I think part of the problem is that the helipads are not yet added to the sim. As they are added they will start to appear in the world map. Jorg mentioned that the community can get in contact and send a list of missing helipads.
Helipads on hospitals are not always as easy to find information about.
Now that we got helicopters this would be the next big step to actually have helipads added to the hospitals and so on. It is really hard if not impossible to find a snowy helipad at a hospital where all the surface is just white as the helipad is just a texture drawn from gps data but not actually a rendered and modded hard surface to find and land on. Please consider this for the next update!
I had an email conversation with Sergio regarding Hospital Helicopter helipads Nav Codes where I had made the suggestion that he could post on his website asking the flight simulation community around the world to send him lists of Hospital Helicopter helipads Nav Codes where he replied he had tried and no one ever responded that they were very difficult to find.
So, within 15 minutes I had sent him many very long lists of Hospital Helicopter helipads Nav Codes with one of them for all of Canada, one short one for Portugal, several other ones for complete parts of the United States.
I will let Sergio tell you in conversation over a cup of coffee what he said after I sent all those emails!!
The Flight Community can help with lists of Hospital Helicopter helipads Nav Codes lists from their Countries and email them to Sergio from HeliSimmer.comhttps://www.helisimmer.com as everyone by now knows he has been quite involved in the Helicopters Development with Microsoft Asosbo for MSFS.
@HeliSimmer I see the World Hub is being developed. This will probably make it easier for people to add missing helipads themselves and submit to the hub in the future.
Would really be a big step forwards if we could get rendered helipads on hospitals to make SAR missions much more realistic. We already have some helipads added on buildings like in Dubai so I guess everything which is needed is already there. NavData is/was provided by the community so is the team working on this?
When making/flying SAR missions etc it would be nice to land by a local hospital, that might not have an official helipad.
It would even be very appreciated if we could just have all hospitals as a POI, ICAO or GPS coordinates - searchable in the sim.
It could even be a community thing, but we just need an option to be able to add it and share it.
For PC you could create your own and post custom POIs to flightsim.to, GitHub etc. others could then post using the coped from Google/bing maps or LittleNavMap.
Addons like the PMS50 allow GPS points to be imported from a txt file.
For XBOX players, simply making a PDF or similar available with the lat/long coordinates would allow them to enter it manually into the GTN430/530 which is more realistic anyway.
I believe it should, specially with so much more mission stuff coming up I can’t see why it shouldn’t be in there, versus
Flying over a great spot you want to use.
Try to find the excact same spot in google Maps.
Either cancel your flight, load some scenery you want to use for that particular spot etc etc, or write down somewhere for later.
It’s not “all of us” who have hospitals WITH a helipad, but we still want to use the LOCAL hospital, and of course these should also be searchable/useable in the sim pr. default.
Maybe we have to wait until 2024 comes to actually agree to how much easier a simple button would be…
You know pre flight planning is part of flying right?
Sure IRL pilots have probably already pre-input regular positions into their GPS. Hence my original suggestions.
If you check out flightsim.to there are plenty of downloadable POIs why not help your own band of SAR pilots out and start creating one for those hospitals.
As far as missions go, the current bush flights have their own waypoints for the specific flight so I can’t see the FS2024 missions being that different.
It’s not that I don’t like your suggestion. Just it’s too specific to be in the core sim. FS2020 is cluttered and slow as it is. We don’t need any more.
What’s difficult about using stock scenery where helipads exist in real life, besides the obvious lack of infrastructure for some, is that the terrain will often be uneven, trees will often encroach unrealistically, and as often as not, the helipad is detected as a building. I have to agree that a simple reference point and leveling, building and tree exclusion for each would work wonders. The hardest ones would be the ones on top of buildings.
Of course, the real kicker is that many don’t have an official FAA/ICAO code, so the sim has to make one up, which we’ve seen have pretty awful results with some airfields.
One big difference is that the mission is often just 1 flight out, then bring “something” to another place (patients etc) or go back to the helipad/end goal.
If you want to make a “more exciting mission” you often look for that particular place to set the scene.
As there were also suggestions to be able to save LON/LAT for other reasons, I see it convenient to use that function for different things.
Again: the need and wants of what the core sim brings is different from each person.
The reason the sim might feel “cluttered and slow” could be that it’s “full of other things” that others want.
It shouldn’t mean there isn’t room for such a simple thing as “copy GPS to text” to make other simmers happy?
