Lately I’ve been scratching myself more and more, turns out I got the jeebies for bush flying again. For a long time this is all I would do, take up my trusty Reims Cessna 150 through the Alaskan mountains and gorges, or bring in a old beat down 737 in the main airport, to then continue into the small smashers and pretend deliver the junk mail to all the graceful people of the outback(VOZ scenery).
I used to do this under 2004, I had a high detail SRTM mesh installed(Simviation), Holger Sandmans Glacier Bay V2(Alaska!) and a few other smaller airports that had the wonderful outdoors spirit all over them.
I never managed to get that feeling back in FSX, the world always felt a bit… barren. Desert like textures in a Caribbean island, Square’s that didn’t blend texture types at all, etc. So in short, FSX kinda never clicked with me.
But, today I was watching this:
It has all that I love, detailed bush airports, wonderful scenery, you name it! It got me thinking. What is the best place for bush flying in what aircraft with what simulator? Well, that’s what I am here to find out, I know some of you may never touch the fat wheels down on a soggy grass strip, but plenty of you probably have! So post your own suggestions so that I can format it into a fancy list!
if there is custom scenery, all the better, if it’s freeware even more so! In short, the bush experience you want to share with your fellow sim enthusiasts!
1 Like
Beach and I fly with EPOCH Alaska in x-plane. They’ve done up a whole bunch of airports for alaska, as well as the epoch living centre at beaver creek which is basically a custom built housing community complete with airfields. You can design your own lot and have it built for you, but you have to pay its mortgage etc…
Even if you don’t want to participate that way, the resources are all available at the site and/or on the xplane org site. They’ve also semi-recently moved I to bc with epoch passage aviation, a release designed around shorter hop dispatch days. That package is available as well even if you don’t want to participate in the economy model. I think you have access to the list of dispatches as well, you can just choose to not submit them. As far as planes, there are tons available from the Cessnas to the noorduyn Norseman to the goose and on. Of course there are also scenery packages (free and pay) by others that are great too, like PANC and the inside passage, etc…
I should mention all the epoch stuff I noted is freeware.
2 Likes
Cool! I’ll have a look into that! Any specific recommendations since I do not own X-plane 10 and it would be nice if there’s a airport/scenery/aircraft combination that you would recommend.
I’ll out together some lists later tonight
1 Like
Yeah - gotta hop back on the EPOCH flying. Life is so nuts right now. But I’ll echo everything Rhino said. I’ve also recently bought that ORBX PNG type stuff and it is really nice looking. I’ll post up a bit more later, getting ready to walk out the door to go flying (thunderstorm dodging more like it…)…
1 Like
So aircraft wise, you can’t really go wrong with Carenado, they have nice, good looking planes. X-Hangar does some good planes as well, though the eye-candy part is not as nice - it is fps friendly, however. If you intend on getting into the EPOCH economy model, the EPOCH fleet contains a number of the x-hangar planes as well, as the developer flies with the group and they are sort of partners.
My favourites when flying EPOCH/EPA (it’s all my bush flying) are the C185F + bush expansion from Carenado, and the Noorduyn Norseman from x-hangar. The Twin Otter is nice too. But again this is going to depend on whether you’re using the EPOCH economy model or not; if you’re just flying for yourself, I’d just aim for whatever bush plane you enjoy post here to check. I know Carenado has a bunch of the cessna’s for x-plane as well.
Scenery… I’d really suggest checking out EPOCH’s download sections and forums (they are a bit of a mess to navigate to be honest), but just looking at my custom scenery folder, we have (all freeware except where noted):
AK59 King Ranch
Alaska FloatDocks A
CYXQ Beaver Creek (this is the EPOCH resort I was talking about)
CYXY Whitehorse
CYVR Vancouver
DM2 Little Diomede
ERA Alaska Destinations 1 and 2
PA Point MacKenzie
PAMR Merrill Field (nice little airpot near PANC)
PANC Anchorage
PAOR Northway
PAUN Unalakleet
PAVD Valdez
Inside Passage (payware)
Final Frontier (payware)
Canadian Rockies (payware)
EPOCH Passage Aviation Territory
Alaska Ultra Glacier Pilot (payware)
and like 20 or something libraries to run these sceneries, plus the hd mesh v3 tiles to make the terrain look like it’s supposed to in terms of elevation / land class / shorelines, etc… as much as possible. It doesn’t work everywhere though, such as Northway - the rivers don’t show up there as there’s no data for them.
