4 hours ago, Simon_C said:

But you fly from and to default airports, don’t you?

You fly to real airports where scheduled airlines have flights to and from. 

1 minute ago, Bobsk8 said:

You fly to real airports where scheduled airlines have flights to and from. 

Thanks. That I noticed already. At least I can manage it a bit. I am now with Wizz UK out of EGKK, I have LGAV, I had to do couple of schedule generators, but now I like my schedule and will be flying these flights first. Not all airports are addons, but I will overlook that first.

In APLv2 you can fly a plane you want, the program did not control, wich plane you fly.
also you can always take a route you want, also a route that is not in your shedule. 
Go into "Tools" -> "Random Fligth generator". there you can take a "free Flight" from where and to any you want.
insert departure and arrival, thats it.
-> you will earn your XP but no money from your Airline when you fly non sheduled flights. 

13 minutes ago, Alti said:

In APLv2 you can fly a plane you want, the program did not control, wich plane you fly.
also you can always take a route you want, also a route that is not in your shedule. 
Go into "Tools" -> "Random Fligth generator". there you can take a "free Flight" from where and to any you want.
insert departure and arrival, thats it.
-> you will earn your XP but no money from your Airline when you fly non sheduled flights. 

You do not get XP or salary for generated flights. 

22 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

You do not get XP or salary for generated flights. 

you are right, for generated flight you get only scores. but you can fly what you want 🙂

Good to know, thanks.

This might be a long shot... but can I monitor my flight on the iPad somehow? My PC is in basement, but sitting there for hours, while all is automatic... not really. Would be cool to be possible to monitor the flight stats on an iPad.

I know that it is not everybody's bag, but I simply create my own "career" modes using spreadsheets. I am a casual flyer and none of the career addons give me the flexibility I need, so, I just build a basic framework and use the parts of it that interest me. I call it my Charter Aviation Simulator.

I live in South Florida, so I have a list of airports from Key West to Orlando that I keep in the spreadsheet that are my "destinations" for my company. I have a few hubs, and when I want to "play" I set one of my hubs as my departure airport and use a randomizer formula in the spreadsheet to get my destination. I have another randomizer function that picks what "mission" type of flight it is (passenger, vip, commercial, cargo, ferry, etc. I basically pulled them from Neofly) and another randomizer function which picks my cargo or other bits associated with the type of flight. Again, I just made my own list of things to populate and keep them in the spreadsheet for the randomizer to pull from.

That is the basics and will get me in the air with a role-playing purpose. I also have additional detail if I want to add to my flight and gamify it even more. I have randomly generated prices and fares attached to everything, so I can do the whole "money progression" thing. I have values set to all of my aircraft in the game, so if I want to do a full career thing, I can start with a lowly 152/172 and "work my way up". But honestly, I don't use this part of my spreadsheet system. Just randomizing and giving myself a litle "role-playing" for my virtual company/airline job is enough of a carrot for me.

I have this set up for South Florida, the Bahamas, the Pacific North West and Southern Spain. I now want to begin flying in California from San Francisco down to San Diego, so I am going to set up that area as well in my spreadsheets.  

Spreadsheet are nice in the sense that they give me full control and customizability. I have formulas set up that take my generated airports and create links to the route in SkyVector and other services. Links are automatically generated to take me to the airports in Google Maps, Chartfox, FlightAware, etc. etc. Everything is right there for me to click to and use all of the awesome online freebies that are available as part of my "system".

 

For me....

 

I'm retired.

 

I'm a retired Tool & Die Maker.

 

When I was young I dreamed of being an airline pilot.

 

Now I fly for Alaskan Airlines 😉

On 1/6/2025 at 5:06 AM, Simon_C said:

But you fly from and to default airports, don’t you?

No it works 100% fine with any add on scenery you purchase.

10 hours ago, jspilot said:

No it works 100% fine with any add on scenery you purchase.

You misunderstood. The software doesn't consider if you have an addon or not, it simply creates a schedule for you. You can refresh it until you get some airports you have, but generally, it doesn't consider them. So you end up flying to airports that you have no addons for. This is the only downside I see with this software. I'd rather have an option to do that, even if some flights happen twice.

Edited January 10, 20251 yr by Simon_C

On 1/6/2025 at 11:47 AM, salasnet said:

I know that it is not everybody's bag, but I simply create my own "career" modes using spreadsheets. I am a casual flyer and none of the career addons give me the flexibility I need, so, I just build a basic framework and use the parts of it that interest me. I call it my Charter Aviation Simulator.

I live in South Florida, so I have a list of airports from Key West to Orlando that I keep in the spreadsheet that are my "destinations" for my company. I have a few hubs, and when I want to "play" I set one of my hubs as my departure airport and use a randomizer formula in the spreadsheet to get my destination. I have another randomizer function that picks what "mission" type of flight it is (passenger, vip, commercial, cargo, ferry, etc. I basically pulled them from Neofly) and another randomizer function which picks my cargo or other bits associated with the type of flight. Again, I just made my own list of things to populate and keep them in the spreadsheet for the randomizer to pull from.

That is the basics and will get me in the air with a role-playing purpose. I also have additional detail if I want to add to my flight and gamify it even more. I have randomly generated prices and fares attached to everything, so I can do the whole "money progression" thing. I have values set to all of my aircraft in the game, so if I want to do a full career thing, I can start with a lowly 152/172 and "work my way up". But honestly, I don't use this part of my spreadsheet system. Just randomizing and giving myself a litle "role-playing" for my virtual company/airline job is enough of a carrot for me.

I have this set up for South Florida, the Bahamas, the Pacific North West and Southern Spain. I now want to begin flying in California from San Francisco down to San Diego, so I am going to set up that area as well in my spreadsheets.  

Spreadsheet are nice in the sense that they give me full control and customizability. I have formulas set up that take my generated airports and create links to the route in SkyVector and other services. Links are automatically generated to take me to the airports in Google Maps, Chartfox, FlightAware, etc. etc. Everything is right there for me to click to and use all of the awesome online freebies that are available as part of my "system".

 

This is interesting. Got a few screen shots you can make of it and post somewhere? I would love to emulate this some. I've thought of something similar but using PnP tables to roll dice on lol, almost like an RPG. 

To the OP, Pilots Life is good. I haven't used it in a long time. I've been mostly using the 2024 career addon - its great when it works (lots of bugs).

On 1/6/2025 at 4:33 PM, Simon_C said:

This might be a long shot... but can I monitor my flight on the iPad somehow? My PC is in basement, but sitting there for hours, while all is automatic... not really. Would be cool to be possible to monitor the flight stats on an iPad.

You can use the Navigraph app for that. APL’s website also has a map showcasing all active flights. 

I was also using spreadsheets to create my own routes etc which is certainly doable but still doesn't quite match a career app.  I was hoping for the career app in 2024 to scratch that itch but I can't even run 2024 atm due to its streaming requirements so who knows when they will allow for 2024 to have a local install feature so its career function is not even an option for me.  It doesn't seem that it quite matches the dedicated apps out there either but I digress.   When 2020 released I used onair for a while and was quite pleased with it, the only other I tried is neofly which is fine but not at the same level but hey you get what you pay for.   Eventually got bored though when onairs limitations started to manifest themselves which particularly seemed to become the case when wanting to operate airliners.  Also I found myself scheduling AI pilots way too much to the point that I spend more time doing that than flying planes and I don't want a tycoon game either.

I actually ended up downloading a trial again for onair so you do have a chance to check it out without committing and it seems that it has come a very long way since using it last at least 4 years ago now, better support for airliners, simbrief integration etc. It has a freelance mode when you can more easily fly the planes you want but I still want to build up to airliners over time using its progression mode as well.  I'm also going for the option where I can't use AI pilots so I don't waste my time on managing them.  Still undecided if I'll resub or not but no negatives so far unless you consider the subscription requirement a negative but even there I can't say that it's unfairly priced either.

I haven't tried APL, once concern I have there is that it seems to limit your planes to actual airliners that fly it?  I fly the classic airliners most, the fokker, the DC-6, RJ etc which I assume you are then limited to the airlines that fly those specific planes and there won't be many if any left but if you primarily fly modern airliners that may not be a concern.

But coming back to onair, just trial it, nothing to lose.

It`s to attract gamers on XBOX game pass.