Nearly a week after launch, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, is still largely unplayable for a great many in the sim community. I am one of the fortunate few whose sim experience thus far has been largely hiccup-free, in that I can actually launch and play the game… usually. Since launch, I’ve logged over 20 hours in the new sim, split (roughly) equally between loading screens and the new career mode. Now, well into my fake career at level 28, I’ve had a decent sampling of what this new mode has to offer in the early game.
So how does the flagship new mode of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 hold up? Well, like everything else in the sim, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
How to Become a Pilot In Under 24 Hours
If you read my MSFS2024 First Impressions article, you’ve already met our protagonist, pilot extraordinaire BLAZE THUNDERHAWK. When we last left our hero, he had just completed his initial discovery flight with his magical and slightly confused mentor, Miles Stanley, after which he “borrowed” a Robin Cadet and made an unauthorized visit to Newark Liberty International Airport (KEWR) where he went for a stroll on the active runway.
We rejoin BLAZE THUNDERHAWK, having returned to his home airport. The Robin Cadet is long gone, probably still sitting on the tarmac at KEWR, and in our absence, Miles seems to have located the keys to the Cessna 172 we were promised. It’s at this point we learn our first lesson in career mode, while your starting location affects where missions generate, your starting airport basically doesn’t matter at all.
In his infinite wisdom, Miles promptly sent BLAZE THUNDERHAWK to a flight school in Arizona to complete his training using recycled missions from FS2020. That’s right, if you were expecting to run a whole career out of your local airport, just forget about that. Your starting airport is used for a grand total of three flights unless the mission generator chooses it again. The game doesn’t exactly tell you this either, but you can actually skip all of flight training as well and head straight to the PPL checkride. Unlike flight training, your PPL checkride actually does take place at your chosen home airport. So if the sim has decided to surround the runway and taxiways with dense tree cover like my airport, I wish you luck. Fortunately, the checkride is extremely (almost comically) forgiving and will reset you to the last stage of the flight if you crash.
The same holds true for your commercial exam. While you could take the training courses, if you’re at all familiar with simming you can just skip right to the checkride, which consists of a 15-minute flight across Southern California.
And that’s the story of how BLAZE THUNDERHAWK, got his commercial pilot license despite overrunning the runway and crashing into trees no less than four times during his PPL checkride and logging no more than two actual flight hours prior to taking his commercial certification.
The Basics
With the pesky licensing exams out of the way, it was time to launch into the real meat of career mode, as the world map begins to open up around your local airport with a whole host of missions to choose from.
Now that we’re in career mode proper, there are four crucial gamified elements we need to keep track of, our experience, our credits, our reputation, and our specializations. Experience is an overall progress tracker for progression. Credits are a system of currency that serves as our primary method of unlocking new aircraft and certifications. Reputation tracks our overall performance as an aviator, with points built up for following the correct procedure and meeting mission requirements, and lost for minor infractions like taxiing too fast, not responding to ATC, or crashing the plane. A higher reputation will net you bonuses to experience and payouts while a lower reputation will restrict the types of missions you can fly and later in the game will affect your insurance rates for owned aircraft. Finally, specializations list out the specific requirements for taking on a particular mission type, usually in the form of a number of prior missions, a level, and a certification.
All of this is to say: if you had dreams of daring low-altitude agricultural spray runs or heart-pounding helicopter rescues… forget it. We have hours of grinding ahead of us before we’re ready to do anything fun. The best part is that you do get to see the fun missions you could be flying, in the form of these persistent gold mission markers.
These eventually serve as sort of “tutorial” flights before you unlock that particular mission type… except the game doesn’t actually tell you these are required, there’s no real additional instruction for being an alleged “tutorial,” and they’re randomly located across the globe and have nothing to do with your starting location. It’s never quite explained why whatever “company” we’re apparently working for gets randomly tasked with flights in a Cessna 172 halfway around the globe. So… what can we do in the meantime?
Flightseeing, Braindead Morons, and Why I Only Fly Cargo Now
In the early game, you have access to only a small handful of mission types. “First Flight” missions are unlocked upon completing your PPL exam, and “Flightseeing” missions which are unlocked after your commercial license.
These two flights are effectively the same thing. “First Flight” missions have you take up a group of “friends of the flying club” for a tour of the local area while “Flightseeing” focuses on taking groups of paying passengers on circling tours of specific area landmarks… and I use the term “landmark” very loosely here. I recommend you keep the on-screen assists “on” here or bind the show/hide function to your controls because unless you’re very familiar with the local area, it’s not always obvious what you should be circling or where.
You actually get paid for both types of these missions, so I can only assume there’s some kind of backroom under-the-table deal where your “friends” are paying the flight club despite the FAA rules against private pilots carrying passengers for hire. You’re scored in these missions based on passenger comfort, your ability to stay within viewing range and altitude of the target landmark, and the smoothness of your landing.
These missions are the worst, not just because of their short length and boring objectives, but for the inane computer-generated dialogue from the passengers delivered via wooden text-to-speech voices that sound like they were developed for Windows Vista.
The use of text-to-speech to deliver voice lines here feels especially lazy, given that it’s not even used to its full potential. Instead of little factoids about the area or some flavor text as to why they chose to take this flight, we get the most generic comments, “I can see my house from here!”, “The clouds sure are beautiful today!”, “Don’t do that again! That was terrifying!”, or “Placeholder” (seriously) delivered in the most grating way possible. After the 8th or 9th time hearing it, it almost makes you want to…
Honestly, I’m shocked that given Microsoft’s push to make flight sim a modern cloud-based experience they didn’t leverage a solution like ChatGPT to help spice things up a bit, especially when add-ons like SayIntentions already do this.
