Jumping into the cockpit of Flight Simulator 2024 is a daunting prospect, whether you’re a first-time flyer or a grizzled veteran. Yet, no matter how experienced you are, these tips and tricks from real-life pilots will make your journey smoother.
After four long years since the last installment, Flight Simulator 2024 has landed on PC and Xbox Series X/S. The sequel doubles down on everything that made its predecessor a hit among both casuals and aero-enthusiasts.
The latest Flight Simulator offers a host of new career paths, such as mountain rescue and firefighting, more severe weather effects to contend with, and the ability to leave the cockpit for the very first time.
All of this adds up to make Flight Simulator 2024 the most realistic and complex entry in the series to date. So, to help you take off smoothly, Dexerto sat down with professional pilots and brothers Pete and Jack Weber, who offered some handy tips to help you avoid turbulence.
Make these Pre-flight checks
When you first fire up the game, it’s tempting to hop straight into the hot seat and take to the skies. But when asked how to make your first flight more fun, Pete advised players to spend a little bit of time on the ground.
“I think one of the biggest things is even as much as you want to just jump in and start flying immediately, the more time that you just set aside to set up your controls and maybe re-bind certain keys, just so everything is exactly what you’re expecting, the more fun it is when you finally get in and start flying,” he explained. “So just making sure to take the time to set up properly beforehand goes a long way.”
Flight Simulator 2024 has plenty of customization options for the controls, giving you the freedom to mimic the feel of real life or streamline it if you’re a newcomer. So, be sure to tweak the setup to fit your preferences and experience.
Scan the skies
Once you’re up in the air, there are lots of different factors to take into account; from your trajectory to the direction of the wind. With this in mind, it’s crucial to make sure that you’re checking everything regularly.“Obviously, you’re learning something very foreign to you, and it’s easy to fixate on certain instruments,” said Pete.
“A good professional pilot has an incredible scan going at all times, meaning he or she is never getting fixated on one instrument, but always scanning and combining it together to create a big picture.”
Learn the Language
In addition to avoiding tunnel vision and concentrating too much on one thing, the pilots also encouraged newcomers to be patient when learning the terminology.
“The lingo is something you’ve never heard before; the phonetic alphabet, it’s all brand new,” he added. “Just take your time. It’s a new language, so give yourself some grace. Once you get it, I think every pilot has that moment where everything kinda clicks for them.”
The best destinations to fly from
Once you’ve got to grips with the controls and how to keep the plane in the air, the next step is choosing where to go. But in a game that features hundreds of airports from around the globe – you have literally the entire world to choose from.
Luckily, the two pilots named their favorite spots that you can visit in Flight Simulator 2024.
“San Francisco is incredible,” said Pete. “They have a really fun departure called the Bay Tour Departure, and you can actually request this in real life with ATC (Air Traffic Control). They let you level off at 2,000 feet, maybe 3,000 feet, and you have free rein to just maintain over the water and depart over the Golden Gate Bridge on a specific heading.”
“You get to do nice banking turns over Alcatraz and give your passengers a nice tour of the city. That’s probably my favorite departure.”
If you’d prefer to swap the city for somewhere a little more picturesque, Jack Weber picked out a couple of locations that give you a chance to take in the scenery.
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“Honestly one of my other favorite airports to fly into, I’ve only been in a couple times, is Jackson Hole (Wyoming). It’s a beautiful approach with the Tetons right there off your side and just beautiful snowy mountains all around.”
“Another fun departure is actually Reno (Nevada). Reno’s got you surrounded by mountains, so that’s pretty fun.”
How to make a tricky landing
In an ideal world, you’d always want to fly when it’s clear skies and the sun is shining, but any pilot worth their salt knows that isn’t always the case. If you want to crank up the difficulty, Flight Simulator 2024 features various weather conditions for players to tackle.
“Probably the most difficult type of landing occurs when you have strong, gusty crosswind conditions,” Pete explained. “The reason is that as you are flying towards a runway, you’re tracking a center and that line is straight, going directly with the runway.”
“But if you have a strong gusty crosswind, your nose is pointed quite a bit off that runway to allow for drift as you approach.”
If you really want to put your skills to the test, they recommended you simulate a “V1 cut,” where an engine fails on the runway, but the aircraft is traveling too quickly to abort the takeoff. This forces you to take off without one of your engines and bring it back around to land.
According to Pete Weber, a “single engine is probably one of the toughest scenarios you can put yourself in. Doing a go-around from a single-engine approach, you’ve got to be on your game 100%. There’s no room for failure there.”
Challenge yourself with live traffic and weather
The biggest draw of Flight Simulator 2024, especially for aviation enthusiasts, is its realism. The sim recreates all of the factors and conditions that real pilots have to deal with regularly.
For those looking for a truly hardcore experience that’s as close to the real thing as possible, there are extra features you can turn on.
“[In FS2024] they’ve got [ATC] synced up with live traffic, and it’s really good. So you can almost entirely mimic real life to the fullest extent with this game now,” said Pete. “Especially if you turn on the live traffic and live weather.”
With this setting enabled, you’ll have to contend with real departures from other airports, and you’ll be able to hear live communications. But while this definitely helps the immersion overall, the two pilots were complimentary about how faithful the game is.
In fact, aside from the feeling of motion, they claimed that it’s just as realistic as the sims they use in their jobs.
“This is just as good, if not better, than the real thing that we do for work. So I’m very impressed by this,” he continued.
Flight Simulator 2024 is available right now on both PC and Xbox Series X/S. If you’re a PC Game Pass subscriber, you’re in luck, as you can play the game for no extra cost as part of your membership.
