For example, let's say I'm doing a long haul flight from VHHH to KLAX, and about 1/4 way through the flight, can I save this and load it back up later so that my aircraft will be in the same exact way as I left it and resume my flight? Was wondering if this will work on complex planes like PMDG's?

While I am not a tube liner, heavy plane flying...I do this quite regularly, save a flight and come back to it.  All the settings are completely stored for everything...so would think the answer is yes.  Can't see that it would not work with complex planes.

 

But, why don't you set up a flight, get your PMDG into the air with FMC programmed or whatever it uses and save the flight,  shut off the sim, restart and load up your saved flight as see if everything is working fine.  THis will give you confidence that you will not loose your flight.

 

I would also "PAUSE" the flight, so that when it loads up you will start in the paused mode, say vs. slew or actually flying.

I like to use it, especially given the randomness of CTD's and the fact that some dense areas can generate OOMs.

 

Simply hit ";" and type the name you want to save it under.  I fly the nGX 99% of the time, and never have a problem.

You can also auto-save a flight (very handy if when FSX decides to CTD).  If you have a licensed version of FSUIPC this is a feature - saves per your specs every X minutes with up to Y times saved being displayed (so you can go back several minutes if needed - handy for repeating approaches when practicing).  You can also specify it to save on exit - doesn't matter if you are flying or not, all settings, flight plan, etc are there.

 

There is also a freeware addon you can use - this too auto-saves periodically during your flight so that you can reload yourself where you were if you have a CTD - http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/syb2.cgi?section=misc&file=AutoSaverFSX.zip

It depends on the plane. Default planes have no problem with this but for (complex) addons this option has to be implemented in the addon. So you will have to check the manual or site of the developer. It certainly won't always work and it also happens that it is implemented badly. I remember several addon planes that either couldn't save a flight properly: some could do it after a few patches, others kept on having problems.

 

So the best thing to do is give it a try. ^_^

It depends on the addon, so you need to look at the docs. Many have extra state variables outside of FSX which may be saved automatically in the FLT file by pressing ';' or may get saved in some other file. There could also be extra steps required to save this extra state. Some addons will save FMC states but "forget" other things (one addon I have does a full FMC state save but forgets the positions of light switches so they need to be reset manually).

One caution about using auto-save features: For some addons, saving a flight in progress has quite a bit of CPU load to gather all the state variables and then format them for storage and write to disk. This can introduce stutters in the sim. So if you have mysterious stutters that happen at fixed intervals, try turning off the auto-save and see if that's the problem.

yes, some complex planes do not do well with flight saves. experiment and see if your's works.