In X-Plane 11, is it possible to select a new flight anywhere in the world by first going to the map mode?

 

I have been able to only go to maps that are within the area of a known/last flight.  This means that I cannot start in Europe and then select a location say in Canada if I do not know what the name of the city is or the airport identifier. I cannot seem to type in a country or even a geographical are to start looking for a potential flight. As far as I can see, you must already have a name or some sort of ID to bring up a potential map of the area you wish to fly in.

Terry

As I understand it, X-Plane's map is tied to the scenery tile that's active for the current aircraft, and a few surrounding tiles. It won't let you scroll around the world outside the current area, because that would mean loading a huge number of tiles as you scrolled. The sim can load tiles in the background during flight, but not fast enough to support a fast-scrolling world map. 

When I want to scroll around the world for places to fly, I use a second program like the donation-ware Plan-G Flight Planner. It can load the X-Plane database for navaids and airports, and you can freely scroll around the world. It's a good flight planner too, if you don't need full SID/STAR support. There are other moving map programs out there that work with X-Plane.

Dragging your plane around the map in MSFS also initiates a reload of the entire surrounding scenery.

 

I find XP's moving map pretty poorly done and nearly useless in terms of area covered, amount of information presented and possibilities for interaction. Any third party plugin, tool or GPS does a lot better.

Thanks,

 

I was afraid it would be something like you described. I am not one that likes to mess with add-on programs and would rather use what is built into the basic sims.

 

Terry