Pedro I’m not a good lander. Trust me, you don’t want screenshots or landing videos of a lot of my attempts. I also am lazy when simming, so I push the takeoff/landing quite a bit in-game, especially when using FSEconomy or whatnot.
But I’ve also become lazy with GPS in-game and I LOVE it. Using VOR is like stepping back in time but certainly can be picked up with a video or two.
With just a nav radio you have a couple of options. The easiest one, and what I generally mostly do on these flights, is precisely that: go VOR to VOR, tracking a given radial in, then switching over to an outbound radial just before you pass (to avoid overshooting and correcting). At that point you can either track the outbound radial on that one VOR, or you can tune the new one if it’s already receivable; or you can wait until you’re a bit further on the outbound to pick it up.
A rather annoying alternative, if you really have to, is to fly to an intersection of two different VOR radials. This is trivial when you have two radios and you can tune one on each. If you only have the one radio you can still do this, but it takes a bit more finesse. You need to track the radial you’re on until you think you’re in the right area – doing a bit of flight planning so you know distance and, with your cruise speed, about how long that will take, is very useful here. Then you hold your current heading, tune in the new VOR, set your radial, and wait until the CDI hits zero.
There’s also the presence of NDBs which you can use to your advantage. You can’t select a radial to fly to on an NDB, but you can do some planning and figure out what the bearing to the NDB will be when you reach the intended point on the VOR radial. Then you tune the NDB on your ADF radio and watch the bearing pointer on it as you’re flying along your radial until it points to the relative bearing you had planned.
All that said… as GPS navigation gets more pervasive, an increasing number of radio beacons are being taken off line, meaning it’s harder to do this sort of thing because you have fewer known reference points. NDBs are almost extinct in some areas. Given that, I do, as I noted, allow myself on a plane like this to have a DME; it doesn’t feel like cheating so much as making up for the context lost by radio beacons going away that you would have had when it was “new”. VOR radial + DME distance is not much different from going to a VOR/VOR intersection with an imaginary VOR. :)
Some folks will think that’s “cheating” if you’re trying to use only what the plane has, but that’s cool. We all define our own fun and relative challenges.
Hopefully that helps a bit? I’m happy to explain more or make some suggestions for radio nav tutorials if you’d like. I don’t want to go over peoples heads but I don’t want to “sim-splain” either. :D
MSFS is good enough in the scenery department that dead reckoning and visual waypoint finding is totally doable in a lot of places. There are lots of VFR charts you can find online, including pretty much the entire continental US via the FAA. (You can also use them as a layer in SkyVector, or the add-on maps for LNM for planning, even if you don’t use them as a magic GPS to track your flight.)
It very much is. One of my favorite things to do in the sim when I want a challenge. :)
TBF, anyone can do the bit in the top picture. It’s being in the right place at the right speed about 5 seconds later that’s tricky.
Good tips, Kaosfere, ty man.
I jumped into learning GPS with the sim because that was my weakness and I’m pretty spoiled on it now. I should dust off the old ways and fly some VOR routes. Maybe a plan to do VOR cross country or something. I still wish they had career things in-game, like getting “certs” or flights to gain access to newer aircraft. I’d happily reset my current status just to get that, ala Grand Tourismo or similar.
I was just re-reading and realized it might not be clear how to do this with just the one radio. It’s easy to know when you pass a VOR, because the FROM/TO indicator switches, as @Matt_W said. But you can tell when you’re getting close, before that switches, by observing how sensitive the CDI is to changes in course. If you turn 5 degrees left of course for a little bit and the CDI doesn’t budge, you’re still pretty distant from it. If you notice it right away, you’re probably almost there, as the relative angle between you and the VOR changes more as you wander off course, the closer you get.
Also, a little while back I finally found something I’d been looking for for ages! Years ago, when I first started getting really interested in the technical bits of flight simming, and navigation in particular, I found an amazing tutorial site online – probably the single most useful one I read on the topic. But it seems to have gone offline some time in the past few years. :(
However! It looks like someone captured the entire thing in a PDF so it’s not lost to history! Hooray! If anyone feels daunted by this sort of thing but is interested in learning more, you could do much worse than working through this:
(You’ll need to ignore the stuff about the 182 trainer that’s completely incompatible with MSFS if you can even find it. You don’t really need it.)
Wow, that’s a real time capsule alright. Also, not totally convinced using a 9/11 callsign in a flight training manual is a good idea.
