Kristofski

Fully agreed, and as usual, the solution is often just a menu with sliders and checkboxes to turn off ATC scoring or allow the user to customize their level of penalty, threshold for errors. The Sim has so many accessibility and assistance features anyway. One checkbox in the assist menu for "Mission Performance bonus only" so that you get extra for doing everything right but don't lose rep for mistakes would go a long way to improving the experience. Nothing worse that getting an A rank instead of an S rank, due to IFR conditions or high winds slowing you down. Safety is more important than speed, but so many of the performance calculations are based on how fast you do something, like retrieval time for Hoist SAR missions, or VIP charter bros who get cranky when your flight into a headwind took 5 mins longer than expected.

Coming back to add some thoughts, my first post in the thread here was before I switched from 2020 to 2024. I definitely think if you are still on 2020, Neofly for GA and Helo careers is the way to go. Folks looking to do a career mode with airliners right out the gate will need to use the other options like On Air and APL Wanted to speak to MSFS2024 career mode now that I'm level 135 and have multiple companies, using both GA planes and Helicopters. I think the #1 driver of criticism for the Career mode is that it simply does not let you fly airliners for a long time, and even if you grind through enough missions to get to the Airliner Certification and unlock passenger missions in Employee Mode, you cannot purchase your own airliner for an even longer time, as the cheapest one is around 40mil and there is no bank loan option or anything. If you want to fly the big boys you basically have to use free flight and 3rd party career apps. However, if you have no interest in airliners and are mainly flying GA or Helos, 2024's Career Mode is actually fantastic for mission generation, variety, and progression satisfaction. I started with planes and a Cargo Company in the 172, eventually created a VIP charter company and bought a Vision Jet. Those missions funded the SAR company and the first H125 purchase, and I now have 4 helos around the world doing SAR missions in a variety of backdrops (one in Australia, one in the Rockies, one in Japan, and one in South America). Never at a loss of things to do, SAR missions are very prolific, and the career mode mission steps work well - there's no ATC typically to deal with and most are VFR so I seldom encounter mission breaking bugs either. Some tips for 2024 career mode - Don't create a company for a mission type you don't enjoy doing. Flightseeing and Skydiving companies can be a trap at the start, due to low mission payouts and longer mission durations. Cargo missions pay better, and VIP missions pay better still. The best $ per flight hour is SAR missions however, as you can net about 150-250k depending on the mission type (Regular vs Hoist) and missions take about 30-45 mins tops. If you avoid SAR missions over 30NM and with large search areas, you can get paid easy for about 20 mins of work, no skips and no Sim Rate increases needed. Eventually you'll get into Medium Cargo and Medivac, both of which need a 208 minimum, so about 4-5mil credits, and those missions pay out around 250-300 on average. Don't get hung up on S-ranking every missions either. Sometimes the game bugs out, sometimes you get a taxi overspeed, sometimes it takes a while to find the guy in SAR missions - You can get an S rank and still lose a small amount of rep sometimes. You can be at S rank, and get an A on a mission due to high winds causing a longer hoist time (who cares about safety when you're scored on SPEED! lol) and drop dramatically from S tier to A tier, and that feels bad but ultimately doesn't affect your income as much as you'd think. Some mission conditions are impossible to 100% either, the VIP ones are like that, you basically cannot get 100% passenger satisfaction if you have a headwind that delays your ETA. A note regarding passive income - the money generated is based on mission type and cost of aircraft. My H125 and Taog Dolphin both generate passive income for SAR companies but the Dolphin makes more passively as it costs about 4mil vs the H125 which is about 1.8mil IIRC. The game seems to want you to build up a fleet, not just fly one plane, then upgrade to the next bigger one after a time. You should basically never sell a plane, you're always better off getting the passive income. Keep the fleet maintained as well, I check regularly to see if the "last flight caused unexpected damage" status appears, and if you see that, you should pay to check and maintain the aircraft. It is annoying you can't do that from the fleet overview screen however. FWIW, 3 smaller GA aircraft and 4 helos with AI pilots, for 2 hours of mission/flight time, I make about 400k passively when I log in the next day.

