Can you believe it’s been 7 months since MSFS 2024 launched? Time sure flies, and now once again, so does BLAZE THUNDERHAWK. Now, if you read my first impressions and subsequent follow-up on MSFS career mode, you’ll know that I overall found the experience pretty shallow and disappointing, yet somehow still addictive. When we last left our hero, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK, he had just become the proud owner of a Cessna 172 and his own cargo charter company, WingIt Express™. We explored the rather simplistic world of company operations and the riveting world of aircraft maintenance and insurance claims after a “seriously it was planned” crash landing in Upstate New York during a cargo run. In the time since, our hero migrated south, where icing is no longer a factor, and entered the lucrative world of “no questions asked” cargo runs between the Florida Keys and Cuba with his trusty Cessna 172 that never seemed to wear the same registration number twice. We skimped on maintenance to keep things spicy and adopted a blingin’ new livery.
A life of flying “whatever” into remote fields in a clapped-out Cessna left BLAZE THUNDERHAWK fabulously wealthy, yet something was missing. What was the point of any of this? Why keep flying the same plane on the same routes if the only thing we get out of it is an ever-rising number that we can just use to promote… more of the same?
Which is just a long-winded way of saying I reached level 91 within a few weeks, got really bored of career mode and just… stopped. I had written up a lot of the experience, covering the certification tree and mission types but honestly the experience left me feeling so burnt out on MSFS2024 I couldn’t be bothered to finish it. But maybe I was a bit too harsh, and now with a whole two major Sim Updates have addressed career mode fixes, and introduced new quality of life fixes like mission filtering on the map, the ability to rename companies, and increased mission payouts. Perhaps it’s time for BLAZE THUNDERHAWK to return to the skies, go back to the mysterious unnamed “company” that was sending him around the world flying odd jobs, and explore more of what Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Career Mode has to offer.
The World of IFR
When I started my run of career mode, I made the deliberate decision to ignore the certification tree in favor of grinding straight for companies. I still think this was the right call, as at this point in my career I have the credits to pay for pretty much any certification I want and am at the right level to unlock the mission types to actually use them.
First up was our IFR Certification, which meant BLAZE THUNDERHAWK was off to Scotland to complete his instrument rating with no prior instrument training. Of all the available certs, this one is the most interesting because it doesn’t just unlock Air Charter flights, but allows you to fly with live weather on any career mode flight. A selector on the mission map allows you to select the last 24 hours of live weather anywhere in the world.
Flying missions in bad weather nets you a healthy credit and experience bonus and helps keep things interesting on those otherwise dull cargo flights. Unfortunately, the flight plan generation for this is kind of broken. After earning this certificate, my first experience with live weather saw me assigned a VFR flight in IMC to an airport with no ILS system and a partly tree-covered runway which, according to Wikipedia, was shut down in 2013. A truly harrowing experience that a lesser pilot would refuse for being disastrously unsafe, but not BLAZE THUNDERHAWK.
In a similar vein, our night currency rating takes us on a trip to Sicily, where we must fly a simple traffic pattern in the all too familiar Cessna 172… at night. The rest of the basic VFR trainings are hidden under this certification if you were so inclined to fly them… BLAZE THUNDERHAWK was not. There’s really not a lot to say about this one but it does allow WingIt Express™ to finally live up to its reputation as a true fly by night operation.
Too Cool for School
The other certifications are pretty straightforward and mostly serve to unlock additional aircraft and mission types. First, our taildragger certification sees us travel to Miami, famous for its bush flight operations, where we fly a simple traffic pattern and land. There are no associated trainings with this one, so it was practically made for BLAZE THUNDERHAWK. Despite bouncing the landing and destroying the gear on touchdown, we still managed to somehow pass this…
Our high-performance endorsement takes us to Seattle where we are instructed to take off and fly a pattern in a Cessna Corvalis. But after my experience in Miami… I got to thinking, it even possible to fail these certifications short of crashing the plane? Just how egregious can we be in our complete disregard for procedure, safety, or basic human decency and still get our endorsement? After engine startup, as the instructor explained how we needed to be careful with high performance aircraft, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK immediately slammed full throttle and made a hard right out of his parking space and on to the apron. We had one rule for this flight: ignore all instructions and objectives unless they didn’t fail or otherwise go away on their own.
