Many (maybe half) of the destination airports in career mode do not exist in real life. I like to use Navigraph to get the details and charts, but much of the time, the airport identifier shows no results in Navigraph. How and why are these phantom airports in the FS2024 database?
As a side note, why are all of the missions of similar length (~5:30 in medium cargo)? And why is the destination so often a tiny airport? Why can’t we get some missions into decent size regional airports with ILS approaches?
Some of them are truly private airports that are unreported and uncharted. That’s a right in the US, and in doing so you don’t get issued an FAA LID. Sometimes it’s an old closed strip that appeared on an older aerial or existed many, many decades ago, sometimes it’s an R/C strip, and sometimes it’s nothing at all, just an airport-shaped clearing. So in the absence of any official documentation/registration, the sim’s AI looks at the aerial imagery, recognizes it as an airstrip of some sort, and generates a false ICAO code/LID, using the nearest populated area as an airport name. This obviously generates a lot of confusion and yes, these airports are often barely useable.
On the other hand, www.skyvector.com will show you a lot of the smaller, private airports that are charted and registered in the US. It will also give very basic information as to the runways, based on whatever the owner reported to the FAA at the last submission. This can be years old, so a more current aerial might reflect changes that the owner never reported to the database, including closures and outright deletions. Often a private field on a farm or ranch is no more than a mowed part of the grass - and you might find years later it’s no longer mowed, or has a fence put up across the middle, or it’s been replaced by a field crop.
Note that the planner.flightsimulator.com webapp also has some of these smaller airports, though I’ve found the details vary pretty widely. Navigraph will rarely show the smaller of these private airports.
I’m with you on the medium cargo mission length.
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I’ve noticed that, by design, the missions are confined to rigid parameters, which make them cookie cutter clones. Medium cargo is nearly always a 530-550 nm run from two small airports with a <5000’ runway. You get some exceptions when there aren’t any close matches to these parameters in an area I’ve found, but it usually tries to pick whatever is closest to this. And it usually winds up being a private airstrip. All the other details are pretty much the same too. Same dialogue, same procedures. I speculate they had to do this because of the breakneck development schedule that was imposed, forcing them to do something quick and easy.
Unfortunately I think this is going to induce a monotony will drive many to boredom after a few missions of one type. All the mission types are like this though. They’re all exactly the same except for the start and end points and maybe the weather. The lack of depth, spontaneity, and creative flexibility may keep Career Mode from achieving long term staying power with players. Even though there are seemingly thousands of choices to pick from, once you’ve played a couple missions of each type, you’ve pretty much played them all.
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makes you wonder what’s in those cardboard boxes…
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Really looking forward to getting some Heavy Cargo missions so I can run that A400 down to jungle airstrips in Central and South America like Tom Cruise
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