Post a pic of setup if you can! I have the logitech Yoke and I'm waffling a lot over the AP panel they sell, which would sit on the flat part of the Yoke body. DAP500 by wingflex is new and looks like a good option in the same price range, which would leave the flat top open for a keyboard tray like you have. One of the things I dislike about my setup was having to use that TV tray for my keyboard off to my right side; would rather it up front.

I did notice that VFR works a lot better than the IFR missions, Sometimes its better to just cancel IFR if the ATC isn't making sense and just use your instruments, GPS, EFB map etc. I know that's not going to work for airliners and I suspect they have the most issues, since they rely more on ATC comms. While I do play with AI and Live traffic on, I dont often run into traffic issues as I'm not flying into international airports in my SAR helos or my Vision Jet lol. I find some of the breaking on arrival is dependent on if you have the pattern correct or not. Teardrop pattern entry almost never works right for me, but the others do. I'll manually update the EFB flight plan if I see it default to a teardrop arrival. Departure procedure seems to be completely irrelevant to the mission steps updating, but arrivals can picky about rather or not you reached "final" and it updates for you to quick reply for landing clearance.

A good video on the topic - failures can occur IRL from things you could not possibly have checked (in this case the bolt that was missing is behind a housing that would need a flashlight+mirror to check during the pre-flight walkaround) In the Sim, I've had this specific issue - loss of tail rotor control - due to my hardware pedals failing mid flight. Because its a sim, we have the luxury of pausing the flight to diagnose the problem, but without pausing to unplug and replug my pedals to reset them, could I make a landing without pedals? I did some trials on the weekend and its not easy regardless of what helo I was using, so being able to practice the maneuver in a sim where there's less consequences for getting it wrong is invaluable as a training and learning tool.

How do you find the VKB left stick and throttle for Airliners? Did you have anything else previously?

The scoring for some modes, like crop dusting, is so out of whack that I just don't bother with those flights anymore. That said, I would guess 70% of the career mode issues are related to ATC. If you can deal with the default ATC, you can probably deal with career mode. Career mode has been improved - I'm getting less moving hold short lines, fewer missed ATC/Quick Reply hangups, and it looks like night missions spawn more frequently. I've also seen an improvement in mission generation. EFB and Flight Plan issues still exist and you should double check and update your flight plan before each mission, still getting the Flight Level bug that requires you to manually update it. The planned routes for helicopter missions are correct, but sometimes the ATC doesnt match up (flight plan has you taking off and landing a helipad, but ATC comms indicate you should be landing at a runway - I have gotten an undesignated landing hit due to this). However, the automatic penalty for spawning in a runway at an airport with no taxiways has been fixed, that helps a bunch. Graphics did improve for me as well. Ground textures are better, more detailed. You can see ATV trails in farmer's fields now, I dont think that was the case before. There seems to be better tree variety and more texture variety in general, which is a huge win for helo and GA flyers

Miltech Mission Hub is the answer - you can create SAR or firefighting missions and place scenery nearby to add to the look of things. I've made several scenarios, its great for practicing Career hoist or fire missions without impacting your reputation There's also an mission generator website that someone made for the mission hub, in case you wanted to get randomly generated missions. Those likely wont have the scenery placements however. There's a bunch of missions and mission packs on flightsim.to as well. I've also recently seen two paid mods and one free mod that set up Emergency missions and have some other fun stuff, Coast Guard and Navy exercises etc. All on Flightsim.to as well

I'm pretty far into the helicopter side of career mode; Lvl 135ish with 2 H125s and 1 Taog Dolphin and 1 Dauphin in the fleet (compared to the plane side, where I only have 3 GA planes currently). There's a ton of caveats to Career mode but it can be really fun once you accept the limitations. I think all the negative criticism of Career Mode is coming from Airliner sim players, since the Airliner stuff is very much locked behind hundreds of hours of progression. If your focus is on learning to fly, career mode actually gives you a ton of content that's structured, and not too repetitive either. I found the helicopter missions in the Search and Rescue company to be very fun, a good combination of challenge and variety. Its less repetitive than the fly A->B cargo and passenger missions. You can make decent per mission credits with the basic SAR missions and an H125, no hoist. 150k per 20-30 mins of flight time. My advice is to skip the flightseeing company the game recommends you start once you have enough funds. Flightseeing missions pay poorly for the time invested, you are better off starting a cargo company with the 172 they give you and learning the flight procedures, radios, navigation stuff while doing those early missions. You CAN do cargo with the light helos but its more steps. Personally, I did cargo missions to fund a Vision Jet and VIP charter company, then did VIP charter missions until I could fund the SAR company and my first H125 purchase. One more thing for learning helos in the sim - the tutorials will speed you very quickly into some difficult topics like Hovering without assists. I STONGLY recommend you play with assisted tail rotor for the first 10-20 hours, especially if you do not have a set of pedals. The G2 starter helo is harder to fly than the H125 in my opinion and the sooner you can get out of it, the more fun you'll have

