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100 Days Of FLIGHT !

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What ?

 

Yep,

its 7th June 2012

100 days since FLIGHT was RTW,

and 156 days since Beta commenced.

 

Thought it an event worth marking with a post.

 

Apologies for its lengthy rambling and tardiness,

IRL got in the way today, and I was a little rushed this evening.

 

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So what have we got -

 

To Date -

Microsoft FLIGHT - Free core product

- 4,028 sq mi land - Hawaii "Big Island"

- Icon A5 - Deluxe Aircraft

- Stearman - Deluxe Aircraft

 

Hawaiian Adventure Pack - 1st Scenery area DLC

- 2,395 sq mi land - Hawaii other islands

- Vans RV-6A - Deluxe Aircraft

 

Maule M-7-260C - 1st Deluxe Aircraft DLC

 

P-51 - 1st Basic Aircraft DLC

 

Zero - 2nd Basic Aircraft DLC

 

P-40 - 3rd Basic Aircraft DLC

 

F4U Corsair - 4th Basic Aircraft DLC

 

Pending -

Alaska - 2nd Scenery area DLC.

- 571,951 sq mi land

 

Aircraft Unannounced -

 

Future -

Location Unannounced - 3rd Scenery area DLC.

Patches/Bugfixes - Ongoing

Features - Various to be activated.

 

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So what's FLIGHT ever done for me -

 

I'd occasionally & frustratedly dabbled with FS,

starting with v3 ? (3 floppies),

on underpowered hand-me-down PCs, with green monochrome screens.

 

It wasn't till late 2003, several PCs later,

that I began flying regularly, (FS8 then FSX),

primarily choppers to offshore to oil & gas platform's helidecks.

 

Previously,

given a decent runway,

albeit 3 times wider, and 5 times longer than nescessary,

I could just about land a short plank.

 

Stir in some nasty weather,

and more than likely

I'd guarantee lifetime employment for some sheet-metal worker.

Though I did manage to complete FSX's heavy-iron missions.

 

 

 

Anyway -

Along comes FLIGHT.

 

Not quite as expected,

though appreciated MS's intent,

but hey-ho & away we go.......

 

Rather than FS previous's "fly anything anywhere",

FLIGHT's limited scenery & aircraft content,

forced me to play solely with what's available,

addressing aspects I'd rarely have considered flying previously.

 

Thought I might as well begin at the beginning,

learning to fly, & more importantly land, planks properly through FLIGHT's Landing Challenges.

Fully expecting an easy ride through the 'career' mechanism

unlocking various aircraft paints, missions, challenges, & jobs as I progressed.

 

How humblingly wrong I was.

 

Being used to landing choppers,

on a plank's equivalent of a dime,

I found myself struggling on basic approaches,

with juggling flying, flaps, and engine management,

and failing miserably to achieve any level of consistency.

 

N.B.

This was mainly into the bush-strips,

where through tweaking the .cfg

I'd inadvertently disabled the POI marker,

and was struggling to even find the strip, let alone land.

 

I've never felt so frustrated,

died so frequently/spectacularly/or needlessly,

yet had so much fun, in a long time.

 

Over time I gradually improved,

but still wasn't achieving consistency, or anywhere near Gold.

 

Clicking an airports details

allows you to start in the air,

placing you approx 2000' above the airports ref point.

 

Initially it was for runway familiarisation.

 

Then for the hell of it,

I immediately pressed B, killing the engine,

and dead-sticked a series of landings.

 

Being used to chopper auto rotations,

I found my landings immediately improved,

and began appreciating the subtleties each airframe's behavior.

 

Still insufficient for those final elusive Golds.

 

I started flying those much-maligned Gold Rush Challenges,

and rapidly found my aircraft handling skills sharpening dramatically.

 

Then took some time-out, to just fly,

along the way completing a bunch of cargo, passengers, and clandestine jobs.

 

The breakthrough surprisingly came from crosswind take-offs,

where previously I'd find the Maule straying leftwards off the runway,

I then started obeying the Take-Off Checklist,

watching my speed, raising the tail appropriately,

and also applying rudder trim, and using the C & Z brake keys.

 

Once I understood & became fluent with their interactions,

I returned to those outstanding Landing Challenges,

and surprisingly greased most of the Golds

at either first or after very few attempts.

 

Finally earning those LC achievements left me grinning ear to ear for days.

