Some aspects of the weather system in MSFS might be frustrating, but we can still have really enjoyable cross-country soaring flights in MSFS.
In RL gliding, the FIA (international aviation sports body) defines the “FAI 500km Triangle”. The rules are quite simple: the task will have three legs (i.e. start, WP1, WP2, finish), no leg can be shorter than 28% of the total (so triangle is approx equilateral), the start/finish will be really close together (typically the same, otherwise the distance between them will be deducted from your distance) and there’s a max 1000m height delta between your start and finish.
So I used B21 Task Planner to explore a few 500km options (disclaimer, I’m B21). The Alps are a great choice because the scenery is varied and stunning and MSFS weather can provide lift in that area that’s viable all the way around a closed task,
I chose a Southerly wind, using the new SSC_Soaring Weather S preset from @SSCGeorg .
Here’s my GPX tracklog displayed in the task planner:
In essence that was 2 hours 42 of really enjoyable soaring, seeing parts of the Alps that were sometimes familiar, sometimes new. I decided to try the flight as a single stint, no pauses, but that was more hardcore than necessary as in the sim soaring community we accept pauses as ‘normal’ and the flight analysis can automatically skip over those, so the flying is quite lifestyle-friendly.
It is perfectly possible for anyone to fly the same task, in the same weather, and compare their cross-country performance with mine. In the SSC Discord we routinely do this both offline and together in multiplayer online.
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While I know I need more glider training, I would love to participate in one of those flights. I’m afraid that perhaps timezones won’t match easily and probably while you fly I’m still at the desk working, but I’ll do my best. Can anyone join the discord? And, do you have a flightplan for that 500km flight?
pls excuse delayed post, if you do join the Discord you’ll find us a busy bunch.
The Sim Soaring Club Discord is open to anyone, we’re still growing with 1,400 members and I’d say the majority of those are fairly new to sim soaring although also at the other end we have a decent number of RL glider pilots. So feel free to rock up - there’s text channels where absolutely any question on sim soaring can be answered and the regular multiplayer flights always include voice channels where we talk mostly rubbish (but we do use the voice channel to coordinate the start of the multiplayer assigned task and compare notes as we go round).
The SSC has a European origin but the weekly Saturday event early evening Euro-time (17:45 UTC) works ok for the USA and we have another popular flight first thing in the morning (~8:30 UTC) on Tuesdays which works well for the Aussies/Kiwis but would be a killer for Yanks. Also there’s a Wednesday (17:45 UTC) event which we’ve recently moved to one-class tasks (i.e. we all fly the same model of glider) which is rapidly becoming popular which works great for the Europeans but is presumably career suicide for Americans.
Don’t worry about the ‘I need more glider training’ part - learning the basics of MSFS is the most work (installing gliders, downloading gliding flightplans, using our soaring weather presets) and everyone picks up the glider flying within very few flights as you’re less likely to die than in RL.
It’s fun either to fly round the task looking at the scenery, or concentrate like a maniac and try and acheive the top cross-country speed, online or offline. Whatever you do you’ll find other people to compare notes with.
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