I agree that there is alot of items to be addressed - I do enjoy both for what they are – MSFS a WIP and interested in seeing how it unfolds and Neofly as a more polished approach (currently).
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Glad the wind sock bug returned from 2020, along with my trust issues. 
That RC runway tho. Amazing!
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NO on “stop generating missions for small airports”.
Yes to “Filters missions by …criteria”.
Better solution to the Small Airport problem is to tune the mission generator to have the proper plane allowed on the proper runway length.
It would not be difficult. Simply have each plane be given and attribute for the length of runway needed to take off fully loaded. Compare it to the length of runway and exclude any plane that exceeds it.
Personally, I like the small grass runways in GA planes…so I would really be disappointed if everything is on some 5000’ runway.
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Me too.
But runway required is not a single number for any type, or even instance of a type. Take-off and landing are different and both will vary with for example altitude, pressure, temperature, wind, adjacent obstacles The calculation graphs for this stuff in aircraft POH are mind-bending.
Th UI could maybe provide a warning, or a suggestion, but being too prescriptive will lead to the opposite problem for marginal cases.
I still think it’s the pilot’s responsibility.
Edit: Also plenty of runways have displaced thresholds - so different lengths for landing and take-off.
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Yes, and surface type, slope, and contamination all factor heavily as well.
It does not need to be that detailed.
Takeoff is always the decision maker. If you can land and not take off…that is not an airport you should fly into unless your plan on making your airplane into a Camping trailer, right?
The margins based on temperature and air pressure can be factored out. They are small enough that you can add a 10% margin.
You are right though about the altitude, that would make a substantial difference, but that would be programable using the known altitude and adjusting the takeoff distance by a percentage that corresponds to the altitude. For example your C172 at 5000’ feet needs 3% more runway, at 10000’ 5% more runway. I don’t know that is the actual amounts but it can be determined.
Point is they can ball park it with a pretty simple program of calculations.
This is wholly untrue. Please don’t state this as fact. There’s so much wrong with this that I don’t even know where to begin.
I’ll start by saying that density altitude (DA) is one of the biggest killers in aviation. There are several reasons most light aircraft don’t fly into mountainous airports during the middle of the day. An airport might be nice and cool in the morning, but the temps can rise up to 20-30°C as the day goes on and DA at the airport can go from, say, 6000’ to over 10,000’ pretty quickly,
This will change your aircraft’s performance significantly - less air for the engine to turn into power/thrust and less air for the prop to work with. Because the air is thinner, for any given true airspeed (TAS), there is less indicated airspeed (IAS). This means your groundspeed is going to be a lot higher to produce the lift necessary to takeoff and land, and that chews up a lot more runway, widens turn geometry (which leads to overbanking and stall/spins), and flattens climbs and descents.
A high DA could lead to a 15-20% longer takeoff roll (or more), but worse, it significantly reduces climb rate - to the point where once you get out of ground effect, you might not be able to climb. The book numbers on a 172SP at 6000’ pressure altitude go from 480 fpm at 10°C to 420 fpm at 30°C, another 15% loss, and that’s just at the airport elevation - as you climb, you’re immediately getting into thinner air.
Now, factor in weight - are you taking off with the exact same weight as which you landed? Did you take on fuel, cargo, pax?
There’s also runway slope and surface, surrounding terrain and obstacles, changing winds.
Suffice it to say, when it’s marginal field conditions with marginal performance and/or changing environmental conditions (which they do throughout the day), you can’t just ballpark it. You have to do the work. There are a lot of pilots who are no longer with us because they thought it wasn’t a big deal.
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Dude…its a simulator game, not real life.
If you are going to get into that level of detail, then you would need to have the players pass an actual PPL before you even let them play the game.
Yes, you know your reality of flying…I know all that as well…but MSFS is not designed to be a Flight Simulation Trainer. It is a game.
