@Nate1 I like Little Navmap for keeping up with the names when Skyvector doesn't have them.  

Hook

2 hours ago, LHookins said:

@Nate1 I like Little Navmap for keeping up with the names when Skyvector doesn't have them.  

Hook

Thanks! I will check it out.

Nate

I like Plan-G. https://www.tasoftware.co.uk/

Very competent tool and free.

Unfortunately no support for MSFS yet, but adaption is planned once the release version of the SDK is out.

16 hours ago, Andreas Stangenes said:

Thanks for your input, @LHookins 🙂  How do you find the airports while browsing google earth? Any trick? Currently, I need to really zoom really close in to see the airports, and it doesn't feel effective. 

I use this site to find airports: https://ourairports.com/world.html

15 minutes ago, Kenjiro75 said:

I use this site to find airports: https://ourairports.com/world.html

Oh nice one! Seems very quick to find potential airports along the way. 

12 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

Take a look at Littlenavmap. It's free and it has been mentionned that it already works with MSFS.

Where did you hear that??

"I can neither confirm nor deny..." 😄 

Hook

11 hours ago, Andreas Stangenes said:

So Option 1 is now ready. I'm thinking of going Central Europe to Asia (making sure to go via Nepal and see the Himalayan mountain range) as Option 2 🙂 

Whatever you do, make sure the airports you are planning to stop at are actually there in the sim. I've "heard" *cough* that might be a good idea before setting off on such a trip. 😊

1 hour ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

Whatever you do, make sure the airports you are planning to stop at are actually there in the sim. I've "heard" *cough* that might be a good idea before setting off on such a trip. 😊

The P3D user that I am, knows that you'd better go and check the arrival airport before starting your flight . Old habits die hard, might be still useful, hope not but who knows  😃 ?

"make sure the airports you are planning to stop at are actually there in the sim"

There is an very old but still useful tool in the avsim library to locate sim airports the world over :

https://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=fsxmisc&DLID=93726

"This zip contains all the airports & navaids for Flight Simulator X and includes all comms and nav frequencies, runway details along with any relevant ILS information. Extracted from the default FSX BGL scenery files in Nov 2006."

It's a .KLM file you cam open with Google Earth. At least the location of airports haven't changed much. In the new sim there will be more, of course

 

24 minutes ago, agutz said:

In the new sim there will be more, of course

The older airport locator won't be of much use in MSFS.  If you want to fly somewhere in MSFS, you will need to make sure your destination is there.

Hook

Well, I will be able to quickly verify the route when the sim launches. The globe view is pretty nice since you will be able to see the airports that are available right away. 

2 minutes ago, Andreas Stangenes said:

Well, I will be able to quickly verify the route when the sim launches. The globe view is pretty nice since you will be able to see the airports that are available right away. 

Yep, you can definitely confirm this with the globe view. It only shows entities that are actually there.

14 minutes ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

Yep, you can definitely confirm this with the globe view. It only shows entities that are actually there.

Funny thing is, if you're like me and fly to really remote airstrips, you might find something that looks like a runway even if the airport isn't depicted as an airport in the game.  If you can see a runway on Google Earth, you can probably land on it.

Hook

16 minutes ago, LHookins said:

Funny thing is, if you're like me and fly to really remote airstrips, you might find something that looks like a runway even if the airport isn't depicted as an airport in the game.  If you can see a runway on Google Earth, you can probably land on it.

Hook

Yes, MSFS is in this weird place where the terrain generation algorithms are good enough to depict a lot of stuff almost perfectly (During testing, I got very fascinated by golf courses and sporting grounds), but NOT YET smart enough to categorize them and automatically assign them certain properties like "airport".

It's really fascinating and sometimes hilarious to watch how the AI struggles to make sense of certain things, especially when it fails. I expect there will be entire YouTube channels soon filled with all kinds of curious and funny examples.

Edited August 8, 20205 yr by Der Zeitgeist

with x-plane I use FSEconomy and skyvector (mostly for the built in metar, nexrad to make make sure the weather is TBM appropriate)  .. then  i use navigraph to actually make the flightplan. 

 

I plan on doing something similar with MFS... (I am still going to use x-plane but more for the Zibo, not the tbm tour)

 

google maps/earth might be nice to add on to the planning stage so I dont miss land marks between airports.. currently my world tour is really an airport tour and thats it.  FSE mainly determines which airports i goto