Read the manual that I should have read before the flight
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I concentrate on flying if I am flying VFR and not on autopilot. If I am on autopilot I get the plane ready for my next landing and pre program the radios and then watch the scenery go by. FWIW
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When not on VATSIM and on weekends I used to go outside and cut the weeds but this ended up more than once in a stall (rather a stall protection stick pusher), as the CRJ does not have autothrottle and the difference between 84%N1 and 83.7%N1 can become fatal.
So Iâm now staying put and twiddling my thumbs.
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⊠Fly and Land âŠ
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Spend all my time looking for the autopilot in the Discus glider
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Generally watch some things on youtube and have a coffee
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it always amazes me - these threads - that so many people donât actually fly with their flight sim.
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If I do decide to fly a jet IFR and itâs anything other than a shortish hop, itâs time acceleration to zap through the cruise. Handflying IFR procedures is much more fun too.
If itâs GA, Iâll have a random failures mod running. Just to give a reason to keep monitoring the gauges. But with most bush flying with fixed wing, I donât really have the time to get bored. The approach planning often begins as soon as cruise altitude is reached.
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People use the Sim for different reasons indeed. Personally I dont fly airlines for the same reason so many people find other things to do. In a sim, an airliner flying can be quite boring. Just like real pilots, you just sit there and watch the numbers. Necessary during a real flight but it gets quite boring in a sim. So my flying is rather like AllineB4652. Except I dont fly jets. But prefer the slower props. I set out my flight plan in littlenavmap and print the summary page. I then fly the route mostly VORDME to VORDME. Alternatively I just handily following roads/highways and sometimes investigate the area as detailed in my original post. Pause the flight, switch to internet, look at the place, and then back to the plane and continue.
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I agree. To some, MSFS is simply a complicated game.
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For short flights, I tend to sit and watch, as for some of my long flights like from Toronto to Scotland or doing the Titanic Route I do a variety of things from listening to music, playing on my tablet, eating, filming behind the scenes vlogs giving my thoughts on the flight, etc
If I know the area I tend to do what another streamer has mentioned and that following roads. I do stream about 98-99% of my flights on my youtube channel (shameless plug at the bottom of this) sometimes when flying smaller aircraft I wonât disable the propeller/propellers but Iâll turn everything to zero and let my plane dip down closer to the actual ground rather than staying up in the clouds so I can enjoy the scenery.
On the two long flights I mentioned Iâve actually gone and watched a movie or two and even had a nap during them. But when doing stuff like that I keep my tablet handy so I can view things and make sure my autopilot didnât get drunk prior to the job.
On one of the short flights I did that, I took a 747 I was feeling a mix of boredom and risk taker so I performed a barrel-roll, yeah Iâm sure my passengers loved that one.
shameless plug of my youtube page: http://youtube.com/@kensquires
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As someone whoâs played simulators for a long time now, I find that the simulator genre has shifted from focusing on functional fidelity to the expensive of user friendliness and accessibility (OMSI, anyone?) to providing an immersive yet user-friendly experience and providing settings to allow more accessibility for casual gaming if people so desire that. Addons for FS9/X or P3D versus MSFS show that same trend. You can hand fly your plane from cold and dark to parking or you can let FMS, AP, or the AI Pilot take care of it while you look out the window on your second monitor.
If youâre a hand flying enthusiast, you lost nothing - you can still do your dead reckoning and VOR to VOR and hand fly planes to your heartâs content - but for many others who just want to live out the fantasy without having to sweat the details, or to those who have disabilities, modern sims like MSFS are far more accessible and enjoyable than previous simulators.
Personally, Iâm pretty casual nowadays. MSFS is a pretty game and I love the sounds and sights, and I want those in the background while I do my work at home or watch something on the side. I hand fly a GA plane from cold and dark once in a while, and I always plan out my routes and approaches and program my FMS, GPS, or AP, but for the most part I just wanna feel immersed without having to watch the gauges or trim every couple minutes.