 

Since revisited many, attempting to max-score each LC.

 

Similarly find myself looking forward

to further enhancing my flying

through FLIGHT's future chopper Landing Challenges.

 

 

 

I understand & like the path MS has chosen,

preventing in-flight pausing / lookaround,

and for the moment, excluding both GPS or autopilot.

 

Doing so forced me to both learn, and improve my multitasking,

using the instruments whilst actually flying the plane,

rather than as previously,

either pausing, slyly looking at the moving map, and tweaking the autopilot.

 

I now even find myself frequently applying dirty weather

just for the sheer hell of it.

 

I consider myself reasonably spatially/geographically aware,

but I find the lack of a map, or FSX's kneeboard,

or top-down's restrictive zoom level,

has mean't I'm not learning the airports relative locations,

and any route's features, as quickly as I was in FS previous.

 

Looking forward to Alaska !

 

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Statistics, Rewards, & Achievements -

 

Much appreciate their increased scope & granularity over FSX.

Though miss the old style logbook,

which'll become increasingly relevant with each addon scenery.

 

The metrics in FLIGHT's Challenges provide great feedback & goals.

In no way do I consider those stats,

or their related Achievements to be bragging points,

rather, find them more useful as B/S troll detectors.

 

In FLIGHT RTW I've now clocked up -

- over 200 hours flying time, (77 night).

- 25.8 k miles

- 3.7 million XP

- 55 tons of cargo, of which 27 tons were clandestine, (Pirate).

 

Nothing compared to some.

One of whom has gobsmackingly -

- Logged 698 hours, (275 night).

- Clocked 92,838 miles.

- Racked up over 11 million XP.

- Hauled 146 tons of cargo, of which 126 tons were clandestine.

 

Currently my successful landings, (1004),

are embarassingly exceeded by my crash-count, (1023),

but only due to wrecklessly pushing the limits

attempting Gold Rush lap records, (Gold with 1'45" to spare).

 

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Highlights & Favourite Aspects -

 

Best Features -

How the various Challenges can substantially improve your aircraft handling.

 

Learning -

How to land a plank properly, (well nearly).

 

Wow Moments -

Icon Landing Challenge #3 at Bradshaw when the sun bloom hit the windscreen.

 

Pucker Factor -

Finding myself inverted

during an early attempt at RV-6A Landing Challenge #5 - Foggy ILS into Lihue.

 

Favourite Detail -

Highly detailed / featured airports, (outstanding v FSX's generics).

 

Favourite Useage -

Flying clandestine missions in manky weather at night.

 

Favourite Aerocache -

Diving down Wailae Falls extremely narrow crevasse,

grabbing the aerocache, and pulling up to weave down the valley.

 

Favourite Aircraft Characteristic -

The Maule's stall behaviour, when I've not being paying attention.

 

Weekly Challenge -

Flying between the top angle arms of the harbour cranes at PHNL.

 

Hangar of Death -

Flying the RV-6 through Kona Intl's tube-tent adjacent the blister tent.

 

Most Satisfying Achievement -

Finally earning Gold for all aircraft's Landing Challenges.

 

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Whats Gratifying -

 

The numbers of new users participating online,

unfortunately not so much in forums.

 

The underlying ground swell of ex-FS9/FSX users

just quietly getting on with enjoying the game.

 

Those few hard-core simmers,

who've had the guts to come-out

and say they're enjoying FLIGHT !

 

Members of the Developer community

who'd initially shunned FLIGHT

who've since found themselves actually having fun.

 

This forum's relatively proactive stance to FLIGHT.

 

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Whats Dissappointing, Even Disturbing -

 

100 days after release,

and 156 days after beta release,

when the first beta-testers broke their NDA.

 

There's still -

 

- Facebook fwits sniping that FLIGHT doesn't do IFR or have ILS, (3 off in past week).

 

- Meawaaannnas demanding FLIGHT become FS11,

dominating most other forums, STEAM, and facebook.

though certainly far less prevalent here, still all too frequent.

 

 

To any still complaining about lack of GPS or an autopilot -

 

If you can't consistently grease Gold

on every single landing-challenge

using those tiddly GA aircraft available now,

what chance have you ever

of being considered competent to land a jumbo. :biggrin:

 

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Describing real-world flying

a pilot on PPRUNE recently aptly put it -

There are plenty of "Cook Book" pilots out there.....that have never enjoyed flying.

