Asobo isn’t purposely making them as hard as you are implying. Once you find a waypoint, you then kind of start over fresh to the next waypoint. If you’re close, you’ll see it.
However, the descriptions aren’t always great. Remember, these are French developers writing an English description for sections of the world they’ve never visited. I’m not totally surprised the Nevada trip descriptions are questionable at best. Imagine me trying to write a bush trip script in German for a flight around the Bavarian countryside. It wouldn’t be pretty!
i was able to complete balkans i had to go back one and redo the last leg then continue to the next then it counted. but now im doing patagonia and i did the first leg twice and it hasnt saved lmao
Strange as it may sound, that is how it is done in the real world. A map, a compass, and a watch are all that is needed to navigate an airplane.
Start with a map. Draw lines from one landmark to the next. Draw 10 degree drift lines to either side of your route. Calculate your heading corrections based on forecast winds and correlate your expected ground speed for each leg based on the crosswind component. Mark each route line with 10 minute ticks based on that ground speed.
While enroute, constant reevaluation of wind drift and ground speed needs to be done based on continuous position monitoring, by looking out the window and using the map. Calculate new ETA to next turn point and repeat.
Consider carrier pilots flying combat missions in the Pacific during WW2. Go fly a 500 NM search box out over the Pacific entirely out of sight of land. Spot an enemy convoy and go attack it. Run away from intercepting enemy aircraft, ducking in and out of clouds and flying an unpredictable route to throw them off. Then navigate back to your carrier. In some cases, a short range coded signal could be transmitted from the ship to assist the pilot in zeroing in on the position, Once they were in range. All this was done with careful planning and even more careful charting and plotting using a watch and a compass.
Nav notes are obviously only as good as the guy making the notes, but as a pilot that has flown 10s of thousands of hours in the bush with no navigational aids, one of the basics is selecting landmarks that are readily identifiable. Given that using a small town is acceptable as a landmark should give you some understanding that it is NOT necessary to pass directly over the same house that the designer intended. As long as you are within 10 miles of a landmark, an experience VFR pilot should be able to pinpoint their position.
In short @sparky0347, yes, this is how it is done. Turn off your GPS and grab a map.
I don’t generally fly the pre made bush trips because they don’t go where I want to go. I do, however, fly a lot of VFR bush trips of my own. I simply use a sectional chart and go fly. The best part of MSFS is that it allows for true VFR flying. In FSX it was impossible to follow a chart. Most back roads, rivers, valleys and landmarks didn’t exist or weren’t matching up with the real world. In MSFS it is accurate enough that real backwoods flying is not only possible, but often even a cabin in the woods is findable.
We finally have a sim that allows for true VFR chart flying.
While I agree the Bush Trip navlog descriptions aren’t always great, they are not badly written from what I have seen. In fact, the use of English is almost poetic at times. Very descriptive and like something from a holiday brochure (Similar with all the Landing Challenge texts etc.)
So I don’t think the problem is the French translation to English. It’s perhaps the choice of landmarks used by whoever built the Bush Trip - which may not be the same person that wrote the navlog script.
I had no problems following the Nevada trip from the notes alone, as landmarks were typically few and far between and therefore easier to find. I also used the heading and times to assist, with the built-in timer (stopwatch) at the bottom of the navlog, though I found I typically had to add 20% or so to the expected time as I was always ‘slow’ (perhaps you have to gun 100% throttle to hit their times). I got halfway through that one until it broke around SU2 or SU3 and was never able to continue.
For the French trip, I found it more challenging to read the notes alone - too many small towns lsited which are adjacent to other small towns, with no easy way to distinguish which is which. Too many river confluences to follow, when there are sometimes 5 branches to choose from in close proximity. For this, I decided to have LittleNavMap open (but with the aircraft marker disabled) and reference the town names on the map with what I could see out of the window, so I had a fighting chance. Also meant I could identify places and features that I was seeing out of the window as I flew, making the trip more interesting overall. Until that also broke.
Everybody is looking for a different kind of challenge, and some want to enjoy the flight without worrying about getting lost, so each to their own, but I have no interest in following the GPS course guidance or a magenta line - it’s not in the spirit of a Bush Trip
That said, I like the inclusion of the approximate route on the VFR map (when it worked!) just to give a general idea of the path to take. The other data on the VFR map isn’t really sufficient to navigate by anyway. (It’s almost laughable that they call it a VFR map really!)