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Stupid as it sounds, for me, cold & dark startup to ready for pushback, ground handling, boarding (GSX Pro), using drone mode to walk through detailed payware airports, and taxiing for departure with live traffic (FSLTL or FS Traffic) from busy airports at âheavy-international hourâ is the best part. Once Iâm up in the air itâs just terribly boring. By then, the wife starts yelling at me anyway.
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OP I do similar, I keep LNP up on the second screen always. Its a brilliant way of learning about our world!
You can download Google Maps (Road,Terrain, Satellite) for Little Navmap.
Get it here:
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you are not alone my friend i fly over places i have been all the time it brings back old friends and good times
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I usually fly âshort hopsâ in the PMDG B738, so not much time to do anything else, but on the occasionally longer flight, as a radio amateur I sometimes speak using the HF bands with radio amateur licenced pilots flying a B737/757 or Airbus in real time â it is pretty cool to speak from my Ham radio at home in my B737-800 sim with someone flying at FL380 in real life and real time.
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I totally agree with @CynicalLake3917 and @erasariel5447 that MSFS has grown beyond simple âstick flyingâ
MSFS 2020 is a quantum leap in sims.
In all past sims the emphasis was on the flight part of the âFlight Simulatorâ - and Iâm not criticizing that - because that, all by itself, was groundbreaking at the time. Imagine! Actually being able to fly an airplane in a way that wasnât totally arcade like Space Invaders or River Raid on an 8-bit Atari with 64 kilobytes of RAM and an 8 mhz processor!
Later versions began to emphasize the scenery more and more until, by FSX, the scenery wasnât an insignificant part of the game anymore.
Now, with MSFS 2020, the scenery aspect has come into its own. Now you can fly, not to âflyâ, but to see the scenery - literally âsightseeingâ within the sim. I can take my granddaughters to places in the world theyâve never been, and may never be, with a reasonable degree of fidelity in most cases.
Can you imagine what a history teacher, or a geography teacher, could do with a tool like this? How much more involved would a class be if THEY could âfly aroundâ the historical or geographical places in question? In the hands of an imaginative teacher, this is a game-changer!
What about the shut-in, or the disabled? With only modest changes to the controls, even Stephen Hawkings could âflyâ this thing! I canât even begin to imagine the therapeutic advantages of something like this. For someone with social phobias, or PTSD, whoâs afraid to go outside, this provides therapeutic opportunities that didnât even exist just a few years ago.
So, yes. MSFS isnât about âjust flyingâ anymore. Itâs so much more than that now. It has opened up vistas of opportunity that have never existed before and, quite frankly, Iâm thrilled!
What say ye?
I like this, it is great to learn about where you are flying it really adds depth to what we do. However, for me, pausing the flight all the time would completely ruin the immersion.
Maybe you could plan the route and assemble things to read whilst you are flying? Maybe on a second monitor/tablet? That way you could achieve the same without the unrealistic pauses.
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Looks like you have a nice Ham Shop. Very Nice !
After retiring and doing other things, I , finally, decided to go get my âHamâ license and about a year ago, I got my Tech licenseâŠ
So for now, I am a Ham without a radio but I keep looking and shopping.
MSFS and Ham sounds like a wonderful hobby.
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The sim is an unbelievable tool for illustrating how almost everything is connected to geography:
Weather
Resources (some from weather) and extraction
Population growth
Trade/commerce
War
Law and Politics
Infrastructure/logistics
Medicine (from diseases like yellow fever)
All of it (and more) connected. Flying easily around the sim we can see how vast the land is and how difficult it was to move, due to terrain, disease, factions, or weather, and how we (mostly) overcame that, but made so many mistakes along the way. We also see why many man-made things are where they are.
Thatâs a major focus of my Wednesday night series The Roads Less Traveled, which uses the adventure and awesomeness afforded by aviation to see whatâs out there and maybe gain insight into how big our world was and how small itâs become.
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