Hello all. I'm curious as to how you choose which airports to fly from and to? Products like Ideal Flight and FS Captain makes the decisions for you but those that don't use them, what is your process? Do you randomly pick, fly in areas you are familiar with, do you keep with certain time constraints, etc?

 

Would be interesting for me to see how simmers approach their flight criteria and the tools, if any, they use.

 

THANKS!

Hi

One way I often do I go to Airliners.net. I like an image taken at a certain airport (for example Hong Kong, GUAM, Anchorage, Rio De Janeiro, etc.).

 

Then I go to Flightaware, plug in that airport and do "live flight track by airport". You get a list of Arrivals from and departures to.

 

I pick a pair of From/To that grabs my interest and how much time I have to do the flight.

 

I plug in PFPX for a flight Plan.

 

I try to use the same airliner and aircraft depicted in the image if I have it in my fleet. I also try when possible fly in real time and weather.

 

I like to fly into new territories. I get bored flying the same route over and over again

I got to know so many countries in the world, sceneries and ATC experiences. I can recall more than 100 ICAO of world wide airports from memory and I updated dozens of AFCADS for these airports and purchased quite a few to enhance the departures and arrivals with good AI.

 

Enjoy

Bill

I only depart from an airport I've flown to. When flying an airliner I generally (not always though) fly a current or historic route. I've been flying a Cherokee around Maine from airport to airport in short hops. On the other coast I flew a 737 from PHX to SAN then a 146-200 from SAN to SFO, SFO with a different airline to LAS in the 146, then the DC-9 from LAS to IAH, then on to LCH, all with airlines that fly/flew those aircraft on those routes. I've also got a route to continue through Europe, which will be picked up from where I stopped last. I may or may not fly at the time of the actual flight. For example, the LAS-IAH flight was by Texas International, that left at something like 1:15am local, and arrived before dawn - so that's what I did.

 

Airline routes come from either FlightAware or Departed Flights when I want to fly an older aircraft like a DC-8. GA is picked simply by looking at the map and deciding which way I want to go.

 

I want to tick off 1,000 airports visited, so I try to head to different places a lot. That probably means my liner flying isn't a precise as is should be because I don't really settle into a routine with built up local knowledge.

 

Not in P3D, but the principle is the same.

 

Mike

I pick real world flights, but I build my whole flight plans from scratch in PFPX.  I'll fly whatever tempts me and try to use real world equipment.

What an absolutely great question!  I'm always looking for a reason to do a flight and I'd love to see what reasons other people use.  One thing I've done is follow along with a book...fiction, non-fiction, doesn't matter.  If they travel somewhere, I take a flight.  One book I recently read had the characters traveling from Cambridge England to New Jersey to Paris, to London, down to Paris again, down to Venice, up to Poland then back to London.  This way I get the 'lay of the land' in and around the area too.  One thought I also had was to do the same with movies.  I keep looking for more reasons!

 

Gregg

The group I fly with only flies on VATSIM (so that AI Traffic is now Human controlled traffic, often with human ATC), As such, our flights are usually selected as follows:

 

1. Amount of traffic in/out of both the flight origin and destination.

2. Air Traffic Control online.

3. Quality Scenery available (we have a custom freeware scenery library of over 60GB)

3. Type of weather we're looking to fly in.

 

Since the first two deciding factors change all the time, we fly a LOT of different airports!

I've made a list of all possible flights that could be done in Poland by LOT Airlines (which is 36), and I just fly through them

I do round the world trips. After each flight I save it and then next time I reload and I continue on to my next destination. I use Flight Commander to pick an airport around 500-1000 miles away and then fly there. Using real world weather it's quite fun and I have no control on the day/night situation. I fly to airports I have never flown to before to keep it exciting.

When flying something other than small GA planes. I fly with my VA, and we have a whole RW based route system. I only fly where I left off, and fly real world routes at the real world times. Kinda helps me with the realism I guess. I don't actually fly the times the real schedules does, I just set it to that time in the sim.

Fantastic feedback guys! Really interesting ideas. Thanks!