Aside: I wish FS2020 had more indepth tutorials, more focus towards learning how to fly properly and a ground school with missions. The built-in tutorial is so lacking, it doesn't even teach you how to use a VOR for navigation. I think they've done simulation/realism of the physics right and the way the airplane feels is very real - just the education part should be more of a focus than the pure entertainment bits.
Flight Sim 2004 probably was the peak of tutorials - they effectively had a full "ground school" of how to fly, with content by an actual flight instructor (Rod Machodo).
That content had written lessons (something also makes me think video lessons, but I may be remembering wrongly) that took you through the theory and practice of things like VOR navigation.
I'm not too optimistic for it appearing on Flight Sim 2020, (it probably required too much attention span and understanding of geography/navigation), but I imagine that the community will step up.
Already the community is doing a great job "fixing" the default A320 and implementing bits of the avionics systems that Asobo left "inop". There's a mission editor that should enable setting up interactive "lessons", and with the number of youtube videos on how to fly VORs and similar (some with flight sim footage and explanations), I imagine the content is all there for curating together.
Why make it yourself, when there's a ton of creators who would do it for you, and for free? Just let the best ones get the ad revenue and Patreon profits. I call it passive outsourcing.
I was doing the takeoff tutorial and was wondering why 10 minutes in it still seemed impossible to get to the desired altitude and speed. Turns out they never mentioned that you need to eventually move the flaps back. Once I figured it out by myself I pretty much instantly made it. What kind of tutorial is it where you need to already know how a plane works to learn how a plane works?
The current training "missions" seem to be straightforward "ports" of the old training missions from FSX/FS 2004, but without the ground school written material to match.
I'm hopeful with the advent of YouTube and high quality video capture and streaming, we'll see video-based ground school lessons emerge that can partner with lessons.
Who knows, perhaps there's a mini business model here for creators to sell (via Patreon or even the built-in store?) curated mission lessons that go along with their YouTube content? I believe MS has confirmed you'll be able to make mission packs and distribute them via the store. And given how fast the modding is taking off, you probably already can drag a folder into your Community packages folder and have it work.
Honestly having to pay to buy the game and then pay a separate creator to teach me how to play the game feels a bit silly.
I personally played FS2020 and gave up after completing the tutorials because I didn't know what I was doing still. I feel like I could enjoy the game a lot, but a good tutorial makes or breaks a game for me. If I have to do a lot of work outside of a game just to enjoy the game it seems pointless to me.
This is good feedback that hopefully the devs will take onboard. I know they were hiring mission designers recently. Hopefully they'll improve the training, because you're missing out on a lot of you didn't really get past the tutorials.
Unfortunately they missed quite a few important things in the missions (another commenter mentioned not being told to retract flaps after takeoff).
I do wonder if part of the interesting aspect of this being a sim is that you can actually go online and watch or read a real flying lesson. Perhaps that's the direction they're trying to go in? So far, the community has been doing really well in fixing up scenery, perhaps Asobo are hoping for others to fill the gap with mods.
Re needing to pay, I'm sure there would be excellent free content on learning it (in fact there already is online), but with value added structured lessons as a potential mini product.
With sims, and particularly when you're new to sims, I recommend turning on assists and just going for it. IRL we have rigorous flight training because planes are expensive and there's no reset button, but in sims there's nothing wrong with just taking something up and crashing a few dozen times while you figure things out.
Many of us who are playing today also got our start with very simple and forgiving sims. When I got into them, there was no mixture, no prop pitch, no spins, no torque, and no p-factor (which was good, because I didn't bother binding rudder controls). It's a lot easier if you enable that stuff a few at a time, once you get the hang of the basics.
I think this could well happen, especially given the current unfortunate levels of lay-offs in commercial aviation. There's a load of qualified ATPs and others out there starting YouTube channels, and I think online flight schools would make sense.
A "shared cockpit" remotely controlled plane mod to facilitate training in flight school would probably be helpful, but then if you start going down that route, you'd likely want a force feedback stick/yoke (and something like FS Force) to give you the ability to see and feel what's happening.
The only part I'm unsure of is if it's difficult enough to fly solo without AI assists to merit all this? Very hard to gauge when you can do it already. But still will be interesting to see what happens.
In a real plane you can fairly easily exceed the maximum extended speed for flaps, and break them. Don't know exactly how fs2020 handles this, but xplane displays a warning and then simulates the effects of asymmetric lift caused by one set of of flaps failing.
You wouldn’t be the first, I swear I’ve seen an episode or 2 of Air Crash Investigations where some unsuspecting pilot forgets to retract the flaps, causing something disastrous.
I want the opposite. I don't really want to control a plane - I want "dream flight" - just basically a 6-axis controller that lets me move however I want - but in the gorgeous FS2020 world.
I think MS should make that available on the web as part of Bing Maps.
