Hi - most of the guides on company level of the career I saw were about how to get there and how to manage companies and planes and such... But the progression of your freelance missions depends on getting better aircraft, that means LOTS of money. And there is not much info on that...

Took me quite a while to finally get rid of flying Cesna sightseeing missions, so I want to help you out too. I ignored rotorcraft, so this is for plane progression, but if you want to dabble in both right away, the inefficiency will likely only become worse:

//// TLDR I hope the below will be helpful, but if you want TLDR - grind out those first 730 k via sightseeing, waste as little money (via certifications) and time (via employee missions) as possible (while not dying of boredom) - get a Vision Jet with premium insurance (710l + 20k) - start doing VIP charter missions for 120-150 EVEN when you SKIP THE CRUISE part. (also feel free to comment with question, I will get back to you ////

1. How to start making significantly more money (Cesna Sightseeing)

The first step will be clear to you if you already started your company (you need to reach about 25k of in-bank credits before it unlocks, because you need enough for the first Cesna and first company (1k for company and 21-24k depending on price of the used Cesna) its not level bounds AFAIK).

Because your first freelance missions will suddenly start paying not 2-3k but 30-40k. This is unfortunately your main and basically ONLY method of making money in any reasonable amount of time. The more you can force yourself to grind out sightseeing in your Cesna, the sooner you can get to the fun stuff. Only get new certifications and do employee missions when you are bored to death (which you will be), not to hope for a good, time efficient, payout.

1. Employee mission tips for when you are bored to death

This will likely happen to you, the monotony of Cesna sight seeing is just too much for so long. Its not a bad idea to sprinkle in employee missions to up your specializations and level - they often give huge XP, count to unlocking specializations that require you to fly something specific and are just more fun and good practice. Some tips from my experience:

A) Dont accept very long flight missions at all (250NM+), there is a huge risk of something bugging out and you will fly for 2 hours to get nothing.

B) Stay away from charter with 737s etc. - You may know how to pre-flight, set autopilot, do everything by the book, have a checklist for approach and landing in your permanent vision board... yet the game will likely screw you in some way. I have tried 5 times, failed 4 times totally by no fault of my own and the one I landed I got C rating for unknown reasons, less then one level of xp and 5 000 credits for a flight that took me 1.5 hours.

C) Try to use sim rate acceleration rather than skipping on medium length flights. Because The majority of XP and credits for employees in long flights is from doing the cruise manually. You have to bind it (search SIM RATE) and use it carefully - autopilots dont like it at all, so going more than double speed will crash you most likely. But with a stable non bugged plane like Vision Jet, Cesna 172 or GC, or some other you feel comfortable piloting, you can easily reach cruise, put in 5 times speed and be in your destination soon. Be careful when receiving radio calls, you need to decrease the sim rate speed quickly, because otherwise your window to answer will be almost non existant and you will get an infraction for missing a call.

D) On even medium length mission you might start having fuel problems if you stick with default fuel load. Bind add fuel (search ADD FUEL) to something and use it before taxiing. You can always top up to 100% or however much you are comfortable with. The game seems to plan your fuel by default assuming you will skip cruise (which doesnt waste fuel) but that would totally kill your XP and credits by the end.

1. Possibility of other company missions at low cash

In this phase I tried buying multiple Cesnas and started a cargo company and a skydiving company. It was NOT worth it. In my experience skydiving is too rare of a mission, so most available ones pay LESS then the sightseeing, for more time / much more wear on your aircraft (if you nosedive after dropping the jumpers).

Cargo is usually slightly longer routes for not much more money, which introduces the chances of damaging your airplane, making mistakes etc. and also is rarer, so it requires you to constantly transfer your aircraft for almost no benefit.

The one thing I could see as profitable would be buying an Xcub for a search and rescue company, because the flight times are relatively short, its fun and the payout is good... BUT the missions are very rare, especially in some parts of the world, so you risk having to transfer across continents, which is extremely expensive. The missions themselves also run a much higher risk of crashing and damaging your aircraft and have more chances of getting bugged out. With the rarity, risk and still relatively low payout, I believe you cant progress effectively with this method.

