[Official] Community Fly-In Friday: New Zealand

[SeedyL3205]

We will be hosting an Official Fly-in alongside a group of community members (you!) on Twitch. This is an open event, free to all who would like to fly along with us and available to pilots of all skill levels. The goal is to have a great time, explore new locations of the world, and make new friends. This event is open to pilots on both the PC and Xbox platforms.

Hosted by @SeedyL3205, @Jummivana, @Pieter2427, @simtom2, and @zkdos

When: Friday, February 24 @ 1900Z for two hours.
2023-02-24T19:00:00Z
Where: The Official Twitch Channel of MSFS

There will also be a Discord event channel open for those who want to voice chat with other members of the community.

Please see below for details on the upcoming Fly-In Event:

FLIGHT DETAILS

Kia ora! We are thrilled to release World Update 12: New Zealand on Thursday, February 23. To celebrate this release, community member @zkdos, a citizen of NZ and IRL airline pilot, has prepared a beautiful flight plan over the South Island (Te Waipounamu). Come join us as we explore some of the most picturesque scenery to be found anywhere on the planet, and be sure to download the new World Update from the Marketplace in advance of this flight!

Pilots on PC can download the .pln file below:
2023-02-24 New Zealand.PLN (9.0 KB)

We will be starting at NZHK. Please load your aircraft 10 minutes prior to take off and taxi over to the runway in preparation for departure.

AIRCRAFT

Recommended aircraft: Beechcraft Bonanza, Beechcraft Baron, Diamond DA62, or any other plane of your choice that can maintain a cruise speed of approximately 170 knots.

MULTIPLAYER SETTINGS

Please adhere to the following settings so you can see everyone / be seen by everyone.

Variable	Setting
Server	SE Asia
Multiplayer	All Players
Live traffic	As preferred
Weather	Few Clouds
Time of Day	Daytime

It is advised in this flight to turn off both aircraft collisions and terrain collisions. If you do crash, you can use “slew” mode to join the pack. If the pack will be too scattered before the first stop, we will use slew on a defined point to regroup.

COMMUNICATION

To communicate with others, a voice channel on the "Official Microsoft Flight Simulator Discord” at https://discord.gg/msfs will be available to join.

LET’S FLY

This is meant to be a fun and informal flight. Everybody is welcome, no matter the amount of experience.

[TONYDARKZERO]

Looking forward to this one

[ElkanDavid]

Looking forward to the NZ update, and no better way to celebrate and explore than with a community flight!

[HybridNZ]

Enjoy all!

[NZAviator6456]

@SeedyL3205 when does the update go live? It’s the 23rd here in NZ

[Pieter2427]

Usually around 2200Z

[DHAUK]

How do i add or view the flight plan as an Xbox user?

[thorung]

I usually get the waypoint names or gps coordinates from the pln file above and type it manually on xbox. I would upload the converted txt file but as new user, I can’t.
This might help.
2023-02-24 New Zealand.txt (1.7 KB)

[DHAUK]

Thanks will try and do that

[kenniekayoz]

I’m also a Xbox user, the best way to add the flight plan is to start with the two airports since you need your start/stop destinations. After that it’s just really guessing about where to add your own pins comparing the map they give to your own tv screen.

To add your own pin in Xbox just click a location and you’ll get 3 options which right now I just can’t think of since my Xbox is off but the 3rd option is “add” which is the option you want since it’s basically adding a pin. Like I mentioned it’s really 99% guessing for what they have and what you have for example you can see when I did the Community Fly-In Friday: Galapagos Islands I streamed the entire thing including me laying down the pins:
Community Fly-In Friday: Galapagos Islands @MicrosoftFlightSimulator - YouTube

I did the same with Suez Canal but got lost on that one when it came to flying
(Community Event) Suez Canal in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula - YouTube

[AdrianKSFO]

Hey, its looking like WU12 did something to the PLN file. Might have to recreate it.