After taking off from the apron, I noticed the “get takeoff clearance” objective annoyingly persisted, so I made a low pass over the runway which triggered an “entered the runway without announcement” penalty and caused the objective to fail. Once in the air, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK took it upon himself to see what the Corvalis could really do.
We circled the airport only minding the altitude requirements for long enough to clear our objective and then made a diving approach to the field, deployed full flaps at max speed, landed on the taxiway Harrison Ford style, bounced the touchdown, and wrecked the gear. The “land on the runway” objective was still active so I went full power and managed to drag the wreckage across the grass and park on the runway. And apparently, that was good enough for a Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 checkride. You know what they say, Cs get degrees.
BLAZE THUNDERHAWK then immediately traveled to Switzerland for his turboprop checkride, presumably to get as far away from the FAA as possible. This went about how you’d expect, and we were granted a turboprop endorsement despite suffering a wing strike during a full-power taxi.
Continuing the trend of unsuspecting foreign flight schools giving BLAZE THUNDERHAWK access to increasingly expensive and complex aircraft he has no business being around, our jet certification takes place in a Cirrus Vision flying a pattern around Toronto. By now, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK has blowing through these checkrides in style down to a science. Full power on the taxiway, start blasting the Free Bird solo, make a quick detour through downtown Toronto, slam a carrier-style landing at the airport, and we have our jet certification.
Our multi-engine certification sees us off to Portugal, where we’re tasked with flying an approach in a Diamond DA62 with a simulated engine failure. While I appreciated finally having a checkride that consisted of more than just flying a traffic pattern, our instructor was annoyingly persistent in her demands that we fly the WHOLE PATTERN despite being in an emergency. I cut my downwind leg a little short because I was rapidly losing altitude, but after landing, the objective marker for “Reach Downwind End” stubbornly remained. It seemed BLAZE THUNDERHAWK had finally met his match…
Next up was our scoop endorsement. This one is pretty straightforward, requiring the player to perform a water landing and take off again with full water tanks. Interestingly, most of the trainings for general backcountry flight such as short field landings, takeoffs, seaplane operations, and ridge soaring are tucked away under this certification.
So with our latest batch of endorsements, what can we do?
Charters and Medium Cargo – More of the Same, But Different
A lot of the mid-level career mode missions will feel pretty familiar if you’ve made it this far. With our IFR rating, we have access to charter flights. So it’s off to Tahiti to fly our first charter, a short island hop in a Cessna 172. Prior to Sim Update 1 these charter missions tended to spawn closer to major cities but thankfully they are a bit more common and spread out after the update. Charter flights demand a luxury experience so you’re expected to wear a uniform, make cabin announcements, ATC calls, and follow IFR procedures. Unlike our flightseeing passengers, charter passengers are seasoned fliers, so they remain mercifully silent through most of the flight except to complain about the WiFi or that you’re banking too steeply.
With the turboprop endorsement, we can fly medium cargo runs. These are much the same as light cargo runs except we fly a Cessna 208 with a copilot who might as well be a mannequin in a first officers uniform. But, as I touched on when talking about the IFR certification, the built-in ATC is kind of broken, and the routes that are generated by career mode never take the conditions and aircraft into account. One flight saw the departure controller and BLAZE THUNDERHAWK stuck in an endless loop of reading ATIS information back and forth to one another for the entire flight. On another, I was assigned an 8,000 ft climb in a Cessna 172 in icing conditions. ATC refused my requests to fly at a lower altitude and the mission objectives would not allow me to cancel IFR and fly visual. More than once I was given inadequate fuel to reach the destination. Other missions instructed me to cancel IFR and make an unguided descent into zero visibility conditions for a visual approach into an untowered airport with no ILS and nothing to go by but the vague traffic pattern magenta line on the iPad and magic floating blue gates in the sky. We’re scored in these based on our handling of the aircraft and our adherence to the flight plan so good luck!
Despite the bugs, the mid-career VIP Charters are some of the higher-paying options for Freelancer missions. So, even if these aren’t the most exciting missions, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK opted to cash out WingIt Express™ and rake in the dough with VIP charters. At 750,000 credits, the Cirrus Vision is one of the cheapest advanced aircraft available for purchase. (Plus, it features a working CAPS system controlled by what I’ve taken to refer to as “the intrusive thoughts lever.”) Welcome to AirMinimum™! Speed, safety, luxury. Expect the AirMinimum™!
