Hi there, I was wondering if flying the Bush Trips, If it’s a test of your knowledge of flying? Also does it record your experience and achievements? Any help is greatly appreciated. TIA…
The bush trips are more for sightseeing than anything else, really. You’re given a route made up of a number of legs, and each leg is made up of a number of waypoints. You take off and fly to each waypoint, which is usually on or near something worth looking at. At the end of the leg you land at an airport/airfield and your progress is saved. You can then move onto the next leg. Most legs seem to be around 40-60 minutes in length.
Some trips involve aircraft with glass cockpits so navigation isn’t exactly difficult in those cases. Of course you can choose not to use the aids to make things more difficult for yourself, and a few trips use aircraft with steam gauges for added challenge.
As for being recorded, your profile will show how many bush trips you’ve completed. Some of them also have an in-game achievement which you receive if you completed the trip without ever using the “I’m lost” button. But many of them don’t have achievements so you might want to check if it’s something that is important to you.
And that’s it really. I think they’re about the joy of flying and showing off the more detailed areas of the world, rather than seriously challenging your piloting skills. Good fun, especially for those new to the sim and wondering what it can do.
(Note the above only goes for the vanilla bush trips provided in the sim. User created trips may well be more challenge orientated, but I haven’t tried any.)
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I think it’s pretty much all been covered in Goffiks post above.
I’ll just add…
Patagonia, Balkans & Nevada are the 3 original bush trips that have associated achievements.
I found that the VFR map wigged out on me during Nevada so I just turned it off and used external mapping. (You would have access to a better map if you were making any sort of trip anyway right?)
Some of the course instructions seemed a bit off along the way on a couple I have done but if you know what your destination is and what direction to fly you can sort of work it out anyway.
There are instructions? I did them all last week and never heard or saw a single instruction. At first I had no clue where to go as I had the VFR map disabled. Then when I found there is a route on the vfr map I matched that with little navmap to figure out where it wanted me to go. (I managed to do the only one without glass cockpit first)
Fun trips, but some sort of instructions would have been useful.
Another tip, you can land at other airstrips as well and it will create a save point there to continue later. And wait a couple days before doing the northern bush strips, LOD is messed up by latitude atm, very short draw distance in Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Alaska. It should be fixed in SU5.
Yes. The NavLog (I think it’s called the NavLog?) Opens automatically (as does the VFR map)
I guess that of you have disabled these in the toolbar at top then it doesn’t open.
You didn’t miss much. If you are using LittleNavMap or similar then you can plot your own course and some of the course descriptions in the NavLog are a bit bugged or pointlessly detailed.
(Balkans is actually pretty ok as descriptions go, but it’s a simple trip. Nevada was pretty bugged.)
Ah, I had that disabled as well. Nevada was a tough one, some of the airstrips are very hard to make out on the ground. One spot has several close together, I kept hopping from one to the other until next leg triggered.
Don’t forget to make a detour over Athens in the Balkan trip. You don’t have to follow the path and its rather odd it avoids the acropolis.
The best thing about the bush trips is that they come with the most flattering weather and time presets for the scenery. Unless you get the bug where it starts you at night. (crashing the plane and restarting the leg seems to fix it).
I had a different bug? where it kept resetting the time back after every leg. The time estimate is far off and I suspect it uses the ETE to set the start time for the next leg. Since the ETE is 2 or 3 minutes for a 30 to 40 minute leg, expect to see the sun yanked backwards when you land.
Oh, and don’t forget to bind a key to repair and refuel. It’s the only way to get fuel during a bush trip.
I had the same thing. I thought it was a feature at first, simulating doing a leg each day. But for sub-60 min trips that’s a bit silly, so it’s probably a bug or oversight.
Closing this as @Goffiik provided a good answer to the question. Thank you!