After watching the Thunderflys on today’s Twitch stream, I would love to learn/do formation flying. Since I have nobody to fly with, I thought it would be awesome to have Formation Flying Challenges!
You would choose your challenge from all the different formation options, then you would try to keep yourself in a pale-blue ghost of your plane showing where you are supposed to be. The challenge would include radio callouts from the group leader. Grading would be based on your accuracy. Turn the ghost off for ultimate experience.
Because replay will probably be a thing by SU25, you can watch yourself in your own airshow from all sorts of fun angles!
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Just get a group of people together, hook up through whatever people are using for voice coms, and start your own ariel circus. You could get together and have practices, and then have airshows for all the other players to come watch once you get your routines together.
Who knows, you might get other people doing the same thing and start a their own club, to compete against you in online airshows.
Its just to bad voice chat isnt included ingame, it would make it so much easier…
The problem with formation flying in MSFS is that other aircraft will disappear when you start to get close to it, really not helpful/useful for formation flying unfortunately. In DCS for example you don’t have this issue so you can fly extremely tight formations, hence the Virtual Red Arrows use DCS.
It would be useful/helpful if this disappearing feature was or could be disabled for people who fly in a group.
Also, there are regular community flights with dozens of multiplayers flying together. Not exactly formation flying (perhaps some of those community flights explicitly offer that though), but nothing prevents you sticking to another aircraft‘s tail (unfortunately if you get too close the other aircraft gets „invisible“). And most flights offer chat options (via Discord mostly), so why not organise such a formation flight?
Note that there are 3rd party tools (recording / replay) which already support „formation flying“. Not exactly the way you describe it (no „blue ghost“, no shoutouts), but you get to see all your other previously recorded aircraft while recording (or simply flying) the current aircraft.