Medivac Flights – Insurance Scams and Human Trafficking
After flying enough passenger flights with a B rating or higher, the powers that be had decided that BLAZE THUNDERHAWK was now qualified to fly medivac flights! On the surface, these are much the same as the IFR charters we’ve been flying, but we are given a bit more freedom with regard to canceling our IFR flight plan and flying visually. We are scored based on the smoothness of our flying which means we need to take extra care during climbs, turns, and landings.
Our first flight had us jet off to France, where a “surfer” had suffered a traumatic injury at Courchevel, which meant an exciting departure from the infamous LFLJ. Shortly after departure, our in-flight doctor informed us that the patient’s condition had worsened, and we needed to make an immediate landing for transfer to the closest hospital, which happened to be… Courchevel. We promptly declare Pan-pan on the radio, the first time I can recall being able to do this with built-in ATC, and turn around for an exciting approach to the infamous LFLJ. Honestly, I’m beginning to wonder if this one was some kind of insurance scam…
These missions tend to spawn in rural areas with destinations taking you to more populated cities with major hospitals. Our patient is given some vague medical problem that necessitates a transfer to a hospital thousands of miles away. If we’re not asked to divert (which only happened on the first flight), we will instead be given a request from the medical team upon reaching cruise to hold the aircraft steady as they perform nebulous “tests” on the patient. There’s no real sense of drama or urgency here, with the crew dialogue limited to vague-sounding medical jargon repeated over and over again in the same dull AI voices we know and love. The weird thing here is that the missions’ stories sometimes just straight contradict themselves. I had one mission where I flew between Cuba and the United States where the mission briefing told me a patient had just had an organ transplant, while the crew mentioned that he was in need of a transplant. I guess ultimately it doesn’t make much of a difference to the pilot, but still…
Search and Rescue – Find SUV, Crash Plane
Now that we’ve seen the aftermath of some horrible injury, let’s take on a mission where we get to find the injured party at the source. Search and Rescue! In these flights we are sent out to some remote but largely flat wilderness such as a desert and are scored based on how quickly we find our victim. Our first SAR flight takes us deep into the Atacama Desert, where a motorist has gone missing. We are given a small bush plane and a search radius to find our missing subject and little support or guidance on how to do so. Fortunately, stranded motorists in the world of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 exclusively drive bright orange SUVs, and all carry military grade smoke grenades to mark their locations.
Once locating the target, we are instructed to make a low pass to make sure they’re ok, only to be told it’s our job to land and pick them up. Now, I’m no search and rescue expert, but landing a plane in a spot where an SUV got stuck feels like a tremendously bad idea… In fact, I recall in Microsoft Flight Simulator X there being an SAR mission where the optional objective to land and pick up the victim resulted in a long conversation over the radio with dispatch about how irresponsible that was and how much paperwork you’ll have to do because of it. But, fortunately, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK is wholly unconcerned with safety or procedure as long as he gets paid, so in we go!
The unfortunate thing about these SAR flights is that more often than not, I’ve found the designated landing zones to be wholly inadequate, usually either covered by dense trees or up steep hills. Even worse, unlike how these bush flights were set up in add-ons like NeoFly, where there was a pretty generous landing radius and you were free to pick your own space to land, career mode demands you get the aircraft all the way to the victim, so if that mean’s a .15nm taxi uphill through rugged terrain in a De Havilland Beaver, good luck.
Even worse, these are among the only mission type where erratic flying will lead to an instant mission failure with no warnings. Of all mission types, these felt the most unfinished. Fortunately, Sim Update 2 introduced a whole list of fixes such as a shrinking search area radius, automatic target location after getting close enough, and an expanded landing area. Given this, I decided to give these missions another shot, but found that the option to skip to the search area spawned me on the ground in a canyon and promptly got me stuck in an infinite crash/respawn loop. But hey, at least every time I respawned I was facing the target, right? Was I? I don’t know. Who cares. Let’s move on.
Scientific Research – Find Tornado, Crash Simulator
This one came as a bit of a surprise to me, as there’s no associated specialization or mission type. It appears as a “special mission” with an expiration timer. The goal of this mission is to fly a research team close to a tornado to collect data about wind patterns. The aircraft given seems to always be an AeroElvira Optica, which feels like an odd choice given the extreme weather and high winds we’re expecting, but BLAZE THUNDERHAWK is up for the challenge. Sounds exciting right?
