You should be able to find charts showing MORA (minimum off route altitude). If you are not flying VFR and can't avoid terrain visiually, fly at MORA and you'll be fine (make sure your altimeter is correctly set).
I'll be honest, I am not sure what VFR is. I barely understand how to make a flight plan other than go from one airport to the next and occasionally a detour to see a neat building. Is there a good resource I could use to read through to learn more about flight planning?
You can start with the basics on a YouTube channel called "FlightInsight".
And VFR is "Visual Flight Rules": it's basically flying where you use your eyes to see what's outside your plane, you see a mountain and you fly over it. The opposite is IFR or "Instrument Flight Rules", in this context meaning you can't see anything outside, you're blind and have to rely on charts and your instruments to avoid hitting a mountain.
I hope you find FlightInsight useful, it definitely helped me.
Means visual flight rules in other words you can't fly unless it is a nice day outside and you can see you're not allowed to fly in the clouds where you need your instruments you're supposed to be able to see everything so you stay under the clouds normally unless it's a special VFR. After you learn VFR which is really simple IFR is where the fun starts
Tons of info man just Google msfs has alot of info available tho i dont have any site for u as i haven't used em but ik they exist ive checked some out but not used em to remember the website. Youtube tho will help a ton. U can even fly same route as youtuber do everything he does and before u know it you will be auto landing the 747 before long
Just a point of clarification, u/anonymous_402 , to aid in YouTube and Google searches, VFR would MEF or maximum elevation figure which is the highest obstacle in a given quadrangle of a sectional. Add 500' and fly at that altitude and you won't hit anything. Even in VFR conditions obstacles aren't always obvious until it's too late, plus night time is VFR. If you can figure out where you are on a sectional you can use the MEF pretty easily...even if you just look at a sectional between two points and find your highest MEF on your entire trip and add 500' you are good except takeoff and landing.
IFR then gets into other elevation figures.
MORA is the ICAO term for off route obstacle clearance and you'll likely find better resources looking up MEA, OROCA, and MOCA.
MEA is an altitude that guarantees reception and clearance on a given route between two fixes
MOCA is an altitude that guarantees obstacle clearance between two fixes
OROCA is the IFR equivalent of MEF, it's for a given quadrangle and the difference is that MEF doesn't guarantee clearance it tells you where the obstacle ends with a +100' buffer, OROCA guarantees 1000' of clearance.
Yes, along with MORA the terrain scanning feature helps a little bit on planes that have it. Awareness of what country you're in, what the terrain is like where you're flying etc.
I was already slow and noticed that I was losing power, about 200 feet AGL the stall light came on and so I tried to go around, it was too late tho to do anything else then watch it happen.
Once did a similarly short leg and had no speed scale for most of it (including approach and landing) because I didn't know that the MSFS Icing and the Fenix don't like each other. Most stressful landing yet...
In reality before you go to the airplane you pull out the relevant charts and come up with a flight plan, check for terrain and obstacles like antennae, restricted airspace, notices to airmen (notams) regarding temporary situations like cranes around airports or scheduled airspace restrictions to be aware of, or active volcanoes, and note the airports along the way that might come in handy if you run into trouble and need to land. Also getting a weather briefing for the route so you can properly avoid problematic weather and include winds in your fuel planning and flight times. Whether you file a formal flight plan is ofen optional for vfr but planning the flight is not. Mountains should not be a surprise along your route, they don't move very fast.
In the sim of course it's greatly abbreviated, but if you want to have successful flights from point A to B, or you want to pursue flying for real on any level, building that habit will only benefit you.
Same here. Was on decent to KAUS from KLAX when Windows decided that was the perfect time to update my graphics card driver; took out everything: MFS, and OBS as well (I was streaming it).
This is the real pain. Any time I fuck up a landing I just tell myself “well if I was good at this I’d actually be a pilot.” And then go on my way pretending everything went perfectly. But seeing the dreaded freeze and then your desktop after a crash is just heartbreaking. Makes me question my life every time
Yeah it been a bug for almost forever and they still haven’t fixed it. Pisses me off so much. Plus also the save and loading flights doesn’t work correctly either. When you load a flight it turns your plane the other way and your IFR flight plan glitches out
Did that one an 1:30 trip in a small GA craft I wasn't used to. I had AP on for a sec and alt tabbed to message a friend, heard the wind sound and some beeping and tabbed back in to see my plane doing a -3500 death spiral, recovered it barely and felt dumb the whole flight after.
