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

[Pedro]

@kaosfere

There is a big difference in avionics between the two that makes them not really fill the same niche. The P.149 only has a single nav radio and an ADF. No GPS, no NAV2, not even a DME. You can still fly it on instruments – I recently did a 90 minute flight in almost 0 vis using only the single NAV radio and a DME gauge I created on one of my Stream Decks because it’s almost impossible to find instrument approaches that don’t require DME in Europe – but that’s probably outside the comfort zone for a lot of simmers.

(There’s also the lack of autopilot to consider… although, again, its not a deal breaker. The plane trims out nicely and needs only gentle corrections in level flight.)

Still, if you’re looking for a reasonably quick plane with good visibility for sightseeing, or like me you like challenging yourself doing radio navigation in “primitive” planes, it’s a truly great one. There are a few v1.0 issues, but the developer is really responsive with fixes usually.

(And if you don’t challenge yourself with minimal instrument navigation from time to time in the sim, it’s something I’d encourage everyone to try a couple times. It’s richly rewarding to break the ceiling after an hour or more in the soup and see the runway directly in front of you just like you planned it to be, and with no magenta line in sight.)

Thanks for the breakdown, I think I might get it today. There’s a weird sound coming from the Mooney that is starting to make me twitch a little.

[Pedro]

Not bad!

These flaps go to five :P

[Skipper]

Looks like a beauty!

Question to you and @kaosfere : I’ve never flown with only a single NAV point radial. How … are you guys navigating unless by direct VFR waypoints? Are you timing flight / calculating across a map somehow? I mean, I could leverage an out-of-scope tool to track myself but over a long distance on a single radial you could be miles off course, right?

Adding here, sure this would be easy if you knew (and could see) dead reckoning points along the way on a familiar course. But I don’t have charts I can actually mark up either.

My only guess is you fly TO an ADF/VOR radial, then another, and another, and to an airport with the same, right?

[Matt_W]

@Skipper

over a long distance on a single radial you could be miles off course, right?

If you’ve got VOR only, you can track your bearing along a radial, but you don’t know your distance from the station. You could establish a course along a radial, fix that, switch your nav radio to a crossing radial and note when you align with that radial to give you a rough triangulation.

@Skipper

My only guess is you fly TO an ADF/VOR radial, then another, and another, and to an airport with the same, right?

Yeah this too. The flight setup screen in MSFS will actually set up this kind of flight for you. You just fly each radial to or from until the TO-FROM indicator switches, which indicates you’ve flown over the station.

[Skipper]

I -think- I remember talking about single VOR back in ground school as a practice for, “if it happens,” but I’m way rusty. Even back then the trainer Cessna 150 had dual VOR.

It might be fun to pick this up just for that challenge.

[Pedro]

@Skipper

Question to you

Well, my original reply to @kaosfere was going to be, “Thanks for the breakdown, at least those bits I understood,” but I was worried it would sound snippy, so I am definitely not the person to answer your questions!

I really need a meme that shows everyone else in this thread landing on a handkerchief with instruments only, and me crashing at the end of the runway or something, because I really am relatively that far back with the actual flying bit. :P

Wait wait I got it

from Imgflip Meme Generator

[Rock8man]

Btw, if any of you haven’t voted in our forum yet, go this thread and cast your votes for Microsoft Flight Simulator! You can vote for 5 games for your best of 2020. But here’s the important one:

1. Microsoft Flight Simulator

Just like that, with the number at the front and the period not bolded, but the name of the game bolded. Thank you, and please carry on.

I love that snow trailer. Whoever is in charge of putting together those trailers at Microsoft does a good job.

[Skipper]

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.

[kaosfere]

@Skipper

My only guess is you fly TO an ADF/VOR radial, then another, and another, and to an airport with the same, right?

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

@Skipper

But I don’t have charts I can actually mark up either.

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.)

@Skipper

It might be fun to pick this up just for that challenge.

It very much is. One of my favorite things to do in the sim when I want a challenge. :)

[Ginger_Yellow]

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.

[Skipper]

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.

[kaosfere]

@kaosfere

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).

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.

[kaosfere]

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:

Instrument%20course.pdf

(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.)

[Ginger_Yellow]

In memory of the disaster in New York City, the C182 Nav Trainer
carries the designation N911.

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.

[IkeVandergraaf]

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.

[Pedro]

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.

[Skipper]

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!

[Pedro]

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 ;)

[Skipper]

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.

[Pedro]

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 :)