Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) - We're really sorry about Microsoft Flight

Something weird must be going on. I’ve just tried it again and no issues climbing at around 1,000 ft/s. Have you checked everything obvious like flaps/gear/fuel selector/de-ice? Is it possible you’re flying single engine or something?

Yeah, I’ll figure it out now that I know it’s unusual behaviour, thanks.

Now I’ve gone from buying ‘bargain’ planes on FSEconomy, to buying bargain FBOs. Saw one last night near Lyon, decided to fire up the PC again to check it out, thinking, if it’s picturesque, I’ll buy it.

Man, beautiful grass airstrip, river flowing past, some kind of chateau right beside it, and a small race track (Circuit d’Issoire) at the end of the runway.

Only three passengers capacity so no pressure to actually fly any routes. Perfect.

I experienced the downside of this game being on the cloud yesterday. I must have been having some kind of connection issues, because the bottom right corner in the main menu wasn’t talking about the World Update, instead it was just a plain panel that said game news, or something like that. And when I played the next leg of the Breckenridge trip, there were all these “squares” of land that were really really low detail and low resolution textures with no trees or other objects populating them. It looked terrible!!!

Come on cloud! I need you!

I’m going to try to get refuelled by the tower in my current Breckenridge pitstop. I think the airport and the solid runway is big enough that they probably have actual refueling facilities. I hope.

The tower icon was not in the in-game menu bar, at least at this airport. I guess I never paid attention to it, it must be airport specific on what shows up in the menu bar maybe.

I know I said I flew near Mono Lake in the early part of the Breckenridge trip, but this time I’m back! And this time I flew over it.

Nice! Nearly there now :)

The Yosemite leg of the Breckenridge Bush Trip is tough! Last night was the second night in a row where I failed it late in the leg because of over-stressing the aircraft. I just have to remember to do all my climbing and descending very slowly and carefully.

It depends on the aircraft of course, but you should generally pull the throttle all the way back to idle, or close to idle, to descend. You shouldn’t overstress the aircraft in that case unless you were also allowing your nose to drop quite a bit.

As for climbing, either don’t use full throttle (I find 90% is fine on anything I fly) or pull the nose up more to keep your speed under control.

Oh, wow, they’ve actually changed the FSE UI. Only one page, and just an HTML rewrite, no actual change in functionality, but still!

One thing they haven’t changed (do pay attention if you’re using our FBO):

We are in network,baby!

I need to remember to do that even for gentle descents now. I thought I was flying pretty smoothly tonight when I overstressed the aircraft again.

Meanwhile, back in Russia, miles and miles of forests have finally given way to miles and miles of farmland.

Woo! Komatipoort is nice; I tried to do a maiden flight from there over to the Indian Ocean the other day but it didn’t register with the extended server outage.

In Russia, the moment I’ve been waiting for. Finally, some little hills! Elevation! It’s not completely flat anymore!

I flew a couple of routes this morning as part of my Sunday Fly-day. I’m surprised how high the geography is there though being fairly flat (mountains on the northern spoke airport but not much on the other leg I flew. I think ground level was 5200? I don’t know the geography of the area but … high plains? Seems like it.

I also flew a few legs out of the opposite of South Africa, in Montgomery, Alabama, of course. That’s one of many, many Sovereign owned FBOs. Their network has to be massive, I can’t even imagine. I’ve run into their FBOs across the globe. How do they even keep them stocked? At any rate, it’s well set up as the hub airport for that small region. I like how they did that, mostly limiting spokes to single passenger or dual, and everything is within 120nm, with a good percentage in the sweet spot of less than 80nm.

Of course, mimicking that elsewhere would be hard, you’d need a 3lot as a start and the right mix of nearby destinations for spokes. :(

I keep putting money in the group, we should keep looking for more FBOs.

Yeah, it seems to be mainly high plains until you get close to the coast.

By the way, I think I successfully finished the Breckenridge trip, maybe? It’s hard to tell. After failing a gazillian times, I got really good at cutting my power every single time I wanted to lose altitude. That still left the times when I overstressed the aircraft when gaining altitude, but I just had to bear that.

I landed on the runway, but never got the check mark. So I drove around to different parts of the runway and then used the brakes and ended up on my nose. So I did it again, this time landing and driving around, and I found a video online where someone lands and drives to the side where a guy is waving those glowy batton things and parks next to him. So I did that. I still didn’t get the check mark. I saw another video where a guy stops right at the center between the two runways and stops there, and I tried that, but that didn’t trigger the check mark ending to the leg either.

Finally I parked next to the baton guy and quit out, and when I tried to back in, there’s now a check mark next to that leg. So I guess I did it?

There’s no achievement for doing it without using the “back on track” like they’d been promising? Or maybe there is, but it didn’t trigger?

When I did the Balkans trip I got the congratulations screen as soon as I stopped on the runway.

BTW, I figured out how to release my DA62 to the group. I’ll continue to be responsible for making the payments (with group funds, thanks Skipper). Then I’ll transfer ownership to the group.

Oh, that sucks. What a shame. I assume there’s no ‘Continue’ option now, meaning that it has fully logged your progress? Or does it let you fly the last leg again? I guess you’re sick of that leg by now anyway and wouldn’t want to redo it.

Just in the last week or two I’ve been paying more attention to the FBO Purchase page, and it’s mind boggling how big some of these groups are - as you say, you come across the same guys again and again. I get that three-lotters probably pay for themselves, but you kinda need to fly anything smaller than that yourself, and that can’t be possible in these cases.

If you went through Capital Aircraft Finance, there’s a ‘money owed’ figure at the bottom of the screen. You can pay that amount in one go and the plane is yours, in case you didn’t know.

On the other hand, I have been flying outside the group for the last week or so as I have a bunch of debt coming due. Will get back to it after month end :)