OK here's a better thread for my questions lol paging @blueshark747 I'm definitely curious about FPV, I've pretty much accepted the fact that I'll never fly a real plane or helicopter due to the costs involved, but drones and RC are more in the realm of affordability. The FPV helicopter video @FPVSteve posted in the other thread where the operator was using a flight stick and collective really opened my eyes up to the possibilities. One thing that turned my off about FPV originally was the controls - I don't care for the Xbox/PS style handheld thumbs for flying method, but seeing the flight stick connected and working was really cool. Another thing I did not initially appreciate about RC and drones was how hard it is to see them from the ground, and therefore how hard it can be to fly them traditionally without FPV goggles. I imagine the FPV goggles are a big game changer. Would you guys say that FPV flying is more immersive than VR flying? On the one hand, the FPV drone is really out there physically, affected by real wind, so flying should feel more realistic? But its not a real plane/helo so you are not simulating engine temp/torque/fuel etc, to me that's an argument for less immersion? Maybe its a question of - do you like the actual feeling of flying part of flight sim, or do you flight sim to try and get 1:1 with the real thing? Gauges, navigation equipment, radios, all absent from FPV flying - do you guys just fly up and do laps, patterns, 8s on pylons? Is there such a thing as flight planning for FPV drones? Some other random q's - night vision? I imagine that would be fun and challenging to fly at night. What do you think would be the cheapest FPV entry kit while still getting the most bang for your buck? As for the original video on the first post - this game is only 15$ seems like a steal, did you try the full version @UrgentSiesta ? https://store.steampowered.com/app/1682970/Uncrashed__FPV_Drone_Simulator/

This isn't just a medivac mission issue, I've experienced this on every mission type. So hopefully they fixed that.

Apologies if I derailed the thread - the FPV videos are cool as heck and I've definitely got some homework to do. I think my initial reaction to the 2400$ USD price tag was just sticker shock, I wasn't expecting it to cost that much more than some of the RC drones I've seen on Amazon. Would love to see a new thread about it however! @FPVSteve posted a ton of really cool info above, and I do have more questions lol

I'm not knocking on the FPV hobby by any means, to each their own - but it is disingenuous to compare the two costs without admitting the PC can do a whole lot more than just flight sim. The drone will only ever do that one thing, whereas the cost of a PC or PS5 for use with MSFS is also going to allow you to do other things with that hardware. I am not familiar enough with the hobby to know why your Pimax couldn't be used with the FPV drone - you said they headset comes included for the price, so maybe there was no option to use the headset you already had? As someone who had his PC before getting into flight sim earlier this year, there's no way I'd consider including in the price of the hobby for me, since I regularly use it for other games and activities. I know there's guys on here doing flight sim with less than 200$ worth of hardware. How much you're comfortable spending is really a personal choice based on access to disposable income. Personally, I'm up to about 600$ CAD worth of new hardware for use with flight sim, of that, the collective and yoke were the most flight-sim-only purchases. But I get it, if you're an airliner guy and you want the full WINCTRL deck that's gonna cost you.

Cool as that video is, that drone is 2400$ USD plus headset, that's a pretty steep barrier to entry. I wonder how durable those things are when they crash. Also range would be a thing I imagine; once you're bored of your backyard and the surrounding area, in creeps the extra cost of travelling to cool places to fly over. Considering you still need the controller to fly its not quite the same as a sim setup - I did see the other video with the Helicopter FPV from a chair that had a flight stick and collective, that looked pretty cool.

Ahh the duality of man LMAO