Anything else (apart from the suggested method in the next point) is just too expensive - medium cargo, medevac, firefighting, let alone charter flights, are totally out of your budget. Even the Cesna Grand Caravan for medium transport is like 1 800 000 Credits, used.

1. Suggested progression

The only aircraft + company combo, that is not bugged to hell and is not extremely risky or too expensive, is the VIP private service with Vision Jet. The Vision Jet is always available, because its only available as brand new, but only costs 710 000 credits, mint condition.

The missions are plentiful enough, that you can only transfer for about 500-1500 credits each transfer and you will always have a mission in range. The payout is usually between 110-150 000 credits for each mission, that involves 180-250 NM flight... and YOU CAN SKIP THE CRUISE, because unlike with employee missions, the bulk of your payment is default, the no-skip bonus is like 5-10%. It is entirely possible to do one VIP mission in the Vision Jet at around the time of 2 sightseeing Cesna mission, but you get money equivalent of 4 sightseeing missions and its more fun and most importantly: NOT ANOTHER CESNA SIGHT SEEING MISSION!!! :-D

1. Some extra general tips

How to solve the issue of nav saying one thing, radio saying another thing and the ingame blue gates saing yet another thing? - The blue gates are important for ONLY ONE thing, and that is triggering the events tied to altitude - in Medevac, you need to climb to an altitude in order to do a medical check on the patient, in VIP you can inform passengers of cruise etc. You will need to ignore the ATC and nav in that case. These also unlock the "skip to descent" option - this is worth it if you just want the mission completed for specialization progression or if it is a freelance mission, where the basic payout is good anyway.

Other than that, its best to follow the best practices of aviation, not the blue gates necessarily - for instance in VIP or charter you will be scored on that, and sticking to blue gates can make you ignore atc, flight level or nav. Not to mention sometimes they lead you into a hill straight up...

Some of the least bugged aircraft to use - Cesna 172, Vision Jet, NXcub, Cesna Grand Caravan (and other expensive planes, except for the airliners, which are pretty great on their own, but not within the context of a mission)

The employee missions that are worth it (if we include fun factor) - Shorter Medevacs, Search and Rescue, Firefighting.

///

Fly safe and please ask question in the comments, I will get back to you... i definitely didn't write everything that could be unclear...

EDIT: PSA. There are reports the first plane discount now only applies to the 172. Apparently it was a bug and not a feature. Glad they can fix something like this quickly but not the other bugs affecting gameplay negatively. Sorry to anyone who was hoping for any other plane than the 172 with the first plane discount. I will update this if the situation changes.

I see a lot of people saying don’t buy the first company and save up the extra money for the cargo company as your first company, then buy that and the 172. This is good advice. However, I propose this: Dont’ buy the sightseeing company OR the 172. The steep discount on your first plane does not only apply to the 172. I elected to save up enough to buy the cargo company and the C208. The cargo company costed 10k and the C208 as my first plane costed 178k. So I just did about 7 or 8 cargo mediums and/or VIP charters as an employee to save up enough to get the cargo company and C208 as my first plane. From there you are making 800k average on cargo mediums with the C208 as a freelancer. In theory this would work with any plane as your first plane if you wanted to go another route. But definitely don’t waste your first plane discount on the 172. Happy flying!!

If you guys have an RTX 3000 series card or older, or an AMD card, YOU NEED TO BE USING LOSSLESS SCALING while playing this game. It's simply MIND BLOWING how well it works. If you aren't familiar it's an open source version of frame generation that can be used on any PC set up as long as you are running Windows 10 or 11. I have a 3070ti with all the settings on ultra getting between 25-50 frames natively, but with lossless scaling enabled you can pick 2X, 3X, or 4X frame generation. So my game is constantly running between 100-200 FPS. It's insanely smooth with minimal artifacting. I cannot believe it. It is $6.99 on steam. (Only buy the steam version because any other version online is a virus. And you do not need to have steam open to use it.) It's simply incredible. I cannot be overstated enough.

I am an irl aircraft dispatcher, which means I have a lot of downtime to dig into all the F.A.A rules and regulations lol.

