Welcome back to another installment in our ongoing first impressions/review of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Career Mode, or as I’m calling it, “The Adventures of BLAZE THUNDERHAWK.”
In our last installment, we covered the early career experience and the overall grind of low-paying and frequently uninteresting missions. Our hero, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK, somehow obtained his commercial pilot license in record time with almost no hours logged and then set out on a globe-trotting series of missions under the watchful eye of ol’ Miles Stanley and whatever nebulous “company” is organizing this. From cargo runs in Madagascar, flying banner planes in Florida, taking skydivers out over the countryside, and transporting androids undergoing alpha testing to see if they can pass the Turing Test… I mean giving sightseeing tours… BLAZE THUNDERHAWK persevered through the grind, honed his skills, violated every type of airspace classification imaginable, and somehow walked away unscathed from at least 15 different plane crashes. But today begins a new era for BLAZE THUNDERHAWK. Under the tutelage of his ever-present mentor, Miles Stanley, our hero is starting his own company.
Air Charters for Fun and Profit
The exact requirements for unlocking companies are never explained, but most people report the option appearing after level 25 with around 25,000 credits in the bank. Your mentor will give you a brief rundown about the world of charter operations after which you will be given a menu of companies to choose from and a steep discount on your purchase of a G1000 equipped Cessna 172.
The cost of the company license varies by company type, and at this point, the first option available will be a flightseeing company for 1000 credits, with the balance of our credit count going towards the purchase of the Cessna. Frankly, the idea of doing more flightseeing missions made me want to…
So I was interested in the next least expensive option, a cargo company. The requirements for unlocking the cargo company are 10,000 credits and an “available aircraft.” It’s not made exactly clear what this means, but basically we just need to be able to afford a discounted Cessna 172, the price of which we can see by clicking on the flightseeing company and looking at price of the available aircraft.
So after grinding just a few more skydiving missions, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK was ready to take the world of commerce by storm in his lightly used Cessna 172. First things first, we need to name our company. Unfortunately, my first choice was not available…
So after a bit more workshopping and market research, we came up with WingIt Express! “WingIt Express: Whenever. Wherever. Whatever… Just WingIt!”
We are then walked through the process of purchasing our first aircraft. There aren’t really any options here as far as configuration goes. Just a cargo spec Cessna 172 in work truck white with the company name plastered to the side with white decals. The Ford Ranger of the skies.
Now for the exciting part of aircraft ownership, insurance! I picked out the highest possible level of insurance. After all, this is our only plane and we need to take good care of it to avoid another hellish grind to scrape together the cash for another.
But… a number of simmers on flight sim subreddits have reported that even with premium insurance, they have been stuck with a massive repair bill after a crash so perhaps the smart move here is just to build up a cash buffer and self-insure your aircraft. After learning this, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK flew his personal Cessna 172 into icing conditions as uhh… let’s call it… an experiment that was definitely intentional. After a totally planned crash landing into a snowy forest in The Adirondacks, we were hit with a 16,660 credit repair bill for damaged landing gear and a check for 13,330 credits through a splash screen that told us our accident was 0% covered… the math doesn’t quite work out on that but at least our purposeful experiment didn’t bankrupt us.
“Headquarters”
So what exactly did we get for our 30,000-something credits? The first and most obvious change is that our nondescript desk nebulously located at our home airport has been replaced by a nondescript hanger nebulously located at our home airport. Our trusty Cessna 172 sits behind us (usually, sometimes this is just some random plane or an empty parking space) as our hero BLAZE THUNDERHAWK browses Reddit on his phone while facing away from the camera.
The rest of the interface remains unchanged save for the “Companies” card which now cycles through some company statistics. Clicking this button brings us to the business management panel where we can see details of our operation and create new companies.
The interface here honestly leaves a lot to be desired, with various options hidden several menu layers deep. The most important menu we’ll need is “Manage Company.” It’s here you’ll find fleet management options and a non-functional button to rename your company.
Fleet Management
Let’s take a look at our fleet, which as of now still consists of a single Cessna 172. We have a few options to maintain, transfer, or assign crew to our aircraft. It should be noted here that aircraft are assigned to one company and are only able to fly missions available to that company because apparently the technology to add or remove seats from a Cessna 172 does not exist in this universe. There is also no option to transfer aircraft between companies so we’re stuck with whatever we bought for whatever role we bought it for.
The “Buy Aircraft” button will open the fleet marketplace, not to be confused with the Add-On Marketplace, where we have the option to purchase second-hand or brand-new aircraft for our operation. The “new aircraft” menu offers a wider variety of options and promises greater customization, but in reality, few aircraft offer any meaningful configurable options through this menu.
2nd hand aircraft are cheaper but may come with maintenance issues. A pre-purchase report on the aircraft condition is available, but many simmers have reported that these are often inaccurate, and cheaper planes with a “good” bill of health arrive needing hundreds of thousands of credits in repairs.
The final option of note here is “Marketplace,” which as expected opens the currently non-functional Microsoft Marketplace. The menu here notes that aircraft purchased via the marketplace using local currency or “SimVerse Coins” can be brought into career mode by redeeming career credits. It is currently unclear if or how aircraft purchased from traditional third-party marketplaces or downloaded as freeware will be usable in career mode.
