When I fly, my inner Walter Mitty likes to have a reason. It’s usually air taxi or small load cargo. Today I combined the two for a multi-leg run. I started out at Dominicci in PR with a load of “bat juice.” From there, it was a short hop to Rohlsen on St Croix to pick up a few cases of “pirate nectar.” After that, I had some party lovers wanting a ride from St Barthelemy to Maho Beach where they heard there was a way to get free drinks. One more quick hop back over to Princess Juliana to unload the booze and the booze hounds and I was done, with the sun just about to set.
So all that got me thinking… What to y’all have running through your brains when you fire up the sim? Are you up there just for the sake of being up there, or is there a mission of any sort?
Depends on the day. A need for scenery, to learn a new plane - on repeat until familiar, a photography challenge, Career mode mission, to test a forum comment, to just mess with speed.
I always have a reason for my flights. Sometimes it is just sightseeing. Other times, nostalgia flights visiting places I’ve been too in real life. Or I see screenshots posted in Community Content Hangar > World Photographer & Screenshots & think “That looks fun - let’s go there today”.
Then there are flights uploaded by others - e.g. the excellent flight plans by @RegentFalke4131 :
When each WU or CU is released, there’s a usually a good two weeks worth of flying seeing the new sights & POIs right there.
Ever since MSFS was originally released, I’ve never had the problem of wondering “What am I going to do in MSFS today?” The world is a very big place, and MSFS is one of the few games that encompasses all of it.
On the contrary, I have more flights in my “to-do” folder than I have time to fly!
I always have a reason to fly, sometimes I want to get some cool shots of a plane/heli carving up a canyon, some days I want to practice my IFR skills and look for a location with bad weather to fly into and do an approach. Sometimes I’m trying a new scenery or a plane.
Sometimes I like to say “man if I made it big would I buy a phenom 100, Cj3+ or a PC24” and then fly them to places around the country I have friends or family just pretending to be so rich I wipe with 100 dollar bills. I’ve also played airline pilot and crossed the Atlantic. Just whatever catches my minds fancy that day.
Sometimes I mirror real world routes, A few weeks ago I flew Cathay Pacific flight 831 KJFK → VHHH, my longest to date at 15 hours 14min.
Imaginative! It depends on the day and flight for me as well. If I’m going in the sim purely to join a group flight, I usually imagine that I’m with a group of pilots all putting on a display for the passerbys below. If I’m on a solo bush flight, I almost always imagine I’m camping out and hopping around finding the best spots to stop and have a fire/sleep for the night.
Back in the FS9 days, I would take the stock Caravan Amphibian and fly to a lake somewhere and land, then motor up to the shore and imagine camping overnight.
I also sometimes dream of something like a PBY Catalina with the interior modified with a kitchen/living area in the front compartment, a shower and toilet in the middle, and a bed in the rear between the two bubbles. I could fly anywhere in the country and never worry about where to sleep!
It varies a lot for me. Sometimes I don’t have any goal other than wanting to fly about, but I also have long multi flight challenges for myself like round the world expeditions, and I use the SayIntentions Sky Ops missions for search and rescue at random places, which keeps it interesting. I have set up my own search and rescue missions using Parallel 42’as Campout Utility - I will set up a campsite at a random point without noting the exact location, then attempt to find it visually from a nearby airport.
I did try using chat GPT to build a fictional charter company, it worked for a while tracking aircraft location, revenue and costs but after about a dozen flights started messing up. Revenue would fluctuate from fight to flight, it would struggle to remember my previous flight and aircraft location. When I’d call it out for forgetting it would show me my last few flights including ones I never did. So it would probably be fine for a digital dispatch but I would have to manually keep track of aircraft location and revenue/costs in a separate spread sheet
