Thanks for this. I’ll check out the SDK link.
But a question I have is: Do you need to start with a flight plan?
What if I just want to spawn at an airport, and fly ‘somewhere’ landing at an airport I see along the way as I sightsee. After landing, will saving as a .flt allow me to come back the next day and start my next freeflight C&D, state saved (ignoring the time/weather limitation for the moment.)
Yes we do. It’s a fundamental part of aircraft safety and planning in real life, along with complying with height and speed restrictions around airports. The most basic details are from/to.
Of course, you can train for good landings by spawning at a certain cloud or practice takeoff for 5 minutes until a safe height, or practice IFR/VFR stuff.
Hmmm sometimes the ‘to’ part of the flight plan for me is just about 3000 feet I really can’t help it but there are days when my brain suddenly says: “boring” and I can’t help myself from shutting down the sim mid-air. There needs to be a way for the persistency modes to just ‘undo’ the takeoff or something haha.
I understand. But my thread is about the freedom to take off, land anywhere without a flight plan, and click a button to start a new flight from that spot, C&D, state-saved.
The universal EFB looks promising. It’s pretty easy to choose to or from and drag waypoints freely on the map e.g. Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty and back to LaGuardia.
If you get bored, try to land in the Hudson and survive. It can be done!
And the EFB can run in a browser like your phone/tablet.
It would be convenient for those who wish to follow all those restrictions. I heartily disagree that it’s a preferable alternative to the career mode, though. Unlike that, it restricts you to a single plane (or else persistence is pointless), closes you off from the rest of the world, (no TPAC or TATL from a bush strip on a Comanche), offers no progression and, most important, you can already impose almost all of these restrictions on yourself already. Add persisting maintenance, fuel etc. and we’re golden!
They said on the last stream that the flight planner component can be accessed via browser. The EFB itself will not be usable via a web browser or tablet. See https://youtu.be/EIMWb5dSZU0?t=2248
Yes it will absolutely do what you’ve described there, that is how I use it. I guess you do need to start the very first flight at an airport initially, but all subsequent flights loaded from that saved .flt will simply start exactly how and where you left your plane when you made the save.
In terms of the planning it, you could create the initial flight plane with two airports that are very very far apart, so that at least when you load the flight plan back up off airport, the ATC state is saved and you’ll be able to continue to communicate with ATC and it will remember your flight plan so far.
Also, on the comment about a real flight plan always being required, sure that’s a good practice and what is taught to everyone getting a PPL. But in truth and practice IRL, many bush pilots who are landing at a private or off airport location will simply not file a flight plan. It is NOT required by the FAA for VFR flights conducted in visual meteorological conditions (VMC). You can even pick up flight following without filing a flight plan and ATC will just create one on the fly and file for you. Not saying this is the best practice, but it happens a lot I’m sure.
In fact if you’re landing off airport you’re almost always going to be in an unrestricted airspace, so it isn’t as if you’re going to cause any issues with ATC by not filing this. Always a good idea to file a flight plan, but you can’t even do that in sim, in fact the only part of this in MSFS that is simulated for a VFR flight plan is doing exactly as I just described; getting airborne and then asking ATC for flight following, and then they file the plan for you. Kind of ironic.
Ah a slight technicality, which wasn’t clear in other videos.
The Working Title flight planner with web interface runs as an app within the EFB. With fuel and runway calulations it will be a great tool on a tablet.
The cool feature is that the EFB integrates with the avionics system in the plane. Hopefully providing a flight plan the MCDU or Garmin widget can load.
Roll on the 19th.
Btw I have an inbuilt bias to the challenge of IFR.