Here in FAA-land it’s going to be fairly subjective. All you need to do to register your backyard grass as an airport is submit a form with self-provided information, including annual operations. That’s it; no survey, no inspection.
It’s not until you try to get FAA Part 139 certification (which allows certain kinds of air carrier operations) that you have to meet a long list of standards.
Here is a list of Part 139 airports. There you’ll see some classifications, but it’s more based on the type of air carrier traffic they’re certified to handle and the number of passengers.
More to the point, the sim needs a stronger rubric as to how they should be classified. It’s all kind of worthless from a GA perspective as we can use airports large and small, thus the size classification system doesn’t even really make sense on its own. One thing that would help immensely is to be able to use the SDK to classify an airport as public, private, military, or joint-use with an additional independent flag for air carrier certification.
Oh that’s some very interesting data. Thank you for the link!
The FAA is great. So much data you can get from the for the US. Such a shame it’s harder in other countries. You would think Europe would be even better but sadly I find it even harder to get good data without paying money, or I just haven’t found the right agencies over there.
I’ve spent some frustrating hours after working my way up to buying a PC-24 trying to find a cargo mission between two airports appropriate for that plane. I gave up finding anything in Europe. And I thought I had one in N America but the runway turned out to be too short.
I’ve used every career add-on out there and they all provide a way to filter missions to find appropriate ones for your aircraft. Copy any of them!
I see two aspects to improving this -
Filtering available missions (which Jorge has said is coming, great!)
Generating missions based on the filters
I.e., the filters won’t help if no missions are generated that fit them.
Filters I’d like to see at a minimum:
Runway length
Mission distance
I think with this bare minimum, assuming enough missions will always be generated to fit those filters, things would be a lot better.
I also google mapped Bear Valley, Bear Valley. In real life, it would be totally doable in the Vision Jet without scaring VIPs to death.
However, the trees in the sim are super high in comparison to the bushes the real Bear Vallley has on approach. I am going to post this as a specific bug so they can track it.
I honestly wonder if, after all this publicity, the owners of that private, PPR strip are going to see an increase in the number of requests to use it once the snow melts.
One mission I had the plane spawned in the woods.. I had to try and taxi between trees to exit the woods and get to the grass runway… It did not go well.
This has become a major pet peeve of mine. Like many of us, I like to use simbrief for flight planning and B-ATC, but the airports that the sim chooses (especially for cargo routes), are often obsure farms or tiny grass strips that are not recognized. Not only that, but if I choose to fly at night, none of these airports are going to have lights (posted about this before).
It’s just feels like there needs to be some more rules for the algorithm to follow or something to ensure that the routes that are generated are a little more realistic. No cargo pilot is going to be flying in to Eustice’s Farm at 2am.
The career mode can be so rewarding, but for now, free flight seems to be the only way to play without becoming frustrated with the career mode design (I know this is not an original opinion, but wanted to re-voice it here).
Do you only want to fly cargo? I ask because VIP missions are going to larger airports, most of my VIP flights have been to places like KTEX, KAUS, KJFK, KPBI, KMIA etc. I had the same complaint about cargo missions airports but after SU1 I’ve been happy with the VIP flying. Plus I get to fly the same planes, PC12, PC24 and also the Cj4. These also pay about 2x what cargo missions pay
The reason I chose cargo is simply because I couldn’t stand the cheesy aspect to the passenger stuff, even with voices turned off, and didn’t realize the payouts were that much better. I have a PC12 and the 408 on cargo, and only the TBM on charter. The TBM VIP’s only seem to generate about 1/3 of the payouts of the typical cargo payouts on those two airplanes at best, so I assumed the payouts weren’t that much better.
If that’s the case, I may have to add a PC12 to the charter co. and do passenger missions instead. Thanks.
Totally agree. Just be very specific what you wish for, knowing Asobo, next time you know, you’ll be flying helicopter agricultural missions from KJFK…
Agree with OP. Just FYI, there are some pretty big threads on this already, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets merged.
But yes, they need to make more realistic airport pairing considerations for just about every career modality. And the World Hub needs to open soon so we can actually make many of the airports useable.
Running those right now in the PC-24 also – if the approach is clear I can get it down on a 2500 foot runway pretty easily, 2000 foot with a headwind. And the stall speed is supposed to be 85 knots, hopefully they fix that in SU2. Just don’t skip to descent
Also was enjoying doing Longitude missions in Neofly 4 – hope they get that working in Career mode soon (faster, longer range).
What this game really needs is mission FILTERS though, including on runway lengths.
I thought the SU1 might fix it, but even though I bought a faster plane (PC24) for my cargo business, I still have missions going to and from airports that are too small, like the bush trip.
It’s impossible to adapt the missions to the type of aircraft. However, I’m sure that in real life there are freight transports to ‘important’ airports!
Honestly, as much as I liked the career, I’m starting to get bored.
Its even worse then just small airports it will assign you to land at a helipad, and there is nothing in the mission briefing that tells you that you need a helicopter for this mission. I think more information in the Career mode briefing is needed.
This thread had me thinking of alternative ways to solve the problem of unuseable airports. Obviously, it’d be best if all airports were properly built in the sim, and vetted for use in missions with appropriate aircraft. However, with 40,000+ airports, that’s a very large lift and until that happens, there may be another quick and easy way to fix this:
I created a wishlist that could allow for a kind of “invincibility mode” by moving the official mission start to later in the process, like an extra check that would happen after you enter the aircraft, well after the scenery and aircraft loads. Nothing prior to that can count against you and you have freedom to make observations about unexpected eventualities with the airport, aircraft, or weather.
So tired of these small airports that can’t even be found in Simbrief… its boring. I want to fly out of large established airports for any type of mission if I choose to do so.
