I’m an armchair pilot and I’ve recently gotten back into Microsoft Flight Simulator before the 2024 release. As someone who would normally do shorter flights in planes like the Cessna 152, longer cross country flights have become quite fun in aircraft like the TBM930. Turboprops and some of the faster propeller planes have good performance (ie climb and cruise speed) whilst being more flexible than airliners.
Picking Routes
My flights usually have about an hour’s cruising time. I have enough time to look out of the window and do other things outside of the sim before getting too bored. I tend to fly over the UK, Florida and Seattle and those are the areas I’m most familiar with. Typically I fly out of the bigger airports in those places, in bigger aircraft I always go for airports with instrument approaches. Even if there isn’t an ILS, some have RNAV approaches which I haven’t had any issues with.
Weather does also take my route into account, sometimes the direction will change based on the winds aloft to give a boost in ground speed. Once I flew the Cessna Citation Longitude from Seattle to New York for fun and had almost 80 knots in tailwind at FL340. That’s an entire afternoon that I’m not getting back, but it was fun as an experiment.
SimBrief
I do my flight planning through SimBrief. This is free to use and works well for all sorts of planes ingame. Choose two airports, your aircraft and it will work everything out for you: Route, altitude, runways, fuel, V speeds, and more.
For shorter flights I have used SkyVector, which has very detailed FAA charts for flying over America if you’re into that. They do lack for other countries, however, so it’s worth checkout out AIPs for them. Here is the NATS eAIP which I use myself for sim flying in the UK, particularly the airport charts. Obviously, we have decent VFR charts too, but aside from apps and paper copies I am unsure of where you could get them.
(SimBrief photo)
Departure & Arrival
As I said, SimBrief automatically works out the most suitable departures and arrivals for you. This takes the work out of guessing them in the MSFS world map or on the aircraft’s navigation systems. In terms of the approach, as I said I would usually go for the ILS and activate it accordingly. Programming a full flight plan into the avionics system is quite fun now that I have worked out how they work, and is made less tedious since airways are worked out for you.
Everything’s Done For You
For me, this takes a lot of unnecessary effort out of the flight. SIDs and STARs are worked out for you via SimBrief. Even changing the ILS frequency, altitude with VNAV and speed if you have autothrottle. I’ve been able to get a better grip on autopilot, particularly arming modes where you can fly on a heading and automatically intercept a glide slope or the magenta line.
When it comes to other phases like taxi and startup, I don’t do those as often because I’m more interested in flying. I’m far from a hardcore simmer but I have to say a change once in a while is fun and some of my flights do involve all the phases.
ATC
I’ve flown a mixture of flights with and without the MSFS ATC. I haven’t done anything on VATSIM or IVAO, though it’s something to consider, especially because the MSFS built-in ATC isn’t perfect. My biggest moan is that it gives the pressure in inHg everywhere unless you change your measurements to Kilometres. Why is it possible to use metric with feet as altitude, but not knots and hpa? Seems like an small oversight from the developers.
Live Weather
When I first started playing a few years ago, I didn’t really touch live weather because I would have never felt like dealing with a crosswind or crap weather. But since returning, I’ve taken a different approach and have started using it for most of my flights. The biggest benefits are that you get decent winds aloft and the weather is much more appealing to look at. It’s quite satisfying to go between flying over clouds and watch the sunset as it is happening outside of my window, in the case of UK flights.
What’s Next
IFR is a new avenue of flying which I have started to enjoy in MSFS. I really like that it’s still a spontaneous “How about I fly here today?”, but with an element of clear cut planning that integrates well into the sim. For other flights, I am looking at spending more time doing some actual VFR cross country, with no GPS or VORs, which feels like a suitable challenge for smaller aircraft.