For years I have been a big supporter of flying Tubes, 727, 737, A321 and such but after a while it seemed to be a grind. I then when got bored jump to another VA thinking that would be the answer. Finally I took a break, about 2 years and now back into it only not the same.

I always looked at General Aviation as a nice distraction but not the meat of my hobby. I found FSeconomy and tried a few flights and found I liked flying 300 lbs of shrimp 80 miles, or picking up 7 pax and flying them in a C208. This lead me to look at purchasing some planes, the bonus is I found that most are not overly bank breaking as apposed to the standard tube liner versions. 

I just recently found a VA operation called " Elite Air Taxi," and flew my first flight from KORL to MYGF, with 7 pax in  Caranado Cheyenne III and dealing with winds and TS at night. Yep blood pressure ticked up but pax happy we made it!

My reason for posting here is when I got back into Simming again, I installed P3Dv4 and X-Plane XI, the beauty is both FSeconomy and Elite Air Taxi afford me the opportunity to not have to choose only one.

So if you feeling stale flying tubes, hate paying almost $100 for a virtual plane then you might want to try General Aviation.

Your break of 2 years is the key here. I take a break every 12 months or so and always excited to be back especially PMDG

 

Edited May 19, 20188 yr by zmak

Welcome to the GA club! FSEconomy is what keeps me flying every month, instead of flight sims being an on-and-off fixation.

I would always have a flight sim of one kind or another on my computer. But I like the way FSE gives me a reason to continue flying, sending me to places I would never have thought to fly, just because that's where a juicy assignment goes.

That goes double when you "buy" a plane in the game, because there is now a monthly maintenance fee, so you can't just collect a bunch of hangar queens. You have to keep 'em busy earning charter fees.

Right now I virtually own just two aircraft: a Pilatus PC-12 based in the Pacific Northwest, and a Bell 412 helicopter in northern Europe/UK. That's what I can comfortably afford with just one or two flights a month flying for overhead, and then the rest is just flying for fun. I'm thinking of taking the PC-12 on a round-the-world tour, taking assignments along the way to (hopefully) pay for it. if you don't want the overhead of plane ownership, you can fly forever just renting any plane, anywhere in the world that's in the FSE approved fleet. I do that occasionally when I feel the itch to fly something like a DC-3.

The game has a friendly forum and works on FS9, FSX, (P3D unofficially), and X-Plane. One quirk with X-Plane is that FSE is locked into the FS9 database for world airports and navaids for compatibility reasons. That requires some occasional workarounds in XP with its up-to-date database, but it's not difficult.