BLUF: How am I supposed to plan an IFR flight when career mode forces me to fly to a small airstrip with no ILS?
In career mode on Xbox, most of the airports that I go with the Cessna 172 G1000 have no information within the EFB or the G1000 that allows me to plan an IFR flight. I literally have to fly in IMC and land blind.
I am not a pilot so I’m looking for guidance from you all. Thank you for any help and I hope this is not a dumb question.
There’s a great thread that details how you can get some better weather information out of the sim before you take on a mission:
You can use that to avoid flying into places where you can’t perform a visual approach.
However, if you need help getting into a field without a published approach, try loading the vectors to final into your G1000. The destination should be programmed in already from the mission’s flight plan, and then you can just hit the approach button. You can get lined up with a glide path to follow or put into the autopilot.
If you wanna fly a bit more like a real pilot then you’ll have to do the proper flight planning. As mentioned in the reply there are ways to do the weather planning, but here is something you can do to descend through a cloud layer and not hit a mountain or a building:
To start, if you are flying on an IFR flight plan it will most likely be made up of waypoints that describe an actual IFR route that is charted. In the US they look like this:
A chart like this helps you to find the minimum altitudes that are safe to fly. On an actual airway between waypoints you will see an altitude number (sometimes with an asterisk) that denotes the lowest safe altitude along that route. You can learn more all about it on YouTube, I would recommend Flight Insight. But to start off using it in a simple way, you could be flying above the clouds on an airway near the destination, and then descend down to the minimum altitude charted to get below the cloud layer, and then navigate below the clouds directly to the destination (canceling IFR). This is the only safe way to do it without an instrument approach procedure, except for if ATC is giving you vectors and altitude directly, which in career mode they don’t really do. You can find IFR charts like this on Skyvector.com, just select “World Lo”.
This is perfect thank you. I was able to do many missions with this guidance.
Thank you very much. I am now watching multiple videos on the planning process thank you. Your information was extremely helpful.
Welcome! A couple of other options to get below the clouds that may not be immediately apparent is:
IRL, #1 would probably annoy ATC but I think would technically be legal as long as you maintain VFR cloud clearances after you cancel IFR. #2 would be straight up illegal and would probably cause you to get your license suspended/revoked, and at worse would cause you to crash into an obstacle and die 
This whole thread misses the point IMHO, the sim shouldn’t assign you things you have to bend over backwards or “game” to deal with. It goes together with my previous complaint about getting PC24 missions into “Joe Bob’s backyard air strip”, it isn’t REALISTIC. If I’m flying cargo in a jet I’m not the mailman, I’m going to fly into an airport with a BUSINESS of handling cargo, doesn’t have to be big, but it sure isn’t some lonely strip out in the middle of nowhere.
I don’t want help that is, I want cargo career mode f’in fixed so it has some semblance of RL.
