First: I would allow me to say, I’m an experienced Flightsimmer with more than 3000 hours in more than 10 years. I’ve flown everything from smallest GA-Plane to 747 or A380. IFR or VFR, manual and autopilot.
I have a proper gear with TM joystick, throttle and pedals for my PC.
BUT: I’m unable to complete that first solo-flight in the PPL-training!
I’ve tried it now more than 20 times. I always got a B+ grade, but never an A.
And if I’m not wrong, I can’t continue without grade an A?
I would guess, 90% of the actual flightsimmers would not be able to pass this step.
And: this is only the first solo flight and not even the PPL-Exam!!
A lot of people got past it, so it definitely isn’t 90%!
The judging the app does is based on fairly tight scoring. Infractions that wouldn’t matter at all in real life are punished. Which to be honest, I don’t mind as long as I know the criteria. The earlier training gave us that. Kind of.
So,
Fly smoothly
If climbing or descending, aim to reach the waypoints at the correct altitude. So, keep making small attitude changes. No big ones.
Keep an accurate heading. So set the heading but to the runway heading to help.
Keep centre line on landing at a fairly soft descent rate.
Use flaps at the speed AND location in the circuit they teach
Doing that I got an A+ with mid 90s scores in most categories.
I think you can change the title to unable to get an A in THE first solo fight which is 100% true.
I believe this training mission has been bugged since 2020 (you can see old posts for 2020 by searching for the mission name on the forum).
I can’t believe this has still not been fixed after all these years.
I’ve tried this mission a few dozen times but the best I can do is halfway from B to A. If anyone has any idea how to complete this with an A please let me know.
It all just seems too fast and too high and by end of downwind you have to maintain speed while not being told to dive. On turn to final it seems early and too high. I don’t understand why we are climbing for 6000 at end of downwind then have to dive down for base turn? Why are we not shooting for 6000 after takeoff and then down to 5,700 for end of downwind?
Aside: In fact all the landings seem to put you way to high for a slow landing. If this is the ‘real world’ way to land it seems a bit…hmmmm…unsafe.
Even with full flaps I can never seem to slow down enough to not have to dive for the runway.
Why do I have boxes to fly through on everything but the most important training missions in the game?
Here is where all your visualization resources should be coming into play.
This is what I found on the first solo as well. The instructions were very confusing and not realistic to real life.
That said, that’s about when I figured out you could skip right to the check ride, and the instructions for that were a little more clear - things like starting your descent abeam the touchdown point, etc.
But yeah, overall the whole thing sounds like it was written without any QA from a CFI or even a rated GA pilot.
I’d LOVE to know what the grading criteria are for this flight.
I am a retired naval aviator, was a check pilot and instructor, have a real ATP, over 5,000 hours of real flight time, and with decades and 10’s of thousands of hours in flight sims.
I’ve flown the first solo flight several times now and never get more than a “B”.
I look at the grades for the various phases and am clueless as to what points are being deducted for. I am dead on airspeeds and altitudes.
I was flying the training just to see what it was like.
The “first solo” secret grading is garbage.
You can close it because it’s not longer needed.
As i created the thread i thought, i need to complete that in first grade to get the ppl license, which was wrong.
Now i already have the ppl and much more.
Thanks!
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