9 minute read
MSFS – Deciding Where to Fly, Flight Inspiration with Career Tools & Resources
By Spencer Doyle
With the entire world available to fly in amazing detail in Microsoft Flight Simulator, sometimes the hardest part is just deciding what to fly and where to go. Which plane do you want to fly? Or maybe you’d even like to fly a helicopter, go soaring in a glider, or sightseeing in something low & slow. If you ever find yourself staring at the screen with analysis paralysis trying to make this decision, then hopefully this article can direct your attention to some useful resources. Whether you fly on Xbox or on PC, there should be something available for everyone.
Let’s start with the in-game tools first. From the Main Page, if you navigate to Activities, and then Bush Trips, there are 35 trips currently available, with Asobo releasing more on every World Update. While you’re stuck with whatever plane Asobo has chosen for the trip, each one is tailored specifically for the experience. These trips range from Alaska to Australia, the Pyrenees to Finland, and often showcase some of the best scenery MSFS has to offer. Depending on the trip, some require a bit of navigating skill, so you’ll need to pay attention to the stopwatch and your VFR scenery. I have flown quite a few of these and have yet to be disappointed.
Now for the simplest out-of-game solution, let’s look at https://worldtour.flights/. Worldtour.flights is a community-driven website where simmers from across the world share and upload their favorite routes. This can range from single short-run flights to long multi-leg trips. They usually showcase scenic locations or interesting things like castles, stadiums, and various other scenery that MSFS has added over the years. If you’re on Xbox, you’ll have to manually input the flight plan, but PC users can download the flight plan file and upload it directly into the sim. If you have flights or tours that you’d like to share with the community, this is a great way to do so.
Flightsim.to is another website to bookmark for finding flight plans. Most simmers know this site as the go-to spot for freeware mods, but there are two sections, Bush Trips and Flight Plans, that are dedicated to the community sharing flight plan content with each other. The Bush Trips usually contain files that add new Bush Trips to your sim, right alongside the official ones from Asobo, whereas the flight plans can be either uploaded into the simulator directly, uploaded into an app such as littlenavmap, or in some cases, just manually input by the player. With anything created by the community, the quality can range considerably, but there are definitely some high-quality experiences to be had there. If you’re ambitious, look at some of the various World Tour flight plans available, some of which mirror real-world trips by various pilots. While you’re on Flightsim.to, search for Airport Finder, which is another great way to find interesting places to visit. With this free app, you can use various filters to find what you’re looking for. I like to use Airport Finder to ensure that I takeoff-and-land and use custom scenery that I have installed.
For the serious airliner simmer, Volanta is a great resource for generating one-off flights. Volanta is a free tool by ORBX that tracks all your flights, including statistics such as your landing FPM and things of that nature. The deluxe version, which requires a subscription, has a Schedules feature which is a database that includes up-to-date real-world routes. This is a fantastic tool if you’re looking to generate a flight, either at a specific airport, with a specific plane, or even, for a specific airline. You just set up the filters for your needs, and choose a flight. Once you’ve decided on a flight, it will also generate a SimBrief flight plan for you.
Now, let’s get into some of the career and business add-ons compatible with MSFS, starting with A Pilot’s Life, Chapter 2. A Pilot’s Life is an airline pilot career simulator developed by Sim Bit World. Like all the career and business add-ons, A Pilot’s Life is an app that runs in the background while you fly in the sim, tracking everything you do, from making sure you don’t speed on the taxiway, turn your lights on and off at the proper time, and land within certain parameters. You start out at the lowest rank, and gain experience on every flight you complete, depending on how accurately you fly the plane. With the experience that you earn, you rank up, which will increase your salary as you fly. You get paid by the flight hour, and can spend that money on various upgrades, including different “licenses”, which gives you the ability to fly different planes. You’ll be offered jobs by select airlines each week and need to meet certain criteria with the airline you fly for to stay on good terms or earn bonuses with them, based on the contract you agreed to when you started flying for them. I believe nearly every real-world airline is included, and of course, you’re flying a real-world schedule that you’ll have some input in generating when you sign-on with an airline.
Next, in the lineup of career and business add-ons, is OnAir Company by Aerosoft. Where A Pilot’s Life is a single player experience, OnAir Company is all about player interaction. When you start, there are 3 servers to choose from, depending on what type of challenge you are seeking. You are not only a pilot, but also a business owner, hiring other pilots, and staff, including mechanics and flight attendants. You’ll buy, sell, and rent other planes, often from other players. You’ll have headquarters at your airport of choice, and even build FBOs anywhere you want, which can sell fuel to other players or repair their planes. You accept available jobs and fly the planes that you’ve rented or own in OnAir. Or of course, for the business tycoon types, you can hire your AI pilots to fly routes as well. You can also start a Virtual Airline and hire other players to fly for you or fly on somebody else’s Virtual Airline while leaving all the business decisions to them.
NeoFly is another great option in the career and business add-on space. NeoFly has a robust free version, and a premium version with more options. Much like OnAir, you are limited to flying the planes that you either buy or rent within NeoFly. What separates NeoFly from the competition is the variety of missions, and the way those missions change the world around you inside the sim. For example, imagine flying a helicopter to extract an injured person, and you get there to find an actual car wreck on the highway surrounded by emergency vehicles. In another example, imagine you’re flying to take water to a forest fire, and the fire is physically represented in the sim. NeoFly also has different difficulties, ranging from Free to Survival. Another major feature that separates NeoFly is its ability to generate content away from airports. If you’re a bush pilot, you might be asked to land within a certain range of a waypoint, and it’s up to you to fly around the area and find a suitable spot and get down safely. On the business simulation side, you can hire pilots, and managers for your headquarters and FBOs that you develop. You can develop routes, accept one-off jobs, or even try to turn a profit by buying and selling commodities.
SkyPark by Parallel 42 is another option for those looking for more flexibility but still wanting some sense of progression. Parallel 42 is a developer known for thinking outside of the box, and their SkyPark option is no exception. In SkyPark, you can choose between two different game modes, Discovery and Endeavor. In Discover, you don’t gain xp or money, but you can go anywhere in the world at any time, so it’s a tradeoff. Endeavor is more of a career mode option where you progress through XP, earn money, and change Karma based on whether you choose to fly illicit cargo for the Coyote company or play it straight. Flights range from simple point A to point B flights, to multi-leg flights, all the way up to Tours, which are like the aforementioned Bush Trips, but allow you to choose which plane to fly. The only restriction you have is the cost to move your “character” if you want to fly from a location far from where you currently are. This is, of course, only a cost in the Endeavor game mode, as Discovery lets you go where you want. For the jobs you accept, you can fly any plane if it has the passenger and cargo capacity needed for the job you accepted.
There are other options out there that I haven’t personally tried, such as Air Hauler 2 by Just Flight, but with the above options, you should always be able to find something that fits your needs and avoid the analysis paralysis of staring the World Map wondering where to go. As for myself, I’m a First Officer flying the Fenix Airbus A320 for LATAM Brasil in “A Pilot’s Life Chapter 2”, a DHC-2 Beaver float plane pilot for Yukon Airways out of Kodiak Island, Alaska in NeoFly, the owner of the billion dollar virtual company “Ozark Mountain Air”, flying a diverse group of planes all over the United States and selling overpriced fuel to players who find themselves running on empty. What a virtual flightsim world we live in!