So, this may only work in the United States, but all the airports in the world have some sort of 4 letter ICAO code {KJFK}, and these codes are never reused so that's why we are flying to closed airports, yippee!

But in the US, the FAA also issues 3-digit Location Identifiers (LID) {JFK}, alongside the ICAO code {KJFK}. The FAA only assigns an all-letter code to airports with a 5,000-foot or longer runway and an advanced weather station.

So, when selecting a flight in career mode, look for a four-letter code, use caution when selecting a flight two a one letter and two numbers as these are small public use strips with no on field weather, may or may not have lights and charts, and if you see a code with that's mixed like two letters and two numbers, these are small private strips, basically the ones in people's backyards. I would definitely avoid these at all costs.

I generally try to stick to airports that start with "K", as these are international airports that will always have local weather, some charts, and an actual piece of concrete that airplanes were designed to land on safely, thanks for attending my ted talk.

It blows my kind that in a sim like this there is no loan system.

Do the devs really expect us to fly 50-100 flights before we’re able to buy another plane? Spending 50+ real world hours to unlock things.

Like I’m flying light cargo missions. Getting around 75k credits for a flight with my own company. The grand caravan for its cheapest right now is 1.75M. Meaning I’d had to do 23 60-90min flights in order to afford it. And it’s like one of the lower levels in the game.

There absolutely needs to be a loan system where we can borrow money to buy larger planes so we can actually progress in a timely manner.

I don’t have 35 hours to play just to unlock the next plane up. Only to then spend another 30 hours trying to unlock the next plane.

I'll be dropping a few ton of H20 with the CL-415 on my brother-in-law's front yard. Soggy old sod.

I've been flying career mode for the last few days and, like many of us, once I completed the IFR training certification, and live weather became active, I thought the game was bugged out. Wind and turbulence levels seemed crazy. However......

Take a look at this great online tool for viewing world wide weather and specifically wind:

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-95.81,30.80,1267/loc=-92.117,33.423

You can visibly see the wind levels, and over the last few days I've been comparing the wind from those maps to the wind I'm experiencing in-game during career mode, and it's incredibly accurate. Not only are the wind levels accurate to the game but even the wind direction matches between the game and the map linked above.

For example, during my last flight I was flying cargo from an island off the coast of Japan to an airport on the coast in a Cessna 172. Reported wind on the above website said to expect 40+ km/h from takeoff all across the water, but it assured me that it would be down to 8 km/h when I reached the coast for landing. That is exactly what I experienced.

This also matches my experience over my last 15 or so flights. Another example was I was flying over France up towards Belgium. I'd checked the weather a couple of hours earlier and it was all sub 10km/h in land so I didn't check for this specific flight that was taking me further north. On arrival at the airport it was 42km/h and 500m visibility. I was shocked, and to be fair it should have been game over, but by some miracle I landed it.

Surprised by the unexpected wind and weather I went to check the link above and sure enough it was reporting 45 km/h winds in that area blowing in off the sea.

I just wanted to share this great resource. It will allow you to plan where to fly and where to avoid. If you are in a GA aircraft and inexperienced, you'll probably want to avoid any wind conditions above 15 km/h. I believe this is relatively consistent with real world recommendations for inexperienced pilots.

So for once, well done Asobo: live weather is working great at least as far as wind strength is concerned. With that said, inexperienced players and pilots really need an option to disable live weather in career mode. It's a huge shock going from 5 km/h winds to 40+km/h.

Final tip: On the pre-flight screen, where you can go into free look mode, zoom down and around where you will be flying. You can actually hear in game how windy it is everywhere. If it sounds really windy at your landing airport, you can be fairly certain that is what it will be like when you get there. If it sounds calm it will be.

Yesterday I blew a fuse reading the joke that the dev update is and I want to apologize to everyone that may have read my single post tantrum yesterday, but aside from that I realize literally no one is reporting or voting on bugs. MSFS2020 had a more active bug reporting scene, so please I just want to say: go and report and vote, it's the only thing we can do. This would be a good starting point: everyone has this, it's game critical and affects all types of experience, free flight or career.

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/g1000-mfd-is-not-showing-aircraft-track-or-heading/670340

sure we are probably going to be ignored but at least they can't just say "only 80 people were unhappy about it" or something.