I hate to tell people that because I know it causes them to be repulsed with “it is not a game, I don’t play games, I am using a simulator!” Whatever… It is a game…and it definately can filter down to a reasonable level the proper planes on the proper length runway without being a certified airline pilot trainer.
And besides…so you would rather just have all of the small airport missions removed instead of having it more tuned to accomidate them?
I’ve spent the last month helping educate people on good (sim) ADM. Look at all the threads with people complaining about not being able to make it into the field. No, I don’t want to just take away all the tough fields - I want people to know how to figure it out and when to walk away. I’m providing free education and resources, for whatever it’s worth, in an attempt to make peoples sim experience better and/or more realistic.
It doesn’t help that the career mode environmental conditions are unclear (I’m working on testing this as well). And it would certainly help more if the sim did all this work for you, but it doesn’t, so here we are. This either ends up with 1) status quo where people just have mixed results, 2) the small fields being removed or ignored entirely, 3) the sim getting its act together and giving people the correct information they need to make decisions, or 4) people learning how to get it and make decisions on their own. In the absence of #3, I’m sticking with #4 (prefer a mix of 3 and 4). But as you said, this is a lot of education, and it obviously doesn’t reach the right amount of people (and of course, the result is nebulous with a non-captive audience).
Meanwhile, people can continue to ballpark at their own risk, then we can continue to have these discussions that end up with everybody being frustrated for reasons most don’t seem to understand.
In all these threads (rightfully) complaining about winter winds and weather, I keep saying “wait until DA becomes a factor this summer.”
If we’re playing “hard-mode,” getting close to real-world performance and environment, then education is key.
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Look …I commend you on your passion…not being patronizing …seriously you put in some work and your here being involved.
I am puzzled though that having such a detailed response now, that it is very odd that you titled your thread as a Binary Choice…“STOP generating…”
There is not much middle ground for details there…and I am trying to open up the middle ground for IMPROVING it, not stopping it.
It’s not my thread. I didn’t vote on it. I don’t want them to stop generating missions on small airports, at all. I do want there to be more sense about it and better filters and choices for mission selection and aircraft, but that’s a different thread.
I’m just saying the way it’s setup right now, education is key. Even if someone doesn’t fully understand how to flight plan and use ADM from start to finish, at least maybe they’ll understand that it is complex in the real world and the sim is actually doing a decent job replicating the risk, in spite of the things it’s not doing well.
In light of that, maybe folks will err on the side of choosing a much more hospitable airport and conditions until it gets better, but don’t just take away the small ones.
To add: yes, other aesthetic and obstacle/pathing improvements need to made to the small airports so that they are useable - just waiting for the world hub to reopen so we can resume doing that.
Well I apologize on assuming it was your thread.
As to the education…yes agree. Myself, I love to learn the right way…its fun for me. And most of it comes from my own research or from watching competent people do videos or other ways of providing information.
But I also realize, I am a minority. The vast majority of people who play MSFS are not doing that. You can tell because the sites where such educational activity online have very small views and follows.
The majority of people are just gamers and this is another game, a simulator game. And whether I like that or not, they pay the bills so I think the Game has to accommodate them.
We probably agree on some of that…
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I think we do mostly agree on our stance in this thread. I’m very focused on education and I want to get the right information out there. It only costs me my time and energy. If people want to learn, great, if they don’t, that’s fine, but I have a hard time when that happens and they complain about things they clearly don’t understand.
In the end, that’s not their fault, that’s on Asobo - they created a modality that is forcing people into realism and situations they’ve never experienced, and they did not provide the right resources to make people successful in that regard. And of course, they’ve also provided a forum that allows people to be free to complain (actually promotes it, in a way) about all the things they don’t understand (along with things they do), and all the consequences that come with that.
Simmers should be given ways to work around it (maybe with commensurate normalization of earnings), but for those that don’t want to, that want to get to a level of understanding that they can do “hard-mode” successfully, every time, I hope I can help.
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User choice.
It all comes back to this for me and I don’t understand why the career mode seems to have been designed to be so restrictive.