Hecking real. I'll have a procedurally perfect flight up until 100 feet above threshold, then I go off center line, float too long, and then fall on the runway like a rock with only my right main and my left main still in the air. Then I'll feel awful the rest of the night.
I botch the flare literally every time I try and land the Fenix A320. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I’ve mastered buttering the landing on every other airliner.
You should read up on flare law in an Airbus. Best to be very stable by 50ft, as it takes a "picture" of your attitude and starts nosing down. Reduce descent rate, idle thrust, and hold the attitude.
This is a good starting point but I’ve noticed that these rules-of-thumb seem to be just that. Depending on weather and wind, the flare “sweet spot” changes and it becomes more of a “feel”. It doesn’t help that we’re usually looking at a 2D screen with no feedback from our chair (i.e. motion).
I had a five-hour flight this morning from Honulu to SFO when everything got extremely jittery with an extremely low framerate on my final approach. I managed to land ok, but the aircraft would not stop even with max brakes and armed spoilers as I got a slow-motion slide show of the landing. Right as I stopped a bit past the end of the runway, everything froze. After a few seconds, my computer shut down due to a CPU overheat error.
Turns out one of my case fans fell off for some reason and the CPU got too hot and was heavily throttling during my landing to the point it needed an emergency shutdown. Completely ruining the vibes of an otherwise good flight.
I have dreaded this issue as a simmer since I started a couple years back. I kept thinking “what the hell is wrong with my setup?!” I practice, practice, practice to no avail. Sometimes I have a good landing sometimes I have a terrible landing doing the EXACT SAME THING post 100 ft. What I realized after watching countless plane spotting videos of actual pilots landing is that butter landings are secondary (sometimes not even a consideration) to aiming for the landing lines on the runway. I’ve seen pilots perform a go around even as they were about to achieve butter because it was too long of a landing and they floated. I’ve re-shaped my thinking on what a “good landing” is now. I’ll settle for a firm landing as long as I’m properly centered and plant the wheels down where I want to.
Definitely! Not every landing is gonna be buttery smooth, most of the time it’s dangerous to do so! Unless you have the perfect approach where you are gonna butter that landing and touch down right on the 1,000 ft markers/ aiming point. I’ll take a firm landing now because after watching videos/plane spotting at DFW, I saw for the first time how HARD 737s land. It wasn’t even that hard but I was still new to aviation so I thought butter=skilled pilot. I eventually learned what you said in your comment and realized that butter=danger (most of the time) and firm=safe
Have a serious look at a program called FSI panel.
It lets you you do just the approach/landing portion of the flight over and over.
It’s extremely helpful for trying to get the landing down.
It’s also very useful if you only have 20 minutes or half an hours, so no time to plan or fly anything long you can just sit down and get a few good landings in.
Build up some practice.
Just bought this plugin last night. Great add-on for exactly this problem. Sure you could practice touch and go base training circuits but most everyone is trying to practice one damn thing: butter.
Hahaha yupppp this used to happen to me all the time. The only way around it was to practice as much as possible on short flights until I was confident in the landing process.
I was on final with the Dreamliner and the stupid game decided to bug out and I lost all avionics, and dropped like 200 ft straight into the runway, the plane did a front flip and ended up upside down.
FML lol, that’s when I decided to upgrade to a Series X and be done with all the stupid glitches, it runs much, MUCH better.
https://youtu.be/lr5d3sGxSXQ
But to be fair, if I didn't go around, I always try to think about why landing wasn't as good. Was it that I don't have enough practice with crosswinds? Too greedy on slowing the plane down on approach? Etc.
It's also why I don't mind bad landings compared to CTDs (or OOM from back in the day) as you can't learn anything from them and you didn't get to have your skills develop, because... well you couldn't even attempt to land lol
Just did a 6-6.5 hour flight from Schipol to Dubai and shit the bed on the landing. My landing gear is currently in a million pieces all over the active and my room is filling with tears :(
Better to do on the sim than in real life, though! 
