This is a good discussion, lots of good points. I like being assigned to smaller airports, when appropriate. I want them to continue using them as they provide a lot of variety and can be extremely appropriate, given the right mission and conditions. I don’t like it when they’re unusable because of errors/obstructions in the in-sim airport rendering - that’s a problem in and of itself and we’ll need to be able to fix them in the world hub, otherwise they need to go entirely.
But in terms of how the mission generator works, even when they’re rendered correctly, continuing to use small airports leads to several problems:
Obviously sometimes the airport is not appropriate for the mission and/or the aircraft. One one hand, in the real world, this is a pilot decision - we should be checking whether our aircraft performance meets the restrictions given by the runway configuration, combined with the environmental conditions. This is part of the required preflight actions in the real world.
However, to that extent, there has been no proper, official education on that, and the tools provided in the sim are not yet adequate for doing it on our own. On a side note, I’ve been trying to help educate (independently) and have been hosting a series of streams to help show folks how to do all of this manually.
The second part of this is that the missions generator is not really aligned with assigning proper aircraft or mission types to airports. For instance, VIP charters to Bear Valley, an extremely high-elevation, low-use, private airport owned by a ranch, are not appropriate. Wait until summer, when the density altitude is above 10,000’ and you’re trying to takeoff in a 172. Either way, once again, no education. There’s a post I made regarding this buried in another wishlist item for allowing more types of aircraft, but it will probably take some flagging of airports, maybe even runways or parking spots as suitable for certain aircraft or even mission types.
In reality, you should just reject those missions. But that leads to the third problem:
The missions list and map has insufficient controls to sort and filter missions. There is a good wishlist item for this as well.
What this all leads to is frustration, especially for the uninitiated. A major missed opportunity. The education needed to make proper aeronautical decisions surrounding flight planning, aircraft performance, don’t forget weather, is like half of the content you’d receive from a CFI or ground instructor during the ground portions real world training. And it’s a firehose of information and data. Simmers have been thrown to the wolves in this regard and I completely empathize with your frustrations.
In a perfect world, all the preflight, flight planning, airport, aircraft performance and weather data would be available in the sim, we’d be taught how to interpret it and make good decisions, and the generator wouldn’t seem so random and detached from reality. I will tell you this, though: the information is there, as long as the weather and airport rendering matches live reality - you just have to know how and where to get it, how to analyze it, and how to make the decisions on your own.
