I’m hoping they have the autopilot working and a cargo / passenger plane with cockpit and jobs that don’t require you to fly way over weight. I would like a better fuel select screen that shows your actual takeoff weight for the mission. Have it change as you add and remove fuel. The current fuel does not show what the plane's weight is with yourself, the co-pilot, and fuel.

I'm just hoping they bundle a decent aircraft with it.

 

That I'm pretty sure is confirmed.

 

I’m hoping they have the autopilot working and a cargo / passenger plane with cockpit and jobs that don’t require you to fly way over weight. I would like a better fuel select screen that shows your actual takeoff weight for the mission. Have it change as you add and remove fuel. The current fuel does not show what the plane's weight is with yourself, the co-pilot, and fuel.

 

Huge doubt about the autopilot. Everything else is pretty sure going to be there... minus the weight problem.

Huge doubt about the autopilot. Everything else is pretty sure going to be there... minus the weight problem.

 

Well I am going to hope for the autopilot. :)

 

I am in the crew that wants all the features like ATC, random weather, AI, flight planning and IFR. I can wait for that stuff. If they do release an update with the autopilot, I will be willing to purchase the scenery and aircraft with cockpits. If they don’t I will just keep on waiting. I am not out any money yet as I was in the beta and received the DLC package at the end. I will keep watching as I suspect at some time they will have stuff I want.

 

I am past my prime now and one thing I find, the older I get the more patient I become. I am not sure if that is because time seems to go faster or not. ;)

As it stands, Alaska will be the next release. Probably early June to mid June.

That I'm pretty sure is confirmed.

 

Link? Source? Or are you under some sort of NDA which prevents you from saying more than you already have? Or maybe you've said too much already. Or maybe you're just thinking out loud. It would make sense if Alaska is released sometime in June with a deluxe aircraft but I haven't seen any confirmation of it anywhere.

No, that is not in any way confirmed. Extremely likely, sure, but absolutely not confirmed.

The current fuel does not show what the plane's weight is with yourself, the co-pilot, and fuel.

 

It doesn't show this in the hangar screen when you select the plane, but it does show it after you begin the mission when you hit the F key to adjust fuel. It might be nice to have it in the hangar as well, but it's not a deal breaker for me.

 

Hook

It doesn't show this in the hangar screen when you select the plane, but it does show it after you begin the mission when you hit the F key to adjust fuel. It might be nice to have it in the hangar as well, but it's not a deal breaker for me. Hook

 

I had always set my fuel from the hanger. Now I don’t think they let you set fuel at airports without fueling. I guess you need to set fuel max at the hanger and then drop down under weight when you begin the mission.

 

Ok, I am ok with the fuel.

I just select my fuel based off the distance to be flown, not off the cargo weight. There's no need be at max gross with 300NM worth of fuel when you are only flying 80NM.

 

I factor in a 20% or so reserve, more for risky business, regardless of the cargo weight. You need the fuel you need, and you don't need fuel you don't need.

I've taken off with near 1000 pounds of cargo and sufficient fuel to make my destination. Was right at the top of the weight indicator. Mostly I did it just to prove a point, that it was actually possible.

 

If you're flying with the engine leaned as far as practical, you'll get about twice the range that the fuel dialog indicates.

 

Hook

To get back to the topic, I had drifted away from Flight news knowing that we wouldn't hear any more about Alaska before the corsair release (and meanwhile I must say I enjoyed quite a bit of FSX flying and some beta warbird combat flying, with beautiful cockpits, but I can't talk about it...) , but here I am again, I really look forward to hearing and seeing more about Alaska. Maybe something at E3, it's just about to start, so we could see things really soon.

For something as big as Alaska DLC will (hopefully) be, I seriously doubt we are looking at a June release considering we have such little information. For single planes sure a month is plenty of time to drop some teaser information to get people excited, but something of this size would take more time so if it does actually get released in June I will be very surprised.

I believe it's been more or less ready, at least the scenery, for quite a while, given the video at that pc gamming gathering early this year, but they're certainly working on the airplanes and aerocaches/challenges/missions and probably the weather too with it's typical Alaska characteristics....

 

I also hope they had the time to fix a few issues reported in FLIGHT.

 

Meanwhile I still have a lot to do in Hawaii :-)

Huge doubt about the autopilot.

 

Yep, me too. I'm thinking that they didn't include the auto pilot for a reason, since it shouldn't be that hard to model (just guessing here). Maybe they excluded it so that players can't inflate their flying time, or easily gain the extra no-skip XPs.

If people are going to want to inflate their flying time, keeping an auto-pilot out isn't going to change that. Let's face it - if you want to inflate your landing stats you simply use the skip function, but it's still in there. These a/c are allowed to go at speeds that should kill the pilot, yet there is an achievement for getting a high speed. I don't see the difference between these and trying to force people to hand fly. Should they learn to? Absolutely - in every plane they 'fly'. But the AP is there to take some load off the pilot to allow them to do other things. We've got people learning single pilot IFR operations as best they can (one of the hardest things in flying to master), yet one of their biggest tools is taken away from them. Can't really believe I feel like I need to justify an auto-pilot for a game where half the a/c don't even have cockpits (especially when I'm preaching to the choir), but there you go...

The autopilot certainly wasn't left out to prevent people from inflating their flight time... You can simply bag out a plane with full fuel, trim it out, and send it on it's way, out to sea.

 

Similarly, the "no skip" XP is more for putting the time in I think, than hand flying. Again, the Maule trims out very well, needing just a little nudge every few minutes. So long as you're not in rough weather, anyway. But, if the "no skip" XP was for hand-flying, you'd think they would have a rough weather bonus.