Unfortunately, this mission type was horrendously broken at launch, with a majority of players experiencing a crash to desktop. Fortunately, this has since been fixed! And we can now experience the thrill of flying into tornadoes in all of its glory! Unfortunately (again), it’s really not all that exciting. The actual mission consists of flying a slow and lazy circle around the tornado, maintaining 1nm separation and a speed under 66 knots. Flying into the tornado (because of course BLAZE THUNDERHAWK flew into the tornado) leads to a mission failure. The winds don’t really pose much of a challenge, so really this turns into a glorified Flightseeing mission, complete with banal AI dialogue about how exciting this is. Frankly, this one is another miss for me.
Firefighting Initial Attack – Arsonist for Hire
Scoop endorsement in hand, BLAZE THUNDERHAWK was off to Spain to fly his very first aerial firefighting mission. We take to the skies in the AT-802 Air Tractor “Fire Boss” and fly a low pass over a burning forest and dump the water tanks. There are options here for configuring spray pattern, fire suppression foam, and spray rate, but none of these are used and the sim simply instructs you to perform a manual dump, which is rather unfortunate because this could be a very interesting system to fully learn.
We are scored based on execution time and how much of the fire you put out. Overall, these missions are a nice change of pace from the endless string of high-altitude IFR flights and I found the firefighting aspect quite enjoyable, though the missions are kinda too easy and short, and I’ve never been instructed to pick up more water or make another drop. My biggest initial complaint with these missions is that there was not that many of them, with players speculating that their appearance was tied to real-world fire seasons around the world. Fortunately, with the recent Sim Updates, I’ve noticed these missions appearing more frequently.
In fact, I enjoyed these so much that BLAZE THUNDERHAWK was inspired to start his own Firefighting Company. Plus, thanks to the increased payouts over 150k credits per mission and increased mission frequency introduced in Sim Update 1, Aerial Firefighting is among the more lucrative options for running a company, but requires a pretty substantial investment. Fortunately, AirMinimum™ was doing quite well, so BLAZE THUNDERHAWK was able to eat the 1.1 million credit purchase price of a company license and a gently used AT-802 Fire Boss.
Agricultural Aviation – Spray the Farm Without Buying the Farm
Locked behind the “tailwheel” and “turboprop” certifications is crop dusting. Agricultural missions are mechanically pretty similar to aerial firefighting, in that both use the AT-802 AirTractor and both involve flying low and slow to drop a payload over some target. This means a lot of dangerously low passes over farm fields, avoiding power lines and trees.
The instructions given by the game for this honestly aren’t that great, so this took some trial and error to get right. You need to maintain level flight and a speed below 110 knots, spray the field and only the field. The game does not tell you this, but your progress is tracked on the in-game EFB.
I found these missions fun at first, but ultimately kind of tedious. There’s a lot of variation in your spray pattern and it’s hard to tell where on the field you’re actually hitting. Plus, terrain and object collision is still kinda wonky, and there’s no way to tell whether you can fly under a set of power lines or clear a tree line until you crash into it at full throttle. Annoyingly, the Cessna 188 AGTruck is not available for these missions despite being featured in artwork and coming with an edition of the sim that I paid extra money for… The Sim Update notes make mention of this limitation, so I can only assume it’s coming in a future update. Eventually.
Are We Having Fun?
Overall, I’m still disappointed with career mode. While some of the quality of life improvements like mission filtering on the map, the ability to rename companies, and increased mission payouts, are welcome additions, there’s still far too much lacking to make career mode feel like a cohesive and finished product. Premium and Deluxe Aircraft are still not available, add-ons aren’t supported, there’s no marketplace support, the AI dialogue is still horrendous, there’s no “bank loans” or path towards unlocking aircraft aside from grinding, and missions still fail or deduct points for no reason.
I really WANT to like career mode. I like the persistent aircraft damage and rolling the dice on maintenance, and I like the idea of owning my own fleet and building a company, but it’s all so frustratingly surface-level and phoned in. Honestly, it makes me miss the days of bespoke missions from FSX, where you got a taste of all of these different types of flying without the AI slop of mission generation. I do hope they continue working on career mode, but I worry that nothing short of a fundamental redesign can save it.
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