I tried to fill a flightplan, but when I first contacted the Ground frequency I didn't receive any flightplan instructions or acknowledgement, and was told no flight plan could be filled because the airport was under IMC requiring IFR.

If I had completed the full Flight School, would an IFR flight plan be available, or is this ATC feature still not implemented ?

3 hours ago, jcomm said:

I tried to fill a flightplan, but when I first contacted the Ground frequency I didn't receive any flightplan instructions or acknowledgement, and was told no flight plan could be filled because the airport was under IMC requiring IFR.

If I had completed the full Flight School, would an IFR flight plan be available, or is this ATC feature still not implemented ?

I did a flight from EGCD to EGVA in winter with heavy rain and cloud today in FSW (not that you can do this in real life, because EGCD is no longer an airfield and EGVA is a standby RAF base, also designated as a USAF heavy bomber base for Europe, so the FSW database is not fully up to date). Obviously in such IMC, a flight like that would be IFR, but I don't see any options at present for making or filing an IFR plan in FSW. so I just did a normal plan and flew it, and when ATC at Fairford said that i couldn't land because it was IFR only, I just flew a circuit and came in anyway lol, and FSW happily said the flight was completed successfully.

I doubt the flight school lessons have a bearing on the rest of what you can do in the sim, although personally I think that would actually be quite cool to be honest, but I suspect it might put off some casual simmers to have things locked out from them in a product they have paid for (that happens in Aerosoft's Ready for Take Off, whereby it limits the airfields you can fly from until you've done tons of lessons and completed flights to other destinations, and frankly, it's more annoying than immersive). I have done most of the flight school lessons in FSW (all but two of them actually), although those two I haven't done are the flight tests and they are so buggy that I can't complete them (I have reported these issues), so I don't know if completing those would unlock the ability to fly IFR, although I doubt it since without doing any of them you can fly in free flight, so that would indicate to me that the features are not interlinked, although I do have the 'twin rating' having completed all the twin lessons and the test at Koblenz (which is the only one of the three tests which isn't bugged to hell lol), so I can't be completely sure.