According to a support FAQ posted to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s Zendesk, the only aircraft available in career mode at this time are those included with the standard edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, which unfortunately confirms that I won’t be flying the 747-400 Global Super Tanker in a fire fighting mission anytime soon. However, this statement is directly contradicted by the Specialization menu, which does in fact reference both the 747-400 LCF and the 787 Dreamliner which are both Premium Deluxe exclusive aircraft.
The Joys of Aircraft Maintenance
Of course, we can’t have a fleet without a proper maintenance plan. Maintenance on fleet aircraft is performed through the “manage aircraft” menu. The condition of the plane affects the failure rate of systems during missions and different components have varying wear levels per flight hour. For a fee, a technician can provide you a check-up for your aircraft which will give you a granular breakdown of what is wrong with the plane, or we can check things out for ourselves during our preflight walkaround. These checkups can be performed on demand with a “mandatory” check occurring once every 24 hours. We can pick and choose individual repairs or opt to defer maintenance entirely if we’re feeling particularly cheap and adventurous.
Or at least that’s the theory anyway. In my experience, I’ve found that things reported by the mechanic, particularly the condition of the landing gear, did not match what I observed myself during the walkaround. So the reality is that it’s not exactly clear when and why these maintenance tasks should be performed.
We can choose to sell our aircraft here as well, for more than we paid for it to boot! DON’T DO THIS. You haven’t discovered a money glitch. We got a steep discount on this plane and if we sell now, we won’t be able to afford another one without more grinding.
There are two other options on his page to wash and repaint our aircraft. Both of these options are entirely useless unless you really feel the need to burn 600 or 19,992 credits for no reason. The cleanliness of the aircraft appears to have no impact on reputation or performance and the repaint option just reapplies the same coat of white logo on white paint that every owned aircraft appears to be stuck with. The support FAQ helpfully assures us “In the future, this feature will allow you to change the paint/livery completely.”
Our Alleged Crew
Backing out to the main fleet management window, we have another option to check. “Crew Available” is a simple on/off toggle which is supposed to allow our aircraft to earn us a passive income when we’re not flying it. I thought this was supposed to generate passive income when the sim isn’t running, but so far, this has not worked for me at all and I am instead greeted with a splash screen on startup showing a bunch of NULL values and a log book showing only additional payments to my insurance company. According to that same support FAQ, this feature actually works by generating passive income while you’re flying other career mode aircraft. This is the full extent of “crew management” available in the sim at this point. There’s no option to “hire pilots” or go into a deeper management experience.
A Whole New World
With all of the company management out of the way, let’s take a look at the actual gameplay behind career mode companies. Our mission map now has a filter for “Freelancer” and “Employee” missions. “Employee” missions include all unlocked mission types we were flying before, while “Freelancer” missions include just those that we can fly with our own aircraft.
We don’t have a base of operations per se, and can take missions from any unlocked area as we did before. However, we now need to pay a “transfer fee” to move our aircraft to the mission airport. This can range from a few hundred credits for a nearby airport to thousands of credits for a longer ferry flight. The manage aircraft menu in the company management screen also allows you to ferry any aircraft to any unlocked airport in the world but I honestly don’t know why you would want to do this outside of a mission.
There appears to be no option to ferry the aircraft ourselves so if you were hoping to circumnavigate the globe in a Cessna 172 free flight is still your only option. Before the flight, we have the option to manage fuel and even plan our own route using the EFB. The missions themselves are otherwise exactly the same with the same objectives and scoring as they were before we owned the company.
A Mile Wide and an Inch Deep
That’s pretty much all there is to the company experience in career mode, and overall I can’t help but feel a little disappointed in what we’ve got here. Far from the far-reaching “airline/economy simulator” we were promised, companies feel like a half-baked tacked-on feature to career mode, which itself still feels like a half-baked tacked-on feature to MSFS2024.
There’s no sense that we’re actually running anything resembling an airline. Our “company” feels far more like some weird nomadic one-man operation than a proper air charter service. We never get to see our FBO and missions still spawn all over the map. Our aircraft always remain where we last flew them, can be maintained and refueled on the spot, and it doesn’t seem to matter what sort of facility they’re at when this happens. There’s no crew management, insurance is confusing and possibly broken, we can’t customize our planes, and there’s little to distinguish company missions from the normal stuff we were doing already. Overall when describing the company management aspect of Career Mode the phrase, “a mile wide and an inch deep” comes to mind, (that’s 1.609km wide and 2.54cm deep for non-Americans) which is to say there’s a lot here but it’s all very surface level. This begs the question, is running a company worth it?
In a word, yes.
Really, money is the main draw of companies in MSFS2024 career mode, and within our first flight we have already seen more than 100% ROI on what it cost us to start WingIt Express. Plus, I do still enjoy the whole “working towards something” aspect that comes with career mode, despite its many shortcomings. So if you find yourself enjoying career mode, companies provide a nice financial boost and planning freedom.
So what’s next for BLAZE THUNDERHAWK now that he’s fabulously wealthy? Well, we do still have a whole specialization tree to work through, and we will of course continue to expand WingIt Express. Which of course means… BLAZE THUNDERHAWK will return…
Feel free to join our Discord server to share your feedback on the article, screenshots from your flights or just chat with the rest of the team and the community. Click here to join the server.
