Key mods / addons / downloads for a new-ish flyer

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Morning all,

Long time aviation enthusiast (my dad got me FS95 on our first PC when I was in my teens). I’ve just come back to MSFS, my first sim since 98. Have put around 50 hours in so far in the Cessna, and have used the fantastic FSAcademy IFR course to get my head around instrument navigation (still have a few modules to do), and the superb LittleNavMap to plan flights.

My question is - what are the key addons that are recommended to improve the sim in the following areas:

  1. A study level aircraft that someone with no real flying experience can learn, but one that comes with all the required training material to learn from the ground up. I don’t own any study level aircraft, but typically do they come with a full training suite or there an expectation of prior knowledge? I want to really learn a single aircraft inside-out
  2. An addon for live traffic - what’s the current state of live-traffic? I see lots of multiplayer tags when flying, but have yet to see many real-time AI flights in my vicinity (and there certainly is in real life)
  3. I can navigate VOR to VOR, but I struggle with the approaches / departures from airports - I have spent some time learning how to read approach plates, but I don’t know where SIDs/STARs fit in, how to plot the course from my final VOR to the airport, and how traffic patterns work. Is there a resource that helps here - I am thinking of the FSAcademy VFR course as it seems like it will have the relevant content
  4. Any other addons you reccomend?

Thanks in advance!

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The sim is relatively new, so not much to choose from to begin with.
I’d recommend FS ACADEMY IFR if you’re up for a decent IFR procedures course.

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1 does not exist yet.
2 does not exist yet
since the sim is far from stable, many many updates and they break things, i play vanilla

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As @wcoesel answered above; no mods yet. I’m curious why you get no traffic though. Did you enable ‘live traffic’ in the settings? It normally takes a while to populate (generally, if I start cold and dark on the apron, by the time I’m ready to taxi other life traffic AI starts taxi-ing, taking off and landing as well). Maybe disable multiplayer traffic for a bit, so you’re sure all aircraft you see are live traffic.

The basic sim live traffic isn’t perfect yet, but there should be aircraft around.

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Thanks for the recommendation!

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Hi there,

I’m glad to see you are looking at FS Academy - VFR.
VFR covers all you need to know for visual flight, circuits, joinings etc.
FS Academy - IFR covers the instrument flying subjects of VOR/NDB/ILS/SID etc.

See here to learn more:

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Cheers all, and thanks Choon172 - already half way through the VFR pack now, fantastic work!

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