Fingers crossed that the next SU fixes the Bush Trip, though I fear we’ll get no fix for in-progress trips - perhaps only fresh ones. It’s a shame that Bush Trip issues got little attention until they became almost 100% broken for all users though.
This is where experience in VFR navigation is key. There are tricks and “rules of thumb” that we have used for decades. The single most important and most relevant to flying in MSFS is “confirmation, confirmation, confirmation”. No visual landmark is unique. But three landmarks in the right spots simultaneously is getting close.
If I am looking for a river/creek junction and am flying along the river, there can be a dozen creek inflows that fit the bill. If I combine that creek with a ridgeline and a mountain peak or a combination of river bends and maybe a count of three creeks since the road bridge…
You get the idea. Find three or more confirmation points that you can use to confirm a landmark. If at all unsure if you are looking at the right landmark, pull out your map and look for other details you can use. Sometimes it is a road junction 3 miles at 256 degrees. Fly there and look. If it is there then find three tings to confirm it is the junction you were looking for. Yes? Then that landmark 3 miles back was the right one. Off you go.
NEVER trust a single identifiable landmark. If you can’t confirm it with at least three other identifiable features you could wind up lost, quick. No big deal flying over the flatlands but turn up the wrong mountain valley and…
FYI:
If you are at all serious about wanting to fly “unassisted” VFR, I cannot recommend getting paper maps, of the are you want to fly, enough. Drawing the track and turns and marking landmarks along the route is an absolute must, not to mention enjoyable.
All great advice. When using LNM as my ‘VFR map’ I can do just that - look for the general shape of river junctions, roads, even the ‘shape’ of towns, then figure out what the author was describing in the navlog reference to the map itself, rather than what I see out of the window - some small streams in-sim can be hard to spot when they’re in a valley surrounded by trees. But in conjunction with other features it’s usually possible to get your position. Then based on the map, figure out the next heading, what you need to overfly or pass left/right of, and then adjust course as needed.
(With LNM we are perhaps a bit spoiled by the fact we can even zoom in and see individual buildings in the OSM data, and match that with the building shapes seen from above.)
Terrain relief and contour lines on the map is another big help, in hilly areas. Especially to give yourself a distant target before the smaller details come into view.
I’ve always enjoyed VFR navigation. As for being serious about it; I’ve spent much of the last 10 years wanting to take flight simming more seriously, but lack of time & willpower in the evenings, and an eagerness to do some flying instead of reading/watching/learning about new topics, tends to result in my experience growing organically as my hopes & dreams wander with time
The name isn’t familiar, so I don’t think I quite made it that far before I got stuck! Some of the airfields were challenging to identify even if the route was straightforward. The airfield images at the end of the navlog certainly helped though!
I enjoy both types of bush flying. VFR Pilotage and Navigation aids. The problem is that pilotage and GPS both are broken in any bush trips at the moment. You don’t get a completion at the end of the leg. So it doesn’t matter if you are using dead reckoning, pilotage, charts, sectionals, GPS, Autopilot. Once you land, the leg completion is not being triggered.
For those of us who enjoy bush trips, that makes it frustrating. It needs to be fixed along with a myriad of other issues being reported by the community here about bush trips.
I would acknowledge if Bush Trips in general would come with an attached pdf document for preparing to the flight in advance. This could just be a copy of the Navlog, in an exquisite form accompoanied by the images, and it should include a map. Given all info is there as such, it shouldn’t be hard to produce such a pdf.
Aside one or two exceptions, even the Bush Trip Addons I bought came without such documentation, at best they included a (usually poor) map.
Maybe a clever soul could even make a tool to extract the information automagically to a pdf.
I like that idea a lot. It’d be nice to print it out to both remove all the extra information from my screen and for the extra immersion using physical maps and charts provides. Plus, for me anyways, it gets annoying when I use the mouse to update the VFR map which makes my rudders and stick quit responding until I mouse back onto the game screen, sometimes leading to a jarring yaw effect because my feet are still in the same position I started in.
(Similar with all the Landing Challenge texts etc.)