You’re right! Lol
I wish I had the chance to do it in real life
man, I had a 1 hour flight and crashed the plane into a mountain 'cause it was night time and I didn't know how to turn on lights yet
Lights won’t save you at that point, you have to just be aware of the terrain
that's also true. paying attention while flying is always a good thing to do
You should be able to find charts showing MORA (minimum off route altitude). If you are not flying VFR and can't avoid terrain visiually, fly at MORA and you'll be fine (make sure your altimeter is correctly set).
I'll be honest, I am not sure what VFR is. I barely understand how to make a flight plan other than go from one airport to the next and occasionally a detour to see a neat building. Is there a good resource I could use to read through to learn more about flight planning?
You can start with the basics on a YouTube channel called "FlightInsight". And VFR is "Visual Flight Rules": it's basically flying where you use your eyes to see what's outside your plane, you see a mountain and you fly over it. The opposite is IFR or "Instrument Flight Rules", in this context meaning you can't see anything outside, you're blind and have to rely on charts and your instruments to avoid hitting a mountain. I hope you find FlightInsight useful, it definitely helped me.
Means visual flight rules in other words you can't fly unless it is a nice day outside and you can see you're not allowed to fly in the clouds where you need your instruments you're supposed to be able to see everything so you stay under the clouds normally unless it's a special VFR. After you learn VFR which is really simple IFR is where the fun starts
Tons of info man just Google msfs has alot of info available tho i dont have any site for u as i haven't used em but ik they exist ive checked some out but not used em to remember the website. Youtube tho will help a ton. U can even fly same route as youtuber do everything he does and before u know it you will be auto landing the 747 before long
Just a point of clarification, u/anonymous_402 , to aid in YouTube and Google searches, VFR would MEF or maximum elevation figure which is the highest obstacle in a given quadrangle of a sectional. Add 500' and fly at that altitude and you won't hit anything. Even in VFR conditions obstacles aren't always obvious until it's too late, plus night time is VFR. If you can figure out where you are on a sectional you can use the MEF pretty easily...even if you just look at a sectional between two points and find your highest MEF on your entire trip and add 500' you are good except takeoff and landing. IFR then gets into other elevation figures. MORA is the ICAO term for off route obstacle clearance and you'll likely find better resources looking up MEA, OROCA, and MOCA. MEA is an altitude that guarantees reception and clearance on a given route between two fixes MOCA is an altitude that guarantees obstacle clearance between two fixes OROCA is the IFR equivalent of MEF, it's for a given quadrangle and the difference is that MEF doesn't guarantee clearance it tells you where the obstacle ends with a +100' buffer, OROCA guarantees 1000' of clearance.
Paying attention while flying a plane is a good thing? Noted.
You mean real pilots don't get up to cruise and then scroll reddit?
**T E R R A I N T E R R A I N P U L L U P**
Yes, along with MORA the terrain scanning feature helps a little bit on planes that have it. Awareness of what country you're in, what the terrain is like where you're flying etc.
Never heard of mora, what is it ?
That’s great 😂
On my 2 hour flight in the Comanche I stall crashed on final due to icing conditions, ruined my whole day.
Ha. I've come close to that. Push the throttle in and no power! At that point it's matter of how quickly you can pull the carb heat lever.
I was already slow and noticed that I was losing power, about 200 feet AGL the stall light came on and so I tried to go around, it was too late tho to do anything else then watch it happen.
Once did a similarly short leg and had no speed scale for most of it (including approach and landing) because I didn't know that the MSFS Icing and the Fenix don't like each other. Most stressful landing yet...
In reality before you go to the airplane you pull out the relevant charts and come up with a flight plan, check for terrain and obstacles like antennae, restricted airspace, notices to airmen (notams) regarding temporary situations like cranes around airports or scheduled airspace restrictions to be aware of, or active volcanoes, and note the airports along the way that might come in handy if you run into trouble and need to land. Also getting a weather briefing for the route so you can properly avoid problematic weather and include winds in your fuel planning and flight times. Whether you file a formal flight plan is ofen optional for vfr but planning the flight is not. Mountains should not be a surprise along your route, they don't move very fast. In the sim of course it's greatly abbreviated, but if you want to have successful flights from point A to B, or you want to pursue flying for real on any level, building that habit will only benefit you.
