FPVSteve

Those random WASM crashes are worrying on a long haul aircraft - nobody wants to sit for 12+ hours only to have their landing ruined (like London Controller) if they even get that far.

A very interesting talk on population, fossil fuel usage etc.

Thanks for the feedback... So sectors are currently generated from the routes that people have already flown with Self-Loading Cargo - there are currently over 2,000,000 flights with about 62,000 distinct routes in the database. These are used as the foundation for the route generator at present and while they may not be 100% accurate in terms of locations and times, you do also have the ability to set up a day of sectors from scratch if you do want to fly to specific timetables (and see below for plans on this). Line Pilot is designed really to allow you to fly as and when you can rather than planning days and weeks ahead. Think of it as an ongoing "career" which you can pick up and put down when family/work allows, while still allowing you to plan your flights for the current simulator session rather than the week ahead. For instance on one Saturday you might build yourself 4 sectors if you have time whereas on another you might only have a couple of hours spare so you'd plan a single flight.. It's designed to allow casual use with ongoing progress - there's no use in planning flights from a schedule if you end up not being able to fly the flights due to time constraints and I think it fits a gap quite well. It does for me anyway. It's not really designed as a "career" mode in the traditional sense because I didn't like having to grind my way into using my expensive addons like you do with a lot of other tools - with this you can simply get cracking and enjoy what you already own. As far as Line Pilot is concerned you're already capable of flying the Fenix A320 / Ini A350 / PMDG 737 and it scores you based on how well you do then challenges you go keep it going and not get demoted to a lower rank. Having said all that there are three immediate upgrades that I'm currently working on and which will be released approx. October time: 1) More visibility of the maintenance/fleet management to make it more apparent about what is going on when there are problems and when they will be solved, plus a bit of interactivity with the fleet. 2) The ability to add your own weekly schedules per airline, and use them to generate your routes (and share with other users if you wish) so that you can use real-world schedules as opposed to ones which may not be entirely accurate. 3) The ability for each airline to operate on a custom SOP for scoring instead of the default one that is currently in place. This will allow you to set different levels of challenge depending on who you're flying for. Hope this helps 👍

It makes MSFS lighting look more like X-Plane lighting....

No-one tried the default A330 in X-Plane? I encourage you to try the X-Plane demo and give it a whirl.

Out of curiosity which CPU/GPU combo do you have? The FSL seems to perform really well on my computer which is a i9-11900K with an 8Gb 3060Ti but I do have texture resolution turned down in MSFS 2024.

Oh wow - this looks incredibly good. Seeing the comparisons side by side makes it much easier to see the changes and it's amazing what trees add to the scenes.

You know, not so long ago this would have been considered an AAA addon. It's beautiful and obviously tons of effort has gone into it. Credit where credit is due, LVFR - nice work by the looks of things.

The only thing I dislike about Chaseplane is how it seems to make my sim "hang" when I first go into the cockpit (presumably while it loads my profiles from the cloud since I have absolutely terrible internet here). Other than that it's superb. I only bought it because I missed the X-Plane camera system so much whenever I used MSFS. Bonus feature: a reinstall of MSFS is frustrating enough - not having to set up my camera views ever again is worth the money on its own.

"Dropping the kids off at the pool".

I forgot to add there's www.diyfpv.com which has a "builder" where you can source all of the parts you might need to get started. Great community.

I didn't post that video it was someone else :) There's honestly so many paths you can take it would be impossible to cover on a forum post but some of the best channels for learning are: https://www.youtube.com/@CurryKitten/videos https://www.youtube.com/@painless360 https://www.youtube.com/@Xjet/videos (although he is currently embroiled in arguments with his local council lol) - he has some superb older videos from explaining how FPV actually works (antennas / transmitter / receivers etc and the theory behind it) to making very cheap "backpack" style FPV systems that you can simply velcro onto an aircraft and get flying - plus making your own aircraft out of hobby foam for pennies (plus electronics of course).

