forward to improvements.
I only use alt-n for taxi if the taxi instructions include crossing a runway before getting to the official Hold Short point.
I also love flying the Vision Jet although a 3hr flight was ruined in the last 15 mins by the ATC and ILS approach instructions going out of sync and leaving me with a -13 Airline Procedures score, because the only way to fix it was opting for a non planned VFR approach into Teterboro.
Don’t do my mistake. Always check arrival airport. Just now I’ve got a mission on B737 and after a very long flight I realized that I am arriving at… helipad!
And one more thing to mention for those who fly missions on 737: you will never get more than 75% for Airline Procedures unless you don’t press File plan with ATC button on EFB after receiving approach instructions, BUT! There will be a very high chance that if you click this button you will CTD within a few minutes after that. Good luck.
I’m over level 200 and have unlocked everything. I bought a Saab 240 for 11 million so I can fly heavy cargo. But there isn’t a single heavy cargo mission in the whole world, neither as an employee nor as a freelancer. Thank God the career mode is completely broken. I also don’t understand why there are so few planes to buy in career mode, because the ones that are available are mostly broken.
) and I had to circle climb for 20 minutes to get above the mountains in my C172. Also having to pay attention to the wind direction when I land and/or listen to airfield ATIS, and verify if the clearance I got corresponds to the desired runway.
