Skipper
1904
Pedro your pics are gorgous. Loved the first one with the double rainbow.
I think I remember Microsoft saying they -wanted- to incorporate seasons but have not yet done so.
With satellite data, I’m not entirely sure how they will do that, it sounds like a challenge to me for sure.
Rock8man
1905
Here was the preview in July that mentioned it:
I’m not sure if it will include seasonal things like fields of flowers blooming because of seasons though.
Matt_W
1906
I’ve got a TBM lined up that I’ll rent in England. I’m shipping my pilot by public transport. It doesn’t make sense to fly her. It’s too far.
Yeah, you can set up up to three job queries with parameters you set: distance, cargo, passengers, direction. And then it generates a few random jobs either to or from your FBO airport with those parameters. They seem to pay pretty well and are just for you; no one else can take them.
At this point, I’ve just set it up. Haven’t flown at all. I’ll let you know
Yep. Thunder only.
I think the only benefit is that you can outsource parts of your jobs to a partner. And you can use the internal mail system to communicate with partners.
Well, they already have a snow slider, so that part is done and presumably the tech is at least partially applicable to other seasons. But, yes. I imagine any automated solution will create a lot of anomalies when applied to global satellite data.
Spock
1908
Yep, I decided to do the same thing. My pilot is traveling to the Dominican Republic by public transport to tour the Caribbean. It’ll take about a day to get there. Looking forward to flying there!
The FBO sounds nice, but I’ll wait til I’m back at my home base to set one up. That is, if I stay in Hawaii. I’m still not sure Honolulu makes sense as home base. Because the Islands are so isolated, there are not a lot of jobs in the 1000-2000 nm range, and lots of water to fly over for those that do exist. But I don’t get tired of the views!
Matt_W
1909
OK I attempted my first flight in Bangkok. Not much available to fly, so I thought I’d take the DV20 for a spin. It’s actually really fun to fly. Steam gauges, nimble, flying by the seat of your pants. It’s got a huge viewscreen so you can easily see in all directions.
Climb out of Don Muaeng airport in Bangkok. (This is the old airport that is used for shorter hops and domestic flights. The newer big international one, Suvarnabhumi, is quite a ways outside the city to the southeast. It takes an hour to ride the free shuttle bus between them. Have done.)
Thai countryside. Probably rice fields. Thailand is the 4th largest rice producer in the world.
So, this the first aircraft where I’ve encountered gyro drift. The gyro wasn’t even close after I took off, which I didn’t notice for awhile and got way off track. But even after I reset it to the GPS track a couple of times, it drifted terribly and was basically useless. On this shot you can the gyro at like 200° but the compass and GPS show about 055°. Also note the gas gauge on the lower right…
The DV20 is a funny little dragonfly. The whole trip I was basically splitting the difference between cloud cover and mountaintops.
So, I ran out of gas. I thought I had plenty, but ran out within 10nm of the airfield. Sucks, because this was an hour-long flight that I had to fly with my hand on the stick the whole time. (Hey the DV20 actually has a joystick for flight control. Verisimilitude ftw!) I tried to bring it around to this weird compound out in the middle of nowhere. (Possibly this is a poultry farm in real life. They abound in this area and are laid out like this.) My engine is utterly dead in this next shot, but you get a surprising amount of range out of the aircraft. There were too many trees down there. I found a small city park on the other side and almost pulled off a landing, but ended up crunching my nose into some bushes. OnAir actually detected the landing as at my destination airport, but didn’t tolerate the crash.
Spock
1910
@Matt_W , those are beautiful pictures. Bangkok looks pretty great to me! I especially like that artsy shot over the rice fields. Sorry about the lithobraking (to borrow a term from Kerbal Space Program). :)
I’ve decided to move my Thunder company (Logical Airlines) to Osaka, in Japan, for now. With the new free Japan DLC arriving soon, that should be interesting. But first I did a return flight from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, and wow, that approach into Hong Kong was too exciting, lol. Mountains all around the field. I actually did find the localizer for Hong Kong using a Google search, but it didn’t help much, because I was too busy not lithobraking into mountains to use it.
It was another trip with low clouds. This time I enjoyed the scenery more, maybe because this time I put on autopilot. I was curious what the orange thing below me here was; never figured it out.
Interesting light on initial approach into Hong Kong.
Here I am trying to find my way into the pattern at Hong Kong. I got confused by all the mountains and buildings. I landed safely, but it wasn’t pretty. 10 knot crosswind didn’t help.
vyshka
1911
Speaking of Hong Kong I remember seeing a video once of someone doing the approach to Kai Tak, must have been FSX. That looked scary with them looking like they were going in between buildings.
Spock
1912
It was scary landing as a passenger there!
Skipper
1913
Matt, I’ll contrast your DV20 notes with the DA62. God it’s implemented horribly. First, the aforementioned autopilot is just hosed. Here’s hoping they fix it. Second, I’ve never been in an aircraft where the structural beams create the worst forward look out of the aircraft you’ve ever seen.
This is real:
This is MSFS 2020:
It takes a lot of getting used to. Not to mention the DA62 is a dual-engine piston aircraft but the mechanics of it in game are like a toy. It is very twitchy.
I’ll add, I’m biased but I truly believe the high wing design is so much better for seeing things when flying small aircraft. The front views are sometimes limited depending on the engine, but side views are amazing and great for getting your bearings in flight.
Pedro
1914
Great shots all round, folks!
@Skipper For a moment there I thought you had gotten ahead of things and were playing in VR ;)
Looking forward to getting back to it today; I have so much to do, I haven’t even got to grips with the big boy flight stuff yet. Great game, and I’ve found myself losing track of time on several occasions so far.
Pedro
1915
It didn’t look like I could get the drone camera far enough away to get the rising moon and setting sun in the same shot :(
Pedro
1917
Just about; it’s the Canadian tundra on the northern tip of Quebec. I was up there to look at a meteor crater lake which turned out to be disappointing.
I’m always kind of mildly horrified when I fly over that area in real life as a passenger - eg if you go from London to SF or LA, you spend hours over this lifeless wilderness (though I am sure there are zilliions of bugs down there)
Thrag
1918
Having driven across great stretches of interstate 80 to and from SF my windshield can confirm the zillions of bugs.
Skipper
1920
Kinda sorta on the same take, what’s that area in Russia where the over ground meteor killed everything? Would be cool to fly over that as well.
Tunguska. Not sure there’s much to see from the air these days, just lots of forest. There’s a suggestion that a lake in the area formed from the explosion, but it’s very much disputed.
Pedro
1922
It occurs to me @Thrag might be able to get that sun/moon picture in one shot on his ultrawide. One for the bucket list, Thrag! But pick somewhere colourful, like the Sahara, to do it in :P
Skipper
1923
Honeycomb apparently announced rudders but fselite has a preview
Knowing them, that’ll be … about tree-fiddy.