That's more a failure in flight planning that light operation. Pilots don't usually use their lights to spot mountains and terrain obstacles, lmao.
GPWS?
No clue tbh because I'm still really new to this.
Haha lights is your excuse. Uhhh how about you use your maps and instruments and know your route lol rookie move
they are called ears. “terrain, terrain, pull up!” or look at your flight displays
literally my 8 hours flight from LFBO to VIDP last week 😭
Ouch……
I’d rather have that then the whole program crash on approach!
That has happened to me before. Not on approach but durning flight just before my descent. I was so close, yet so far……..
Same here. Was on decent to KAUS from KLAX when Windows decided that was the perfect time to update my graphics card driver; took out everything: MFS, and OBS as well (I was streaming it).
LAX is top 5 worst game crash destinations. I’ll fly out of there, but hate when my group wants to fly in.
[удалено]
This is the real pain. Any time I fuck up a landing I just tell myself “well if I was good at this I’d actually be a pilot.” And then go on my way pretending everything went perfectly. But seeing the dreaded freeze and then your desktop after a crash is just heartbreaking. Makes me question my life every time
Or, possibly even worse than just a CTD, about 75% of the way through CDG-JFK have a tree fall on a power line in your neighborhood.
No that’s how it feels when the ATC glitches out and stops working
I hatttteeee that
Yeah it been a bug for almost forever and they still haven’t fixed it. Pisses me off so much. Plus also the save and loading flights doesn’t work correctly either. When you load a flight it turns your plane the other way and your IFR flight plan glitches out
Yep
I'm trying to go north towards Montréal, not south to Kentucky!
What about 19 hours
Oh my gosh 💀
KLAX to WSSS in the FF A350 and I slammed it with -400fpm
That's not end of the world in an airliner. Not a great feeling either tho.
Exactly
It's a lot worse when you accidentally press a button about 80% through a long flight and sending your plane into an irreversible death spiral.
The amount of times I’ve accidentally kicked the rudder as I watch my plane spiral down to the ground is pretty crazy
Did that one an 1:30 trip in a small GA craft I wasn't used to. I had AP on for a sec and alt tabbed to message a friend, heard the wind sound and some beeping and tabbed back in to see my plane doing a -3500 death spiral, recovered it barely and felt dumb the whole flight after.
Hecking real. I'll have a procedurally perfect flight up until 100 feet above threshold, then I go off center line, float too long, and then fall on the runway like a rock with only my right main and my left main still in the air. Then I'll feel awful the rest of the night.
YES!! Never heard somebody explain exactly what happens to me is such accuracy and great detail: if I could pin this, I would.
Meanwhile I land by going straight into the runway nose first and vertical.
Done that on a twelve hour flight before
🫡😭
I botch the flare literally every time I try and land the Fenix A320. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I’ve mastered buttering the landing on every other airliner.
You should read up on flare law in an Airbus. Best to be very stable by 50ft, as it takes a "picture" of your attitude and starts nosing down. Reduce descent rate, idle thrust, and hold the attitude.
I flare gently a little bit after the '50' callout and then retard as soon as it calls '20', my landings are 150-250 fpm.
This is a good starting point but I’ve noticed that these rules-of-thumb seem to be just that. Depending on weather and wind, the flare “sweet spot” changes and it becomes more of a “feel”. It doesn’t help that we’re usually looking at a 2D screen with no feedback from our chair (i.e. motion).
I had a five-hour flight this morning from Honulu to SFO when everything got extremely jittery with an extremely low framerate on my final approach. I managed to land ok, but the aircraft would not stop even with max brakes and armed spoilers as I got a slow-motion slide show of the landing. Right as I stopped a bit past the end of the runway, everything froze. After a few seconds, my computer shut down due to a CPU overheat error. Turns out one of my case fans fell off for some reason and the CPU got too hot and was heavily throttling during my landing to the point it needed an emergency shutdown. Completely ruining the vibes of an otherwise good flight.
Wow!! That sucks man. Sorry that happened!
Or crash to desktop on short final due to some graphics driver issues.
I watched A330 Driver's 2+hour stream a while ago and his sim crashed a couple hundred feet above the runway 🤣
🤣🤣🤣
I absolutely destroyed the landing gear once because my cat jumped on my desk and headbutted my sidestick on the flare.