 

 

 

Have Fun

ATB

Paul

 

FLIGHT - Earn your wings !

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Whow!

 

Thx for sharing! It was a very good read before going to bed, dreaming of Alaska :-)


Main Simulation Rig:

Ryzen 5600x, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, 1 TB & 500 GB M.2 nvme drives, Win11.

Glider pilot since October 1980...

Avid simmer since 1992...

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I'll keep reading as so much of your anecdotes are mine also. Is a 'plank' a rotary wing pilot's reference to a fixed wing?

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Thank You Sir,best thing said about , FLIGHT ever..I would think there are many who enjoy FLIGHT as you do... as I do also...for me its BEEN one great Hawaii Vacation..Soon we may be in a far colder place, that too will be a great Vacation...ALOHA!...Vin

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Excellent read, and pretty much my thoughts exactly. Thanks for sharing

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Paul, yours is a very well said and thorough assessment.

 

You expressed many feelings I have experienced with Flight and left little space to add.

 

I can say that after 25+ years of flight simulation, Flight has brought the joy of flying back to me. Every time I startup the game I feel as enthusiastic as I felt back in 1986, when I fired up FS2 on my Televideo, it had an 8086 Intel processor, 128-256K RAM, twin 5 1/4 “ floppies and black-green screen.

Time sure flies my friends.

 

I also think Flight has contributed to my flying skills, not having all the avionics available at the moment has forced me to do patterns, VOR flying, ILS-DME, LDA approaches and landings by hand, and I admit all those have improved.

 

Never did challenges or missions on previous flight simulators. With Flight, given the limited scenery, aircraft and gadgets available at the moment, I have done and redone all Challenges until I got top scores on each one of them. Those Gold Rush Challenges are a blast, and have managed to finish two of them with way more than a minute to spare, except Ford Island, where I have just above one minute.

 

In summary, I’m just having fun. I’m waiting for Alaska and whatever it brings on. Perhaps the future is bright after all. In any case I enjoy what I do, in real life, work and in my spare time.

 

 

Cheers

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Well, there's not much left to say after such an indepth dlve into MS Flight.

Well done Paul and thanks for sharing.

The only thing that I can add is my own personal feelings about Flight and what it has done for me.

Being a retired 737NG pilot I got very bored with FSX and even the incredible addon.....PMDG NGX.

Why did I get bored ? Simple really, it was not fun or new and I had seen it all before and even did it in real life for almost 30 years.

In real world flight simulation, FSX gets used for the outside visuals only. Software like Project Magenta networked on about 7 PC's give you the flight deck.

Flight has rekindled my love of flight simulation because it is back to the basics and the stuff that really matters when learning about flying etc.

The aerocaches are both fun and educational but if you don't like them that's fine. I personally love the idea and look forward to more of it.

I really believe that MS has gone down the right road with this. The whole idea of being LIVE is a very powerful concept and has endless possibilities.

If MS stick to a plan of good DLC over the next 2 years I think Flight has massive potential to be both a great flight simulator and and a game all rolled into one.

I will admit that I did not like it when I saw it first but it really grew on me as I began to realize that for the first time in years I was actually enjoying desktop simulation and having fun too. Also love the landing and gold rush challenges. I have clocked up a lot of XP points because of those. Actually tonight I have exceeded 9 million XP. Going for the cool 10 Million before Alaska comes out ! :LMAO:

 

Fred.

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What an enjoyable read that was.

 

All I can add to that is - well done Microsoft for creating a flight sim that can be used on almost any machine, desktop or laptop. Finally I am able to enjoy flying on my 4 year old laptop . OK I can`t run it with the settings maxed out , most of them are on medium. But the game still runs beautifully and is a very enjoyable experience. I have had a great time learning all about VOR`s and ILS`s and practising using them.

 

So well done to the Flight team. Thanks very much. :clapping:

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Paul - great stuff written mate *slaps Paul on back*

 

Nothing much to add to that.

 

Flight kinda gets you where it counts... Your head might tell you that it doesnt have this or that or the other, but what it does have is convincing. It also enables you to have fun, which leads in many cases to addiction.

 

Its a great beggining. Well done Flight team.

 

Nuff said really!

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Very complete and accurate summation of what I feel as well. Thanks, Paul, for putting it all down all down in black and white.

 

Best regards.

Luis

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