Thanks. That looks pretty amazing. Now that I’ve got the basics of taking off, flying, and landing (in MSFS) down, I’m really interested in learning more about navigation.
Just passed 100 hours flight time on my pilot profile. Steam shows … 394 hours in-game.
I spent a lot of time after release in Dev Mode, which doesn’t log time, and I guess the Time Acceleration thing doesn’t log it either. Still, seems low.
There’s a few posts on the FS forums about it. For a while (until some of the more recent patches) there were issues with in game flight time logging. That and all the other achievements are fixed now and logging correctly (supposedly.) But beyond that, Steam logs time from the moment you hit, “play,” which includes time to boot the game, load patches, sit at the menu, paused, anything really as long as the .exe is running. Thus the huge discrepancy.
I have 427 Steam hours for the game but 121 on my in-game pilot profile.
Also congrats on your 100 hours flown!
Thanks! Likewise!
Oh yeah, I forgot about the install and patching time for sure. I remember there was a slight uproar about Steam logging the install time, meaning the 2-hour refund window was missed.
Still having a lot of fun with it. I had largely cleared my backlog before this came along, and now it’s in as bad a shape as it ever was.
Coupla promo shots from the bush trip I’m working on ;)
Jesus those look awesome. Where in the heck is that bush trip???
I’m still having a blast as well, also with a growing game backlog. At this point, this game is going into “rotation” along with others that it looks like I’ll probably continue to play multiple times a month. I’m also still having fun flying FSEconomy flights. I purchased a second Beechcraft King Air and once paid off I plan to move it around, probably to Europe to enjoy some scenery there. With everything planned for this game, it’s going to be really hard to step away from for quite some time. Not to mention VR is pretty damned amazing with it.
A second King Air!??!?! Incredible :)
Yeah, I need to figure out a way to balance this with other stuff for sure. As you say, there’s so much happening with MSFS that it’s hard to keep on top of it all. Keeping up with the mod scene alone is a full time job.
Here’s the proposed route. I’ve had a blast on the outward legs to Albuquerque, but the return (southern) legs have a lot of pesky scrubland/desert with not a lot of dramatic scenery or points of interest. You can actually see the individual legs getting longer as I hit New Mexico and start running out of stuff to talk about :)
Depending on the length you’re going for, I’d be tempted to send folks up to KGJT and make them fly through Arches and the Canyonlands. It’s simply lovely, and some really alien looking terrain.
Yeah, that’s a good point. The terrain alone would probably carry the trip. It is just a fantastic part of the world. The little bit of Colorado I’ve done has been a hoot.
It’s roughly based on a road trip I did years ago, so that was the appeal - I’d already researched or knew about a lot of the points of interest etc. The southern legs have a few big hitters - Very Large Array, Meteor Crater, Grand Canyon etc - which I really wanted to do, but there’s just a lot of empty space in between them. I’ll try it out and see what I’ve got though.
There’s a bush trip on Flightsim.to that I just grabbed that starts you out in Star Wars Canyon, goes to Area 51, and ends in Vegas.
Gotta say, if you’re not in the mood to strap VR goggles on your head, a SuperUltraWide monitor is a darn good substitute.
What monitor is that?!
Denny, do I want to install this? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/openxr-developer-tools-for-windows-mixed-reality/9n5cvvl23qbt?SilentAuth=1&wa=wsignin1.0#activetab=pivot:overviewtab
I saw it mentioned on reddit. Will this create more problems with it and SteamVR? Or do I have this already installed with SteamVR and the WMR beta?
Hey Jeff, yes, you do want that! Sorry, I thought you already had that.
Install it and turn on the Preview OpenXR Runtime (faster) and (unlike the screen below) turn OFF Motion Reprojection. Though that interpolates frames to give you a faster perceived frame rate, it also adds severe stuttering on the outside scenery in demanding areas that is far worse than any frame rate slowness.
You can also mess with the Custom Render Scale to increase performance; I’m currently running at 80, which to my 50-ish eyes doesn’t make a noticeable difference visually from 100 but does give me a frame rate boost. But my system is a beast, and a lot of people have found 70 is the sweet spot.
The monitor is a Samsung CRG90, a 5120x1440 beast I’d put on my Amazon wish list to track for price drops thinking of maybe picking up late this year and my overly generous mom bought me for Xmas. :) I was already an ultra-wide fan, using a 3440x1440 screen, but this one really fills your FOV. It’s insane.
WOW. Is it curved? Cause if it isn’t… I couldn’t imagine. What kind of video settings can you run with that in MSFS?