No this is North Lincolnshire near a place called Eastoft 👍

it's not a VR headset as such ... it's a set of video goggles which have a video receiver in them that outputs to a screen (or screens) inside them (or indeed a screen on the ground if you prefer to use a groundstation). The video is transmitted live from the aircraft so you can pilot it as though you're sat onboard. I still have my first pair of goggles (Fatshark Dominators) which only support analogue video but they're super-reliable and the aircraft I fly with them have a range of approx 2km with a simple circular polarised antenna or ~5-6km with a patch or similar direction antenna attached to the goggles and a ~200mw transmitter onboard the aircraft. I also have some newer digital goggles from DJI which someone has tested out to 10km but I find flying at range or altitude (besides being illegal) really boring - close in, low down flying is way more fun. The quality of the video via the HD link is absolutely beautiful though. Here's a video I made while testing a plane I built a few years ago, I think I flew it out to just over a kilometer in this one but I was just testing the autopilot system to make sure it would turn home and not nosedive into the ground if I lost signal 😆. You can see me take the goggles off my face at the end after my "landing" 😆 The autopilot/on-screen display my goggles during this flight looks like this in the live feed to the goggles (that above video is a HD recording from a separate camera I stuck onboard): In the centre you can see a line which is pointing to home so you don't get lost - if you do, just flick a switch and the aircraft will come home as it knows its launch point relative to its current position via GPS. I also made a headtracker for the goggles linked to a channel on the transmitter so I could physically turn my head / look up and down and have it remotely control a couple of servos on the aircraft to move the camera and look around. Pretty cool hobby that I used to do before work (you'll note the timestamp on the video says 5:50am)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8heJBJmUh8s

Yep, still got all of my kit - however I much prefer flying fixed wings, it's way more relaxing and far less expensive if (when) you crash 😅 Some of the guys flying freestyle have the reflexes of a cat, I was never that good 😆

I used to fly freestyle drones and I used to really enjoy practicing on a mod I had for GTA V purely because the scenery was so varied and detailed. Los Santos is massive!

Some of those "real pilots" used to claim the 2020 flight model was great, only to hang it out to dry when 2024 came out. I have a rule in life to never listen to "the general consensus" without trying something out for myself. That goes for films, books, rollercoasters and my simulator settings. All I know is my FS2024 now matches fairly accurately what I see on numerous real life videos and more to the point, it feels better to me which is what I went looking for since I was disappointed with the awful "FSX" feeling it had previously.

I read the other day that disconnecting the GPU outside before switching in the cockpit can cause lots of errors that cause the real plane to have to be powercycled - so maybe it's not a bug!

Passive mode just means ActiveSky adds some atmospheric effects (like turbulence) into the existing weather rather than actually controlling the weather. It's not that it "bounces around all over the place" it's more that it looks like it's actually flying rather than a camera moving through the air.

Have to say I was disillusioned for a while having had the recommendation to turn the Turbulence to "Low" in the sim .. the "on rails" feel was really offputting. Turning it back to Realistic and letting ActiveSky do it's thing is a game changer. Airliners + Realistic Turbulence + ActiveSky in passive mode is superb and really transformed FS2024 for me with all of my addon aircraft. Sometimes it feels like you really have to fight it all the way down. I watch channels like "Approach and Departure Videos" and the setup I have now really replicates what I see in real life on those videos which is what I felt I was missing.

People said I’d never get over my obsession with Phil Collins - but, against all odds, take a look at me now....

Well my take is that the price of everything in the world is going up hugely, very very quickly. What was correct when announced in April 2025 may be wildly out now given the rising cost of everything from electricity, rents, wages etc. People need to stop taking it personally. Could Synaptic have handled the PR a bit better though? Maybe, but equally no one has spent any money on it yet - if the price is too much you're free to not spend your money. It's not like they sold three variants and only gave you one.

One thing I have noticed is that a good departure + arrival airport is really important for me. There are some absolute stunners out there for free (like Gatwick) and payware like RW Profiles EGNT or Luton EGGW (I forget who made it) that transform the simulator. I like to fly into places I've not flown before and if there's no decent freeware available it can get expensive quick on MSFS - X-Plane, not so much because the default airports are so good with accurate ground markings etc. It seems silly to me to spend all that money on high fidelity aircraft while chasing realism and not have decent airports to fly into - the only drawback of course is buying an airport for a flight and then not going back there very often.