Yeah, I’m loving the TDS GTN 750Xi in the planes that support it, but you gotta zoom like crazy to read charts on a panel display.
Problem is that I don’t run multi-monitor anymore (no room with a 49"!), so if I’m going to move charts to another screen it’s going to need to be my iPad.
So the other day FSE took me into HI29 while I was flying around the islands, only to discover the airport was so poorly done (tree shadows on the satellite imagery messed up the AI airport creator, I think) that it was unusable for anything larger than an ultralight, much less the C172 I was flying.
So, I fixed it. Cleared the trees to match the actual satellite imagery, and added some chickens and a few other details just to make it more than just a pruning. :) Not exactly a place you’ll likely want to have as a home base airport, but if you’re flying FSE in Hawaii, it’ll be useful.
And while I was at it, I updated the airport in my town in the WA Snoqualmie Valley to add a few more details, use the new SDK terraforming, and add a parking spot for cold-and-dark starts.
I bought an XCub in Idaho and leased to the group. I just did the bushiest bush flight I’ve done so far in it to get it from 3U2 where I bought it to nearby 24K where there are some assignments. I highly recommend the trip. It’s short, but you either have to follow the river valley or climb over the hills and plunge back into the valley to make the tiny strip. I ended up doing it twice because I forgot to start the flight the first time so I tried it both ways. I’m probably going to hop around the hills a bit more but I’ll leave the plane rentable afterwards.
FYI, Iceland is lovely to fly in live weather right now. The midnight sun period is approaching so there are long sunsets and the night is more of a twilight. Extremely pretty.
That looks like an awesome fun-in-the-sun kind of journey. I also have flashbacks to seeing my course in a game of Pirates, long ago.
Noted. I’ll try to take a delivery from somewhere there. Sounds like fun. And thanks for adding the XCub! Sounds like a fun spot.
I have about 100K to partially pay off the Vision Jet with the remainder in about a week. I’d be glad to kick in for anything after that, let me know. I’m also going to try to pump up the group bank to about 500K, which will float all of the aircraft assigned to the group for quite some time even in absence of members online.
In addition to flying the group’s caravan around the Caribbean, and once it’s dark there flying the XCub low along river valleys in Idaho, I found a rentable caravan in British Columbia to get in another live weather sunset golden hour. Just flew through a storm to land on small dirt a strip in the middle of a long lake (CAG4). There was fortunately a break in the clouds as I came in. Absolutely beautiful. After landing I switched out of VR to get a shot.
It’s one of those runways made challenging by a tall tree literally in front of the runway that I can’t imagine exists in real life, but MSFS just models a solid line of trees along the shore.
The combination of FSEconomy and live weather has gotten me so much more addicted to flight sim. My landings have improved greatly in the last few weeks of this addiction.
Soooo… I saved up $300K and looked at what planes were available. Certainly wasn’t going to spend that on a worn out C172. Thought it’d be fun to find something that would be good in Alaska or Hawaii, my favorite places to fly.
Looked at Grumman Geese (Gooses?), since there’s a great payware one and a decent one included with the 40th Anniversary Edition, but they were over $400K. But there was a Grumman G-44 Widgeon for about $200K, and I had the Flysimware G-44 and I’d barely spent any time with it. And it was in Juneau. So, boughted it!
Leased it to Qt3, and have been flying the flights for the group. Anyone else here have it? If not, it’s a really nice seaplane. Holds 5 passengers, and it’s amphibious so you can snag those lucrative water runway missions that tend to just sit in the list.
Once I get enough in the bank, I’ll sell it and get a Goose so that all of you can use it if you want. (There’s a pretty good Inibuilds Goose included with the 40th Anniv. update, as well as a freeware Big Radials version and a much better payware Big Radials release.)
I got the money for the Widgeon by flying the Qt3 Longitude around the West Coast. Or, rather, by letting it fly itself on autopilot during the workday for a couple of days this week. It recreates one of my favorite parts of flying across the country – seeing the amazing variety of ground features.
That all looks great. But then, going from NM up to Juneau, we see that some of British Columbia looks fantastic, while other parts look as bad as China and Russia…
Oh! One more post… Discovered something really cool. When I’m not flying in VR, I can use the Duet app to turn my iPad Pro into an external touchscreen monitor for my PC.
So move the TDS GTN750Xi down to the iPad and I have a touchscreen GPS to use with my planes! Haven’t tried it with planes that have glass Garmin cockpits yet to see how it works there, but for planes that support the TDS anyway it’s pretty awesome.
Excellent tip! I’ll have to try this. I have used the GTN750 as a pop-out off the toolbar in everything I’ve flown since getting the mod. I don’t have to fiddle with finding extra files that way. One of my favorite things about it is being able to change the default type of information presented in the four corners. I frequently change one to ETE and another to wind speed and direction, which helps a ton on long journeys with real weather.
Your flights over Alaska look great but they remind me of all the flying over Canada I did along with @Pedro as we helped Oji Air up there for FSE a while back. So much snow. At least Alaska has much more variance of mountains and coastline.
I also like that little G-44. I’ll have to check it out for a flight. Don’t forget the Kodiak though as you can use the amphib version if you have enough passengers or cargo to fly out of a seaport.
Great shots! And the view from 40,000 feet can be especially gratifying if it’s an area you fly regularly at less than 10,000 feet. My ill-fated bush trip through the US Southwest was done at 1,000 feet AGL; I passed over at 30,000ft a few months later and could pick out all the features I’d mentioned/featured.
I’ve been thinking about getting Gamepass which would give me this, it looks fantastic.
I’ve not looked through the whole thread yet, but is the making money part of things a mod you tack on? I searched “economy mod” in here and pointed to FSEconomy, but that was about three years ago.
I think the idea of making money to buy better planes and build up a collection sounds marvelous.
Most of them are not mods, per se, but third party utilities that plug in to the sim via Sim Connect (another utility). Some of them do have mods for in-game panels and such though. There is no economy in the base game.
Some of the economy add-ons are focused on progressing from plane to bigger plane, as you suggest, some are more about simulating an airline pilot career, and some are just mission generators.
