In-Flight Refresh/Restore

[DickB 6]

I just wanted to share this tip that I discovered, Not only does it allow you to refresh your flight in-flight with a single button/key press, but if you happen to crash, it will automatically reload your flight at a point immediately before the crash so that you can recover and carry on.

You need to have Pete Dowson's wonderful FSUIPC installed. Set up the flight autosave facility as follows:

Enable Autosave: Checked

Save Interval: 60000 secs (we're not interested in the regular autosave file)

How Many To Keep: 1 (to ensure the file is overwritten on each autosave)

Save Whilst on Ground:  Checked

Also Save To A Flight Called: Checked and specify filename as Previous Flight

At This Interval (secs): 60 (or whatever you wish)

(It may be that you can do the same with other flight autosave tools, but you must be able to save the file as Previous Flight)

This will automatically save your flight every 60 secs to a FLT file called "Previous Flight". This is the file that FSX reloads when you invoke the Reset function (Ctrl+semicolon) or when you crash in mid flight. The file by default contains the flight settings at the start of the current flight, but there's nothing to stop you replacing it. 

So with this setup, if you're flying along and FSUIPC starts warning that you are running out of VAS (which was my problem), simply invoke Reset (I have it mapped to a button on my yoke). The sim pauses briefly and then reloads your flight from when it was last autosaved (i.e up to 60 secs ago). The reload is very quick, because most of the scenery is already loaded. The flight then carries on automatically, but with much less VAS - in my case nearly 1GB less..

Or, if you should happen to crash for any reason (it happens), instead of automatically reloading your flight from the beginning, FSX will reload from the point of the last autosave, which on average is 30 secs before the crash, thus allowing you to recover and avoid repeating what you did wrong the first time. 

I guess this scheme or similar could also be used if you wanted to repeat a particular segment of flight (e.g. a landing) over and over.

Edited March 26, 2021 by DickB
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