Curious how other people approach the ‘where’ of flight sim! I sometimes black out due to too much choice! I also started about 4 or 5 world tours that I never finished…
Do you have a home airport? Do you fly a world tour? Or do you pick a place at random that looks interesting?
Tours are brilliant to keep you on some sort of a schedule, and I always feel a great sense of accomplishment when finishing a tour too! They’re also awesome because you can find yourself flying to new places you’d never have maybe discovered before.
I’m pretty sure there are some very cool community created tours you can find online.
A few years ago I was lucky to get hold of the route details for the real world tour Iron Maiden made in a Boeing 747-400 for their Book of Souls album world tour! We replicated it in flight sim and even marked the difference between the real world flight times and our own in the simulator.
If you’re looking for some great inspiration for flights away from tours, I use FlightRadar24 to find some realistic flights that airlines are currently operating. Depending on my mood I’ll either randomly click on aircraft until I find something that interests me, or select an airport and look at the routes to and from that location.
Chewwy 
A couple of years back, I crafted a spreadsheet tailored for my World Tours, featuring at least one airport per country. Leveraging the TBM aircraft enabled me to access airports across nearly every country. Presently, many of these airports are marked off in my spreadsheet as I’m currently piloting the A320 for my latest tour. Some of these airports pose a challenge due to their short runways.
For me, embarking on a tour is the primary source of motivation to keep flying.
It is always a good idea to check the community Events.
Even if you don’t make it in time to a specific event/fly-in, you can always download a flight plan that is thoughtfully crafted and brings you to interesting areas you may never have thought of.
I highly recommend the “Bush Divers”
Each flight is very well crafted with lots of airstrips along the Route, and it brings you to breathtaking Vistas.
They have a noob friendly discord channel. You can join the voice comms for each fly-in just to Listen, or fully participate. It’s always a nice experience, and it never came to me that I have wasted my time.
Example:
It never gets old to fly around in a loose formation with 20+ other GA planes.
That’s awesome! The TBM is such a perfect aircraft for tours. Can cruise at pretty respectable speeds and altitude, but then happily land on a 400m grass strip runway. Here’s my spreadsheet example from a section of the Iron Maiden World Tour I flew a few years back. One of my viewers helped Iron Maiden plan their routings for the IRL tour and kindly sent me the details so I was able to compare the difference in block times:
That’s a good idea that you added the FP Routing to your spreadsheet! I think I will add that column to my spreadsheet for future flights. That may come in handy!
*I flew out of SPJC anyway, in the A320… I see in my comments the A320 has a max of 9,200 altitude for takeoff. I just now saw that elevation. Whoops!
Using a spreadsheet and utilizing the cell-range Conditional Formatting options that they provide can really help out with highlighting cells of info that are in violation of these kinds of red-flags. Time to set it up properly!
