On numerous occasions, carrer missions, such as employee medium cargo or employee medical transport, require takeoffs or landings on airstrips that are not suitable for the plane used.
It is therefore necessary to research the aircraft performance data outside of the sim and then check both airports for suitability.
One of many examples that I found - a flight from UKMD (length: 1304ft) to LKDR (length 1178ft) using the PC-24. According to its Wikipedia Page, the PC-24 requires a minimum of 3091ft or 2408ft respectively for takeoff and landing in good conditions.
Thus, just over a third of the required runway is available for takeoff and slightly less then half the required runway is available for landing.
Obviously these limitations can be pushed in a simulator, but pushing the limit to this extend leads to loss of credits and reputation. This leads to more dissatisfaction with an already flawed carreer mode.
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
The issue occurs on noumerous (sometimes more than 10%) of the missions available for medium cargo. For medical transport, this issue has occured before, but no investiagtion was undertaken.
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:
Load into the carrer mode
Open the mission map view in employee mode
Scan the available missions for medium cargo for unsuitable runway lengths
YOUR SETTINGS
If the issue still occurs with no mods and add-ons, please continue to report your issue. If not, please move this post to the User Support Hub.
What peripherals are you using:
[PC Only] Are you using Developer Mode or have you made any changes to it?
No
[PC Only] What GPU (Graphics Card) do you use?
Irrelevant
[PC Only] What other relevant PC specs can you share?
According to the developers themselves, this is “by design.” My thought is that the intention here is that, just like a real-world pilot, you must first research and understand a potential “job” before accepting it. This isn’t a great example, but if I’m an Uber driver and someone at an off-the-beaten-path campsite is looking for a ride, I should probably not take my car there if it can’t handle the terrain. Will the service allow me to take the job? Maybe. Will it result in a good experience for me, my car, or the potential passengers? Probably not.
That being said, I do think there’s some conflicting answers from the dev team on this matter, considering the SDK explicitly calls out that performance data for required runway length must be included with aircraft to be Career compatible, which to me implies that they do not want to pair missions with airports that cannot properly support the aircraft.
Furthermore, there tend to be times where it seems like all the missions for a given aircraft type are unsuitable for that aircraft. This feels more like a bug to me, but again, they have officially said this “issue” is “by design” so I’m not confident this will go much beyond its current state.
I see your point Zadma but am still hoping someone brings this up again for a discussion at a Dev session. Some airports are at the end of very long missions which by my way of thinking should match an aircraft that can in the first instance actually fly that far and should therefore have sufficient runway length to accommodate a plane that is obviously going to need a longer runway.
This is just common sense after all. No-one is going to fly a 172 for 5-7 hours to deliver cargo to a short runway.
Conceptually speaking I understand what you said in the first paragraph.
Yet, given the abysmal mission UI and the lacking data availability inside the sim for the planes and airports, this is 100% a bug that has been deemed too much effort considering the easy excuse.
I think the argument is that they shouldn’t/aren’t intended to. The only reason that would happen is if you didn’t properly research a flight and chose a flight with an inadequate runway, and that’s the consequence.
Again, not fully sold on that as the intention, but it’s the only logic I can apply to “By Design.”
To put into words my reason to consider this an issue, even by design:
I have tried to enjoy the carreer mode a lot. There are many issues, especially with the helicopter side. I want to complete a few medium cargo missions to reach the large cargo missions. Yet, It is hard for me to find medium cargo missions that are not on questionable airstrips.
Manually checking every flight I find requires navigating the clunky UI for both the mission view and the EFB in addition to high load times. I enjoy spreadsheet games, but usually there are more moments of success. Checking a mission for 5 minutes while having to use external tools and data and then finding out that the mission is not suitable is bad game design.