Thankfully, you don’t need to do too many of these passenger missions before you unlock ferry flights, longer missions that consist of transporting an aircraft between two airports in blissful silence. Cargo flights follow soon after, which are essentially the same thing, except the airplane is filled with nondescript cardboard boxes and there’s a stricter time limit. I mean the dispatchers tell you there’s a time limit, but in my experience, that’s not what that time limit actually is… The requirements for these missions are pretty straightforward, fly the route, don’t wreck the plane, and stay within the supposed time.
Skydiving
Finally, after literal hours of busywork, we’re ready for the first new flight type Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has to offer, skydiving flights! On the surface, these are very simple flights. Take off, fly to ~10,000 feet, aim into the wind, hold altitude and speed, signal the jumpers, and return to the airport. You are scored on how quickly you complete the flight and how well you maintain position and altitude.
Despite the simple structure, I found these to be surprisingly enjoyable. There’s just something immensely satisfying about watching a group of skydivers leap into a beautiful rural vista from your garishly colored 172 while energetic music blares from the ether.
My biggest tip for these is to pick the one with the highest listed payment and skip the initial climb to 10,000 feet. It takes a long time for the 172 to get there and you’re working against the clock. Perform the jump, and then put the plane into a dive and race to the ground as quickly as possible while taking care not to overspeed. This has consistently netted me a ~2,500-3,000 credit payout for very little effort.
Banner Towing
After five successful skydiving flights scored at a B or higher, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK has apparently amassed the required skill for one of the most dangerous jobs available for a barely certified pilot, banner towing! During a banner tow mission, you take off as normal and then make a very low pass over the airport with a tail hook extended so you can catch an advertising banner. It’s quite challenging to get the hang off this, as you need to maintain an altitude of just ~6 feet AGL at a speed of below 72kts.
Once you catch the banner, (which took me at least nine tries and three wrecked Cessnas) you go full power and fly off to ruin some tranquil beachfront. With high winds and towing a massive piece of fabric behind you, the Cessna 172 is even more squirrelly than usual so it can be a bit of a challenge to maintain level flight. I’ve found the best strategy here is to deploy full flaps and keep the aircraft at full power for the duration of the flight. We’re still just an employee, so fuel and maintenance are someone else’s problem.
Final Thoughts, or How Career Mode Forces You To Just Stop Caring
So at roughly 20 hours in, we’ve basically gotten the gist of what the early career mode has to offer. I have a few thoughts, complaints, and final tips.
The early MSFS career is honestly kind of a grindfest. Mission payouts are poor, every flight feels the same, and there’s a stunning lack of variety given the highly detailed world and hundreds of available aircraft. I find it particularly odd that other than the initial discovery flight that gave me a glitched Robin Cadet, every single career mission I have flown so far has been in the default Cessna 172, which the AI has consistently and confusingly referred to as a “one hundred seventy-two” aircraft.
Browsing the “compatible aircraft” section of the specialization menu is especially confusing, and most of the game’s 100+ aircraft don’t even make the list.
Honestly, I was hoping that there would at least be an option to try out the new flights like firefighting, rescue hoist, sling loading, and crop dusting without a required hours-long grind. Imagine if FS2020 dangled the F/A-18 Superhornet in front of you and then made you fly training missions for 12 hours before you were even allowed to approach a carrier.
The fact that the entire mode is hosted server side as well and (apparently) doesn’t support any sort of modding or customization is maddening. There is a good game buried in here somewhere, and I think if the add-on community had its way with it we could have something great.
The worst part is that everything is just so inconsistent. The AI is infuriating in its scoring, with points docked for things like leaving the landing lights off for a landing in broad daylight, an “off runway landing” when the runway in question is an unmarked grass field, or just wedging your plane into a building on spawn and saying you crashed. Flight paths and taxi routes are often outright nonsensical, and the game has a bizarre fixation on making you perform a back taxi down the runway before you can turn around and take off.
Overall, this entire mode just feels unfinished, which I guess is not all that surprising. It’s becoming abundantly clear from this disastrous launch that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was not ready for prime time, and frankly, it was irresponsible of Microsoft to push it out in such a state. To be clear, I don’t blame the developers for this, developers don’t set release dates. Microsoft pushed an unfinished product and charged hundreds of dollars for it because they knew that despite everything people will still buy it and play it.
And that brings me to probably the strangest thing about MSFS2024 career mode. Despite how broken it is, I keep finding myself going back to it. I like that my flights have a purpose. I like having goals. I like inventing my own weird headcanon around BLAZE THUNDERHAWK and his misadventures.
My advice here is to take the whole career mode as seriously as the game seems to… which is to say you’ll have more fun if you just stop caring.
The game wants you to land on a taxiway filled with parked aircraft? Land in the grass and take the penalty. Parking area inaccessible because of bumps in the taxiway? Just press skip to parking. Don’t want to back taxi? Just take off. Approach path takes you through a mountain? Make up your own approach. As long as you don’t crash the plane or miserably fail the actual mission requirements, you’ll still make money and you usually won’t take a reputation hit. And if you do crash, just end the mission or Alt+F4. If the requirements aren’t clear and the penalties are random and meaningless, don’t be afraid to experiment. See what you can get away with.
But Wait, There’s More
After a long day of globe-trotting Skyhawk operations, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK sits alone at his desk, Miles Stanley floats into the room, his expression blank, he has a business proposition…
Ever wanted to start your own airline? I do. Clearly, we’ve just scratched the surface of what the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 career mode has to offer… Which is to say, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK will return!
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