I've not installed FS2020 yet, but from what I've seen in reviews, I believe "drone mode" can be untethered from your plane and allows you to do just that.
DCS is quite like that, in that if you want to learn the systems there are some decent lessons for some planes but none of them cover things like BFM or (server!) etiquette. Luckily there is a thriving online community to help you learn the ropes, although it is rather annoying sometimes to be just fumbling around.
The F-14's AI RIO "Jester" can actually guide you through startup, which is very cool
DCS has put some great training tutorials that come with it. That combined with Chuck's super detailed and colorful PDFs guides for each aircraft as amazing.
Or I wouldn't be opposed to a printed manual. I remember the first flight sim I bought, one of the Jane's series, had a huge binded manual with it that I used to read during study hall at school. Just reading it and learning about the basics and physics of flight I found more interesting than the game itself. I miss those huge manuals from big box PC games.
I love old PC games that include printed manuals, but flight sims often were the best. Falcon 4.0 shipped with a nearly 600-page manual that dug deep into basic operations of the airplane.
I haven't found it that bad, I started with most assists on, then figured out one thing at a time by googling or YouTube or watching a stream.
Like, flaps, what are they? Oh, generate lift, used in takeoff and landing. Oh, the cabin is marked with settings for to and land.
The autopilot was a similar adventure. Step one, turn it on, crash. Step two, I can figure out hold altitude and heading settings, now I can take my hands off and Google the rest of the settings while the plane flies itself. Garmin has a manual you can reference.
Right now I'm working on figuring out autopilot approach and landing and nav data stations.
Focus of 2020 was to put together a solid simulator experience, which it seems like they’ve mostly done. Gameplay improvements and educational material were stated to be coming in subsequent releases.
X-plane is also pretty bad for this. It has VOR and ILS tutorials, but nothing more advanced navigationally (like navigating to the intersection of two VOR radials), nothing about crosswind landing, nothing for the more complex aircraft, etc.
However, the flip side is that the simulation is generally realistic enough that you can use instructional materials for real world piloting. The VOR frequencies match the real world, the real SIDs and STARs are in the simulated Garmin GPS, etc.
Have you come across “How to fly”[0]? X-Plane does have some guides, though they tend to be maybe too expansive sometimes.
That aside, there are folks who work on their pilot licenses and stream flight sims, I have learned a fair bit from watching them on YouTube.
Ideally as you say one should just be able to use real-world pilot training materials, navigational charts and aircraft checklists (for B737, for example, there is an unofficial iOS checklist app). Then all that’s left is documentation of sim’s limitations—a good sim should tell you in what aspects it fails to simulate the real world.
It’s actually really rewarding to be able to figure out (mostly) on your own how to complete an IFR flight, given just the charts and the 6 basic analog instruments.
(Same here, X-Plane and no MSFS—as far as I heard, the 2020 version is still outdated as far as simulation of the actual physics of flight is concerned and seems to not have changed much from FSX days.)
The Boeing 777 [1] and 787 [2] have an integrated Electronic Checklist screen. Any decent simulation of these aircraft will have that; I know PMDG's 777 [3] does.
There's an excellent book called "Flight Sim X For Pilots" that's essentially just a walkthrough of flight school, starting in a piper cub and gradually progressing through to instruments flying and multiengine flying. I think it's probably a bit dated now, but it's an excellent source of information for how to do things properly in a sim, since it's aimed at real aspiring pilots.
I think the tutorials are not so useful in the game, however they gave me some basics. I spent some hours on YouTube and from zero flying knowlege, I can say I am now familiar with the Cessna 152 Takof, landing, navigation and also with the 172 with G1000 (including ILS). Wish all this introductions would be in the game.
However the overall experience is still very Beta. I got a lot of freezes, bugs on map (like a big bump on some runways that flip the airplane and game over) sometimes the nav get unresponsive (partial freeze of the game)
Even worse is that after you buy the game on steam, any in-app purchase is done on steam but download would be from microsoft and that just doesn’t work for a bunch of people.
At least this free models are just working when people copy them in place, while payed content is not even showing up at the moment.
It's also missing aircraft help data. In FSX, you had a checklist that contained stuff like takeoff speed, landing speed, climb rate, ideal flap settings, and so on. In FS2020, the checklist basically only contains instructions on how to start the engine.
The are decommissioning some of the redundant VOR stations. The VOR network will remain operational as a backup to GPS. (See: "VOR minimum operational network")
When it comes to life-critical systems, you never rely on a single point of failure. GPS is potentially a single point of failure. It can and does have errors, either due to military jamming exercises, satellite failures, or other interference. I've personally had the GPS system in my aircraft completely fail due to interference.
It's also worth noting that the FAA considers VOR navigation a required skill. It's part of the core material on the test as a private pilot.
I wonder who is the person doing the voice over in the built-in tutorial. She sounds like the same person who provided the voice of Delilah in Firewatch.