EDIT: It turns out Navigraph was causing this issue. If anyone wants to partake in this fly-in and you run into this issue, try temporarily removing the Navigraph folders from your “Community” folder and see if that fixes it.

[SeedyL3205]

Hello @AdrianKSFO,

I can’t re-create this. The original .pln file is loading properly and working as expected for me (see screenshots below, taken just now with WU12 installed). Are you possibly using any addons that could be affecting this?

[AdrianKSFO]

Yup. Appears so. I disabled my “community” folder and the plan loads up fine. My addons are all Marketplace items, FWIW. I guess let my post be a heads up then?

EDIT: It turns out Navigraph was causing my issue. If anyone wants to partake in this fly-in and you run into this issue, try temporarily removing the Navigraph folders from your “Community” folder and see if that fixes it.

[Homerun795429]

Nice work sir, looking forward to the possibility of MS one day creating a way to import plans on XBOX, think it’s possible? Probably not is my gut feeling. Maybe you can shed some light on how to enter GPS co-ordinates on a Garmin, I have figured out the flight plan computer for the most part, but not adding locations that aren’t an airport/waypoint/etc.

[SeedyL3205]

@Homerun795429

looking forward to the possibility of MS one day creating a way to import plans on XBOX, think it’s possible? Probably not is my gut feeling.

We’ve sent this request to the devs before specifically so Xbox players have an easy way to import .pln files shared by other players, but it doesn’t look like it’ll be possible due to the locked-down security on the Xbox console. It’s certainly a change I’d really like to see at some future point, though.

Thanks,
MSFS Team

Edit: generally when I create flight plans for Fly-In Friday events, I try to keep the number of waypoints relatively small (and limited to airports and marked POIs) so Xbox players can easily create the plan by hand in the sim.

[kenniekayoz]

I would have to agree with @SeedyL3205 I don’t see the MSFS team having the ability to import files like that on the Xbox due to it being more of a lockdown system, since if you can do that who knows what other things users will try to import, it’s better to keep the high security the system has.

As for adding waypoints/pinpoints as you can see

Microsoft Flight Simulator - Prep Work For Friday New Zealand Community Event

I decided to goof around with things, while I don’t have a headset so you can’t hear me but I set the from and to airports then you’ll get a bit of a pause while I go and grab my tablet since I clearly wasn’t planning to do this and didn’t have things prepped properly so roughly around the 11min mark I clearly have my tablet and booted up to this MSFS site looking at the screenshot (above) you can see I’m trying to set the first point being just above the letter A in Ashburton to set the point you tap the “a button” on the controller, as you can see the first few times things kinds of jump to the bottom of the screen and appear not to be working, I’ve learned that’s the game telling me that I’m zoomed out too much so you’ll see me zoom in more and I’ll click the “a button” at which it’ll give me the menu of 3 items being:

• set as departure
• set as the arrival
• add
  I chose the 3rd one “add” and you’ll see the pin will get placed I did that a few more times as well setting pins where I thought would be close to what they are shown on the screenshot, however, at the bottom of the screen they have (above) they clearly have a few pins that aren’t shown because you can see how the flight plan kind of gets a bit screwy but it’s blocked by the information box about the airport that they have chosen to land at.

As for GPS coordinates I haven’t played around with the GPS at this point, I’ve wondered if it was added into the game for us Xbox users to play with or was omitted due to it being more complex to use for the system.

Hope that helps all my fellow Xbox gamers

[ZKd0s]

For any users having this problem, see Navigraph’s fix here that requires a redownload of the latest AIRAC data from the Nav Data Centre.

[AdrianKSFO]

Hey zk, thanks for the link. That fix was for the previous instance this has happened. The current AIRAC cycle 2302 r1 is still broken after WU12. There’s an ongoing thread on the Navigraph forums where it looks like they’ve acknowledged the issue but are still investigating.

The best thing to do right now is to move “navdata” and “navdata-base” out of the community folder when trying to load a PLN file created before WU12.

[DHAUK]

Thanks for this