I’ve created a cross-country trip with many legs for refueling. Is there a way to save my progress mid-flight so that I can get back to it and continue without losing my flight time, and also protect myself against a computer crash in which I would lose all the flight time for the trip?
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I believe so, but unfortunately i don’t know how to do it at them moment
Well, at least you give me hope that someone else might chime in and explain how to do it. Thanks!
There is a save/load function from the ESC menu, but unfortunately it starts you from the ground every time you load. Or from the water, if that’s what you happen to be flying over. Default key is space or you can also click on the button.
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So if I stop at an airport on my multi-legged cross-country trip, I can hit the “space” key and save my game right at that airport and continue my trip the next day? That would be a good enough compromise for now, so that I do not have to complete the entire journey and hope my system doesn’t crash and I have to start over, or break up the trip into separate save files which would be extremely tedious since I have dozens of refueling and sight-seeing stops selected. Thanks for your reply!
I have saved a flight that way mid flight and resumed … in the air right where I saved it. It did clear the weather for me (probably because I was using real weather).
If you save a flight at the start, you get the plan and flight saved in two separate files. Best to just give it a go and try it.
I’d probably prefer to stop and start from cold at an airfield though … safer that way, just like in the real world 
Yes, you can do that. And as @ClayishCoast9 wrote, you will lose current weather when loading that back in.
Thanks, I agree. I’ll give it a try. I nearly spun out and hit the ground last night after using active pause while in autopilot. When I came out of pause, the system acted as though I had pushed my yoke all the way forward. I had to pull the yoke all the way back and give it massive trim just to readjust it, but I went from 10kft to scraping the treetops.
The trees need to be topped anyway. Too tall.
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Yeah, I was just thinking that even if you’re in an area like northern Alaska where there aren’t guaranteed to be any airports near your route, there’s nothing really to stop you from picking one of the bush planes or the Icon and setting down in a clear area or lake and “camping”, except that if you did it IRL you’d probably eventually end up with six different agencies wanting to ask you questions at once.
I decided to fly the King Air from Chesapeake to Point Hope in Alaska, and I added plenty of small airfields to stop and refuel, but even with the King Air’s endurance, mine in the seat is not so much–so I’d like to be able to save the sim and stretch my legs without losing my flight time. Plus save the trip in case my system crashes.
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That’s how I saved my original trip–it created a .FLT and .PLN file. But as I fly using that plan, I do not see a way that the plan is modified by my using it. I tried hitting the keyboard’s spacebar while in flight, but nothing happened. If I hit the esc. key, it will take me to the main menu where I can load/save the flight files, but since I’m in the air, I don’t know what will happen if the system crashes and I have to reload the plan. I’ll give that a try by renaming the file so I don’t lose my original .flt file.
I saved while in the air, and tried loading it. It worked–I regenerated in the air on autopilot, but I also lost the capability of changing the time of day because the weather icon is greyed out now. That is a nuisance, because this is a very long, multi-day route and it would be nice to still be able to change the time to see the sights, even if I can’t modify the weather. I had also started out the trip with Live Weather.
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I have been using “Little Nav Map” shareware for flight planning. It can save FLT or PLN files that can be read by FS. Vice versa if you want to create in FS and tweak it in LNM. The live map interface tracking (via LNM Connect) is stuttering with the FS release, but I read that that is being worked on.
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I’ll check on mine tonight but I suspect that the game spawning me on the ground is due to using live time / live weather
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Originally, I used Live Weather, but I set the time to slightly before dawn (0530 EST). However, when I regenerated, it set me at 0200 UTC which I could not adjust, so I’m stuck flying in the dark for quite a few hours.
■■■■! Made it to Ohio, landed in the dark, and the program crashed while I was taxiing, so I lost all those hours before I could get the log entry. 5 more minutes, and I would have been able to shut down and get it in my flight log. Dag-nabbit! Something else that was giving me fits in the King Air–Auto Pilot. After the save, no matter what I tried, every time I engaged it, it would go into a steep roll. It worked fine when I first started out, but after I saved the flight once I started flying it, I could not make it work again. I pushed every button in every combination trying (since I was flying for several hours), and nothing worked.
Ngl I get that as games get bigger and bigger it gets harder to test everything in a reasonable amount of time, but some times I think the first couple of months of a release should be called the open gamma test or something
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I agree. I started again with the original Flight plan, and the auto pilot worked just fine, so something is getting messed up when saving the plan during the flight. There’s no sense in running a re-saved version if it forces me into UTC and I’m flying in the dark. I hope they get that fixed quickly! I created these routes with waypoints to check out all of the hand-crafted points of interest and airports. And I found it very tiring to fly for hours with only being able to use trim controls instead of AP.
Yeah, I’ve been doing one of the bush flights, and as much of a pain as it will make planning long trips, I think I’m going to do something similar with using more legs of shorter distance instead of max range trips that I don’t want to do in an entire sitting.