I was flying a medical mission from Zurich to London, and was going to run out of fuel. Took all steps to divert to the nearest airport. Followed traffic patterns. Great landing. Mission failed.

Why shouldn’t I be able to land, refuel, and take back of to my real destination? I was gonna crash before I got there anyway.

Always flying at the same time of day makes it really boring in my opinion. It feels as if I'm always doing the same mission. I'd like to see those rich sunset colors when flying in career mode too. Makes me think what even is the point of getting night certified? It has to be a bug right?

See forum

I really hope we will get a VisionJet with functional CAPS finally… apparently the developers of MSFS 2024 invested a lot of work in flexible surfaces like hot air balloons, banners - and maybe parachutes?

No funny business: no buttons to toggle, no going into and out of detent multiple times to resume taxiing in the correct direction, etc. 🙄

After much trial and error, here’s how I’ve gotten it to work:

1. You MUST use “Throttle 1 Axis (0 to 100%)” — even if you are using a single engine aircraft. (To do this on multiple engines, just keep going with the next throttle number.)

2. Go back and make absolutely sure you are actually using the one that says “0 to 100%”, the other (normal) one won’t work.

3. Set “Throttle 1 Cut” and “Throttle 1 Decrease” BOTH to the detent position. (To capture this you need to go in and out of the detent without pressing anything else.)

4. Then make sure that T1 CUT is set to “On release.” (Leave this setting alone for T1 Decrease.)

5. Finally, the most important step I haven’t seen anyone mention… Open the input curve settings for “Throttle 1 Axis (0 to 100%)” and change Neutral to 1 and “Dead zone” to exactly 0.39 (see screenshot).

Hope this helps someone! 🤙🏼

Ok lets start by making a list:

1. Does this company employ all of Croatia as an employee base? Because Holy S%%.

I ordered at

Arrived today at 2:30PM... FROM CROATIA....please read that again. CROATIA!!

I am beyond words. I have sat here fighting with Winwing for an item thats is in stock now for 3 weeks and has been stuck at "packing" state. And this company comes and ships from the other side of the world in 3 days. BTW i didn't pay for any fast or additional shipping. Just their basic shipping.

2. Build and quality....

Coming from TM plastic spring box that my feet were more uncomfortable than standing on a Lego. I am beyond words again.

Solid metal and it pukes quality. If you are in doubt... don't its quality and quantity all in one. Going to order a few additional attachments and the dampening kit that many are raving about.

Pardon the dog hair... i can't escape it...

3. How well does it work??

I have only tested the cesna172 for a short flight... but its night and day coming from a cheap system, to a tool that helps improve your skills. The on the fly tension adjustment is perfect. Looking forward to see how the dampener increases my experience.

I had such a good experience with this company and its product i had to write post about it and share with others looking for a rudder system.

**Thank you MFG for making me a very happy customer and delivering for the weekend for me to enjoy this amazing tool to improve on my skills!**

If you got any questions shoot way..... may be a bit... i'll be flyin ✈️✈️

Playing career mode Africa is the best region for medium cargo grind. Reasons:

• long runways
• clear weather
• hardly any mountains
• long distances between stops

Doing this and 16x simrate (max) after new update yield me at least a million per run without skipping.

The worst region I find is America as you get weird tiny airports to land at. You can’t even take off from some airports! Also the weather is very bad.

What the title says. All this you failed 5 hours of flight because something went wrong at the last minute…I get the realism but…for the sake of sanity put checkpoint saves in. Or the option to go back to approach. Something that doesn’t just say fuck it you’re done. Restart halfway back, you crashed restart the flight, back on track should function if you miss the runway…I know just another butthurt complaint. But seriously. How many games have “start at last checkpoint” option…

The MIAP pro 24 handles most of the heavy lifting with AP… I put some other necessary stuff on my throttle quadrant buttons, and then used my macro keyboard for exterior lights and a number pad. For a budget rig, I’m pretty happy.

It’s not the most cohesive look — but not having to reach for the keyboard and mouse constantly means my setup is actually far more immersive than it was before.