One-sentence version: Recommanding the amazing tool: FSXPilot
Background:
For those who have more interest in sight-seeing than flying (like me), in order to get to the POIs, lots of time has to be spent on plane-handling, auto-pilot tuning, etc.
But the core problem is: I simply don’t have much time, and I just want to walk through the POIs quickly, without regard to earning any achievements. Is there a best way to do this?
Idea 1: Let the plane do the auto pilot itself.
But seems due to some glitches, after starting a bush flight, though flight plan is inside the plane, POIs are simply wrong, making the full-auto navigation impossible.
Checked other ways to import flight plan into the plane for auto piloting, but seems there’s no satisfactory solution for me:
- Loading bush trip pln file from “MSFS - World” page, POIs are still broken;
- 3rd party navigation sites/tools - either overkills or non-free.
Idea 2: Can something do the flying for me?
After quite some investigation and assessment, the FSXPilot has become my winner.
Here’s how to do the full automatic fly:
- After running fsxpilot (along with MSFS), Import pln flight plan file.
(I assume your know about pln files. And the pln files for each bush trip can be found in your MSFS installation)
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With your plane on the departing run way, “Run flightplan”, and Voila, the plane is driven by FSXPilot all the way up to the sky, including accelerating, retracting flaps and gears, navigating …
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To ensure the plane is going the right way, I personally like to open the same pln file in Little Navmap, and compare the desired flight path with the actualy one.
To gain more than just flying by:
See something interesting and want to know more about it?
There was a tool BushTalk Radio , which can auto pop up wiki page and read it out loud. But some short-comings have made it my secondary choice:
- POI trigger distance could be unsatisfactory, and you can’t actually do much about it.
- POI data is quite limited. Though your can join as a volunteer, but you will find free-account has daily limit too…
And today I have found and would recommend my best choice: msfs-map , another not so quite well-known, but most satisfactory tool.
The basic idea of msfs-map is similar to BushTalkRadio: look for related information around the plane and display them. But the key difference is: msfs-map searches directly in wikipedia, instead of a self-managed database, which results in much more comprehensive results.
And the UI interaction is quite nice, you can bind controller buttons to choose next POI and toggle TTS audio play.
PS: the screenshot shows a modified version by myself: auto-translating the english wikipedia into my mother-language, making me understand better.
Some more usages about FSXPilot
- Tell the plane to stay, while I wish to study my surroundings slowly
Amidst a flight plan, when you want to spend more time around a POI, you can “Pause filghtplan” and make the plane fly some holding patterns to wait for you.
“Why not use Active Pause or slew mode?” Well, I simply got SIM crash when I did that, so the above is what I have to do.
- Free to take off or land on any runway, by asking FSXPilot to.
Auto take off:
Auto land:
