Starting to make some good progress in the 2024 Career Mode; level 45, most of the mission types unlocked, not hurting for things to do by any means. Have not started the first company, as I understand that Flight Seeing is a trap and you will have to grind a lot of those missions before making enough to start a second company. By waiting, I now have options to start a lot of the other ones as well, Cargo and Charter being the two most 'profitable' according to others online. A lot of the guides for career mode are outdated, many posts are from 2025 or earlier and don't likely speak to any of the recent updates.

I know the first plane you get is a discounted 172 that can be used for a variety of mission types, but I can't really find a list of what planes cost and what the average mission type payout is. There's conflicting info depending on where you look; one steam guide has a spreadsheet that suggests 200 cessnas is more profitable than a single 747. Larger planes have more maintenance costs so the game seems to reward you for taking the middle route, 2-3 hr flights with a mid-range plane, like a 208 or PC-12. 

The other factor bothering me is that some companies seem entirely too boring to justify? Like the Medivac missions - when I first unlocked these, it was kinda anti-climactic? Just a VIP charter flight with different wording, no extra steps or anything. I thought Medievac would have a timer on it, like you need to hurry as the patient is dying, but its actually just, take your time and fly super smoothly, no urgency at all.

I'm worried that the agriculture/firefighting missions will similarly disappointing, so I'm putting off the scoop cert. I want these missions to be more rewarding for the repetitive nature - there's only two fire fighting planes and a single sprayer plane, so why would anyone make a company for these, when the missions would get boring quickly? Maybe as 2nd or 3rd companies for the passive income? Been avoiding the tailwheel cert and the search and rescue missions as I've read they are all bugged, asking you to land on uneven/impossible terrain and bugging out/halving to walk from the landing site to the objective as the plane cannot taxi up a mountain etc. Probably these missions were designed with Helicopters in mind. 

What are some other folks experience in career mode? Any advice or tips? First company, Cargo or Charter? FWIW I rather enjoy the 208 and other Turboprops, TBM 930 has been great for charter, but I think the Vision Jet is better ROI from what I've read?

PS: There's the red bull air races in the activities/challenges but no air race company/career? Need that air race career DLC asap! LMAO

I do have 2 companies, one light cargo with a 172 and one sightseeing with an Optica, but I haven't bothered with that side of the career mode much. I use the carrer mode just as a flight generator and hence I mostly stick with the employee missions. The company side ties you to one location whereas using the employee side I can pick what type of mission I want and where I want to fly in the regions I have unlocked.

I have done some of the rescue missions as an employee and haven't run into the problems you are listing. I suspect that the reports you read are the usual fud spread about 2024.

Updating after another weekend of career mode hijinks - Lessons learned and some eyes on the next steps

Ended up starting with a Cargo Company and the subsidized 172; Flight Seeing is a trap and should be avoided unless you really like flying around the same, hopefully custom scenery packs. Light Cargo missions pay out was close to but typically less than 100k per mission, 1h-1h30m average with no skips in the 172. Skydiving is also a trap as the 172 takes FOREVER to climb to 10000 loaded up with the weight of the passengers. Just doing the Skydiving Unlock mission was painful. I would love to know if ANYONE owns a skydiving company LOL.

At around 600-700k in the bank, I was able to get a used Vision Jet and start a Charter company. One VIP charter mission was enough to cover the maintenance on the jet to get everything back to good. RECOMMEND - pick the middle insurance for your first 1-2 flights in any new owned aircraft. I ended up putting my Vision Jet into the dirt about 100ft short of threshold while getting used to landing it and while my reputation suffered (S back down to A 😞) I wasn't forced back into grinding cargo missions, only 1 cargo mission was enough to get it back. VIP missions with no skips and bad weather were netting me 200-250k for a 45min-1h flight. Once you feel confident you can land in a crosswind/bad weather, put insurance back to the minimum. If a mission is indicating IFR/high winds, it doesn't hurt to bump insurance for that mission only, then change back after. I don't like using the "Alt-F4" abort mission trick, I'll only use this if the game has bugged out preventing me from completing a mission. 

Which does happen. I've had clearance to land, but after landing, the next mission step failed to trigger and I was forced to Alt-N 'Skip to approach' and land again, losing my no skip bonus even though I had flown the 90 mins in real time (huge bummer). A few times, the parking spot circle failed to load or appear, which was frustrating as you cannot ask Ground for another parking assignment, you must play hide and seek with the blue circle. I think turning on Taxi Ribbons would help locate when the parking stall is behind a building and you cannot see it from the hold short, but obviously that breaks immersion. It would help if the Smart Cam focused on the parking stall, but alas, too much to hope for there. Having a way to end the mission without being at the right parking spot would be great also (obviously with a penalty).

I also found that ATC clearance to land wasn't always given automatically. Some missions, you'll get the update to auto-reply for clearance when you're close to 3nm out, sometimes you wont get it at all until your on short final, sometimes it never pops up and you need to manually ask for full stop landing. If windy conditions make landing difficult you usually cannot request a different runway either, that's caused some grief especially when there's an ILS/LOC runway at your destination you'd like to use, but the game refuses to let you. I don't remember the exact airport but I flew into one that had 3 hard surface and 2 grass runways, and the game WOULD NOT let me choose a hard surface in the 172 to land, I was only able to request the grass runways. Landed on the hard surface anyway, expecting to be dinged for no clearance, but instead the game just didn't register my landing at all. Had to Alt+N back into the air and do it again.

Bugs and Quirks aside, still having fun with career mode; Now that I have a second plane, I can have the AI pilot fly my 172 while offline, and that seems to be OK for passive income, provided you keep the plane maintained and Insurance at the lowest option. Seeing as the 208 is about 2mil used, the next steps seem to be VIP missions, I'll need to do about 8-10 of them to afford the 208 and start doing medium cargo. Can't decide if I want the AI to fly the Vision Jet while I'm offline as well, I've read some mixed opinions about that.

On 5/5/2026 at 11:17 AM, bailout said:

The company side ties you to one location whereas using the employee side I can pick what type of mission I want and where I want to fly in the regions I have unlocked.

This is only true to a small extent - you are asked where you want to deliver your plane whenever you purchase it - you can only chose airports you've been to already; however, you can open up any airport on the map by moving your pilot there for usually a couple hundred credits. You can just hop from spot to spot, paying about 700c each time while not overlapping circles to uncover a good chunk of the map. You can also re-locate your plane, but that cost seems to be about 1000c per 100NM or so. So for me, with my companies started in Europe, I can move a plane and my pilot to a mission that's say 200NM away from my last one for about 2000c - considering you'll be making 250k the cost to relocate is very minimal. 

7 hours ago, Kristofski said:

I would love to know if ANYONE owns a skydiving company LOL.

The Caravan and PT-6 are available for Skydiving missions after you unlock the turboprop rating. I started a skydiving company with the SWS Kodiak, but waiting on a patch from them to make it functional for skydiving missions.

7 hours ago, Kristofski said:

If a mission is indicating IFR/high winds, it doesn't hurt to bump insurance for that mission only, then change back after.

I believe insurance rates are locked in for 24hrs, so if you change to the higher plan, all flights within 24hrs will have the higher insurance cost even if you switch back to the basic plan.

7 hours ago, Kristofski said:

I don't like using the "Alt-F4" abort mission trick, I'll only use this if the game has bugged out preventing me from completing a mission.

Not sure if you're comparing the "Abort Mission" option in the sim to Alt-F4-ing, but just wanted to note that actually "Alt-F4-ing" and pressing Esc -> Abort Mission both do the same thing: they take you back to your departure airport, I believe minus the fuel used during your aborted flight and plus any wear and tear or damage that occurred. The sim saves the progress on a regular interval and immediately if you cause damage to the aircraft or crash, so Alt-F4ing has no benefit.

7 hours ago, Kristofski said:

I can have the AI pilot fly my 172 while offline

The AI pilots only fly when you are also flying in career mode. If you only have one company, they will fly when you are doing employee missions. The total income is only reported every 24hrs, so the numbers you see when starting the sim fresh are actually from your last session, and not from when you were offline.

8 hours ago, Kristofski said:

Can't decide if I want the AI to fly the Vision Jet while I'm offline as well, I've read some mixed opinions about that.

I have the AI fly all of my planes (including a Vision Jet) and haven't had any issues. I do max out the insurance for any plane that AI is flying just to be on the safe side.

 

I took a similar route to you and used the Vision Jet to grind VIP charter missions until I saved enough to buy a PC-12 for a medium cargo company. The PC-12 on med cargo pulls in 700k-1.2+mil credits per flight. Also, you mention skipping phases of the flight a few times. Just a reminder that increasing your simrate is also an option while you're on autopilot. You can cancel IFR so you don't need to respond to ATC messages (the ATC in the sim in general is not realistic and this is particularly noticeable in career mode). I can 8x simrate in calm skies with no problem.

All in all, I treat the career mode like bailout mentioned above: primarily as a mission generator. As for creating companies for skydiving, agriculture, etc etc... they only make sense in that you make the full amount of money possible for that type of mission, and you can have AI making money when you are flying other mission types. They're not particularly profitable, and if you're min-maxing career mode credits, there will be better paths to making the most money.

10 hours ago, Funky D said:

I believe insurance rates are locked in for 24hrs, so if you change to the higher plan, all flights within 24hrs will have the higher insurance cost even if you switch back to the basic plan.

Good to know - I had been on basic at the start then when I encountered that strong wind on the weekend, I bumped it up. I had 1 crash during that session and got the correct crash recovery rate so I knew that Increasing insurance does work, but I assume decreasing worked the same. They should include a pop up when switching that tells you its in effect for 24 hours/next billing cycle.

11 hours ago, Funky D said:

Not sure if you're comparing the "Abort Mission" option in the sim to Alt-F4-ing, but just wanted to note that actually "Alt-F4-ing" and pressing Esc -> Abort Mission both do the same thing: they take you back to your departure airport, I believe minus the fuel used during your aborted flight and plus any wear and tear or damage that occurred. The sim saves the progress on a regular interval and immediately if you cause damage to the aircraft or crash, so Alt-F4ing has no benefit.

interesting, as I had read elsewhere that if you are going to crash, its better to alt-F4 before you crater to save on the airplane insurance. You'll end up back at the departure, loss of rep for cancelling a mission, but otherwise no impact to money or wear and tear. I've done the abort mission from the menu twice now when parking stalls would not appear at my destination, and both times I got partial credit for time spent flying, but like 10-12k for what should have been a 100k plus mission 😞

11 hours ago, Funky D said:

The AI pilots only fly when you are also flying in career mode. If you only have one company, they will fly when you are doing employee missions. The total income is only reported every 24hrs, so the numbers you see when starting the sim fresh are actually from your last session, and not from when you were offline.

Also not well explained in game then; I logged in last night having played since Sunday and did receive passive income - you suggest this is from my Sunday session and not the Monday time spent offline? So insurance is billed daily rather you play or not, but passive income only collects while you're actively playing? I watched one streamer get bankrupted by insurance payouts after not playing all week and coming back to something like -20k per day as he hadn't changed it to basic.
 

11 hours ago, Funky D said:

As for creating companies for skydiving, agriculture, etc etc... they only make sense in that you make the full amount of money possible for that type of mission, and you can have AI making money when you are flying other mission types.

Seems like that's the next step up then - those airliners are expensive so it'll take a while I think to reach "End Game" as if there is such a thing. One poster on steam forums had the spreadsheets going and was confident that 200 Cessnas was more ROI than a single airliner. Now that's a true gamer!

Another weekend of Career Mode shenanigans

Got the scoop and tailwheel certs and started doing firefighting and search and rescue missions. Wanted a change of pace from the Charter missions, which are numerous and bountiful lol. Firefighting and Search and Rescue, not as much

Sitting around 2m credits and letting AI fly my Vision jet and 172 while I poked around employee missions, putting out fires and dipping a toe into the search and rescue, I learnt a few things that seem to run counter to the intended progression:

In Firefighting, you start loaded up with water for the first pass, and can actually put out the fire in one shot, which sends you back to base to land, mission accomplished. I thought I'd get bonus points for not having to scoop and make a second pass, but alas, not so. I actually LOST points for being so timely about it, 0% in the execution category as I guess the game scores the mission on your scoop timing, and if you don't do that, cause you put the fire out in 1 shot, you are locked into a B rating that tanks your reputation. Oh, what fun. Because of that, I opted not to start a firefighting company, also the incredible lack of missions. By far, the least spawned mission type.

Both firefighting and search and rescue were surprisingly sparse in mission generation. I did not find many. I had to move my player character around the map paying credits to blindly unlock airports and the circle radius and just guess where missions might spawn based on the "hot spots" in the company creation page. The hot spots are seasonal, but no dates to indicate when a season starts of ends. I assume we are in Spring? but I could barely find 3 or 4 missions. This is very very poorly done by Asobo, you should just be able to pay a fee to unlock a region or pay a fee to refresh/force mission generation.

In my hubris, I started my 3rd company as a search and rescue with a Draco; I can always keep the plane for light cargo once the missions dry up. And they sure did, southern USA and South America had about 2-3 each, and once I had those done, that was it. Nothing more spawned. I'll try again tonight but that was a bummer. I rather enjoy the mission type, searching and low pass are fun and immersive, the landing is quite challenging as the terrain is usually uneven, so you need to really practice slow flight and STOL. When everything goes well, this mission type feels very rewarding, but has the potential to go south fast, with the uneven terrain on landing. I've had a few bugs where the tail of the plane locks/stays hovering in the air and wont sit, even at full stop. Never done so many go arounds - sometimes you just have to land elsewhere and taxi up the mountain a bit. Definitely a few moments where you just want to yell at the guy to walk over to you, instead of you having to take the plane to them. Uneven terrain meant clipping issues as well, sometimes tires would sink into the ground and stick under the texture plane, the tailwheel especially.

Hopefully the mission generation gets better. Its a tad misleading seeing plenty of cargo and charter missions after you create those companies, but I guess those are more common IRL so maybe I can look at it that way. One question I had for anyone that has a search and rescue company - once you exhaust the missions you have visible, if you set an AI pilot, will you still get passive income? Or does passive income require missions to be generated? Anyone with firefighting/search and rescue companies? Tips?