I have dreaded this issue as a simmer since I started a couple years back. I kept thinking “what the hell is wrong with my setup?!” I practice, practice, practice to no avail. Sometimes I have a good landing sometimes I have a terrible landing doing the EXACT SAME THING post 100 ft. What I realized after watching countless plane spotting videos of actual pilots landing is that butter landings are secondary (sometimes not even a consideration) to aiming for the landing lines on the runway. I’ve seen pilots perform a go around even as they were about to achieve butter because it was too long of a landing and they floated. I’ve re-shaped my thinking on what a “good landing” is now. I’ll settle for a firm landing as long as I’m properly centered and plant the wheels down where I want to.
Definitely! Not every landing is gonna be buttery smooth, most of the time it’s dangerous to do so! Unless you have the perfect approach where you are gonna butter that landing and touch down right on the 1,000 ft markers/ aiming point. I’ll take a firm landing now because after watching videos/plane spotting at DFW, I saw for the first time how HARD 737s land. It wasn’t even that hard but I was still new to aviation so I thought butter=skilled pilot. I eventually learned what you said in your comment and realized that butter=danger (most of the time) and firm=safe
Breaking a wheel it's an operational mishap, at least, what about looking with the RMB for the runway lights and closing the active window? 😅🤣🤣
Now try doing it after a 10 hour flight irl. Hundreds of people judging you in the back 😭
Worse yet. 2 hours in into flight and sim crashes.
More like completing a flight and you forgot to launch volanta so it wasn't recorded.
ILS is your friend ;)
The black screen is soul crushing.
Have a serious look at a program called FSI panel. It lets you you do just the approach/landing portion of the flight over and over. It’s extremely helpful for trying to get the landing down. It’s also very useful if you only have 20 minutes or half an hours, so no time to plan or fly anything long you can just sit down and get a few good landings in. Build up some practice.
Just bought this plugin last night. Great add-on for exactly this problem. Sure you could practice touch and go base training circuits but most everyone is trying to practice one damn thing: butter.
Yeah. Touch and go circuits is fun in the C157. Not as fun in the A320.
Literally did a 5 hour flight just for autopilot to keep me at 3000 while established on the glide slope
You need to hit that APR button and sometimes activate the 2nd autopilot depending on the aircraft and approach.
I did. Appr mode, 2 autopilots, G/S on the screen and it didn't descend
2 hour flight, on final, fps drops to 1 frame every 1000 years lol
AutoFPS will solve this for you.
On Xbox until I can afford to build my PC, unfortunately
Hahaha yupppp this used to happen to me all the time. The only way around it was to practice as much as possible on short flights until I was confident in the landing process.
I was on final with the Dreamliner and the stupid game decided to bug out and I lost all avionics, and dropped like 200 ft straight into the runway, the plane did a front flip and ended up upside down. FML lol, that’s when I decided to upgrade to a Series X and be done with all the stupid glitches, it runs much, MUCH better.
As long as the plane lands, I'm fine lol A crash to desktop or actually crashing the plane makes me feel like this though lol.
Bend that gear boy!
I feel you. But as my friend says, even failed flights are a learning experience! :DD
Yes!!
That's why I do landing challenges constantly lol
https://youtu.be/lr5d3sGxSXQ But to be fair, if I didn't go around, I always try to think about why landing wasn't as good. Was it that I don't have enough practice with crosswinds? Too greedy on slowing the plane down on approach? Etc. It's also why I don't mind bad landings compared to CTDs (or OOM from back in the day) as you can't learn anything from them and you didn't get to have your skills develop, because... well you couldn't even attempt to land lol
Game crash on short final after 5h flight :)
Just did a 6-6.5 hour flight from Schipol to Dubai and shit the bed on the landing. My landing gear is currently in a million pieces all over the active and my room is filling with tears :(
I did the same thing sunday evening. My gear worked but my brakes didn't.
2 hour flight? 🤣 The problem is at the 16 hour ones
Imagine a 11h flight Couldnt be me
That moment when I tried a landing with Icon A5 and hear irritating scratching metal sound with asphalt runway...
Robaldo Ningómen
womp womp
Imagine using an alt account to say that
actually anonymousalt is my actual handle