We should have enough missions generating with different criteria that we can just take what we want.
Right now pretty much EVERYTHING in the US that I see either departs or arrives in a “minor” airport, IE one that doesn’t start with K
For me PERSONALLY I hate this because what I enjoy most are procedures, charts, etc, and those don’t even exist for these airports. Half the time the airport can’t even be found by Navigraph/simbrief
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Absolutely.
What I want to fly varies, depending on mood and time available.
Mostly, I dislike the things you enjoy most. I don’t use Navigraph or Simbrief.
But sometimes I’ll piece together how, say, an ILS approach works and fly that.
There is already massive variety in the missions available. Just not necessarily in every location.
For anyone not finding missions they want to fly I suggest opening up more of the world by either flying a mission there (free travel provided), or transferring yourself (you pay, but on the scheme of things, it’s peanuts) and the gold first specialisation missions give you a free toehold often on the other side of the world.
Larger airports tend to be more common for higher level missions (which is kind of logical).
My current focus is VIP charters, and some areas (my little bits of S America, S Africa and NZ) there aren’t any.
Whereas in UK everyone wants to fly to Glasgow EGPF or Southampton EGHI: both not difficult with SIDs, STARs and ILS (but icing conditions in Scotland were a problem yesterday). Lucrative but for me kinda boring.
In Europe the traffic is often to tricky Alpine areas or require high-level Alpine transits that are ill-advised in C172.
I like this variety, but it means you need to know some of this before committing to an aircraft purchase and taking advantage of the always-free delivery anywhere you want. Although passive income seems to generate even for planes that are located somewhere without missions suitable for their type. (I have a SAR Cub in Scotland that I’ve never been able to fly but is a nice little passive earner).
So for me personally, the mission generation is fine. I just need to be flexible where I fly to avoid weather and availability problems. And patient to move on to major airports.
On top of all the small airports, there are also all the CLOSED airports. I FINALY got some VIP missions to pop up in the US for me, and all three of them want to go to 33NR - again a tiny airport in the mountains. Also one that has been CLOSED and removed from the books.
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I like to use ForeFlight when flying in MSFS24, and it’s so annoying when the airports are the little private strips that aren’t even usable or open in real-life.
Backcountry and helicopter stuff, absolutely use those - that’s realistic! But when I’m doing charter missions to private/dirt/closed strips in a PC-12, when there’s an airport available 2nm away with an ICAO code (The one’s that start with “K” in the US) it’s quite frustrating.
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Indeed I’ve gotten to the point now where I check Navigraph first and if the airport isn’t listed, I won’t do the mission. But that’s tedious, and frankly it really feels like a good 90%+ of the missions in the US go to airports that don’t have the K designator. Not sure the right terminology, I call them podunk strips 
Hmm, point taken, but there are a lot of planes flying out of many of those “podunk” strips in real life. One of the bigger determining factors as to whether it can get a “K” ICAO prefix is if it has a weather reporting station. With nearly 20,000 airports in the US, about 8,000 of them public, you can see why that’s not always economical or necessary (especially if there’s already one with a station nearby). I chuckle at the notion of Petaluma (O69) being considered “podunk.”
Also, it’s no guarantee that a four-digit LID is any better, as many of those are also small airports. It’s only the “K” prefixes that are a relatively good indicator of size and/or amenities.
I’m sure there is a lot that goes into it. From my POV it is mainly that if it has an ICAO identifier then most likely it will be in Navigraph, though even that isn’t a guarantee and in fact many strips without the “K” are in there too so I’m probably just talking out of my rear end 
Bottom line is I just wish there was a way to filter the missions to only shows ones that meet criteria we choose, like airports of a certain size, though I don’t even know how you would classify that in the first place. In a project I’m working on, we have airport data form a source that identifies “small_airport”, “medium_airport”, and “large_airport” in the data but I have no idea what that is based on, and it probably isn’t anything official.