Is flight planning going to get better any time soon?

Flight planning in FS 2020 is really tedious. FSX had a far more robust flight plan loading and editing menu at launch. How was this overlooked in this version considering there was something to base work on from the past version? My feeling is that FS 2020’s primary focus is eye-candy VFR and anyone interested in instrument flying using in-cockpit flight planning features is not catered for.

I’m getting a Microsoft Flight ‘superficial sim’ vibe right now as someone who is also looking for increased realism as well as eye-candy visuals. Please tell me I’m wrong because the lack of basic flight plan loading, saving and editing in the GPS instruments, or even something in the FS 2020 General menu system while flying says otherwise :frowning:

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Agreed. I tried to make a flightplan using waypoints and that was a nightmare of a fail.

SO many cameras and camera controls, and yet NOTHING to put in a waypoint on the flight planner, or to make a route and edit it. It is ridiculous.

And don’t get me started on the “where is the bloody NRST button” … and then selecting a different apporach after a TOGA just crashed the game three times.

It truly does seem that we have lots of new things to buy, but so many bugs that aren’t getting addressed … go to external view, come back to cockpit, mouse no longer works … EGSH taxiways backwards, Alpha is Delta and Delta is Alpha … Selecting an APP into the IFR runway results in a game crash … no NRST button on the Garmin … a map so useless I couldn’t even find my destination because the Stockholm archipelago has been drawn by a three year old child who missed out lots of islands and detail … taxiway blue lights stickong out of the ground in the middle of a taxiway … no replay … no recording while flying … game registers as a desktop app instead of a game so cannot register in Steam, nor in Radeon Gaming software (my main recording medium for YouTube) which also sees it as a desktop app instead of a game so no profile can be set, can’t be seen by Thrustmaster software etc.

I see all you mention too and I’m left with the impression that much of the focus was getting the streaming technology implemented to drive all that VFR eye candy, leaving not much dev time to ensure the quality and refinement of other features for UI/UX, navigation procedures, flight planning and IFR features. I think the intention was to fix all this in post-release patches. I also suspect all the things mentioned were pointed out in alpha and beta but it was decided to forge ahead and release anyway :frowning:

Just to make sure I wasn’t looking through my FSX rose-tinted spectacles, I fired it up and you quickly realise how much better the flight planner is in there. It’s available before entering the world, it’s available while you’re in the world and the Edit tab provides all kinds of quality-of-life tools that make interacting with flight planning much superior to what FS 2020 provides at the moment. I really hope this is on the list of things to address and isn’t what we’re stuck with.

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