So ya, most of that stuff is free aside from the aircraft. Chris might have some recommendations on aircraft. A lot of those airports have some nice charm to them (and the “group” ones like ERA destinations have multiple airports obviously … they’re really well done). If you’re looking to do bush flying elsewhere, than BC / Alaska I don’t really have any recommendations as I don’t really fly elsewhere for that type of stuff.
If you have any questions I’d be happy to answer.
4 Likes
I missed a bunch of airports too, PAFA, PACV, etc… theres a ton.
1 Like
for FSX theres that Misty Moorings community, they fly a lot of bush in the northwest canada/alaska area. Not flown with them but they have a pretty impressive collection.
Before I lost the bug I was flying in FSEconomy, I had just bought a C185 with tundra tires and was flying it to my home area in San Diego, in preparation for a trip up the coast to Alaska to start a bushflying endeavor up there, with plans on stopping and checking out the bush pilot scene in Oregon, Washington, and along the fjords and mountains of coastal Canada.
The last thing I really was having fun with was practicing STOL takeoffs and landings on the summertime ski slopes around lake tahoe/truckee area, after buying pretty much the entire west coast of North America in ORBX scenery… Tons of fun.
Apparently screenies from Steam don’t embed well here. HA! I FINALLY found something the forum cant do!
Flying around the Tahoe area in the trusty C185.
On final for a ski slope above the Truckee Airport.
A terrifying go-around flying into Truckee in weather I had no business flying in.
Flying with friends, starting my ferry flight of the C185 from Southern Canada to San Diego.
3 Likes
Lots of great suggestions here. Hard to go wrong with anywhere in the Pacific NW, but personality, I 've had a lot of great adventures that began at Stewart BC CZST.
2 Likes
Ya I don’t have that one but the xplane version is good too I’ve heard.
1 Like
I wish that there was an add-on for x-plane 10 like FS Cargo or Air Hauler to simulate hauling freight on these runs. As much as I like tooling around the mountains, I miss the mission aspect, especially with the WX that one encounters in the NW.
1 Like
I seem to remember reading you could get sir hauler working with xplane.
Honestly though that’s why I like epoch and the various other VA’s. They give purpose to your flying. Epoch has no activity requirements either’ they just want you to make smart aircraft choices based on cost/revenue. Other than that fly once a week or once a year they don’t care. Obviously they’d prefer you there because a busy community is a fun community but that’s all.
I’ll see if I can find that note about air hauler later today.
I’ve been messing with Air Hauler the last 48 hours trying to get it working. It has some quirks that I’m still trying to work out. It almost works, but was designed to work natively with XP9 not XP10, and not 64-bit…so you have to do some messing around with it. I’ll let you know if I get it fully working…
I find myself liking X-Plane so much these days that I’ll struggle through other stuff trying to find the same experiences I can in FSX. But it is…uh…a struggle sometimes… LOL…
BeachAV8R
2 Likes
I can fully understand, X-plane has a certain charm to it. Especially visually.
Then again, is FSX really the end all? I have spend most of the evening testing graphical settings and applying a tweak guide(that did double my framerate though…). Besides, FSX does not like the HOTAS Cougar and for some reason needs some serious coercion in getting it to accept keybinds.
Well, I’ve been working on getting Air Hauler to work all day long…and can’t seem to crack the nut. Everything seems to be working, but when I actually enter the sim (Air Hauler launches it) - I don’t get the welcome message I’m supposed to see about being on an Air Hauler mission.
I suspect it has something to do with a plug-in or something that isn’t working - but I’ve gone through every thread on the internet about it and have tried various solutions, but no luck.
I’m running Air Hauler in admin mode (essential) but I’m not sure if I’ve correctly replaced the XPUIPC plug-ins as is recommended here:
Pretty frustrating…and from what I’ve read, Air Hauler 2 won’t support X-Plane. So I might have to go with FSX if I want to do anything along those lines. More in it for the curiosity at this point - I have more fun flying the EPOCH VA missions…
1 Like
Aha…! Success…! (I think…)
I might have finally cracked the code (I’d wait for confirmation though). My order of operations for success.
- Buy Air Hauler for X-Plane
- Install as admin
- Run Air Hauler patch as admin
- Download and install new XPUIPC: Wir arbeiten gerade an unserer Website
- Move the originally installed (by Air Hauler) XPUIPC.xpl file into the X-Plane 10/Resources/plugins folder
- Run Air Hauler in admin mode
So I got the welcome message when I loaded up a flight. Will run a test to see if all the resources are being tracked and deducted (fuel/cargo/pay)…
BeachAV8R
1 Like
Does that then bork xpuipc for everything else?
Good question - messing with xpuipc can be a bit of whack-a-mole - so we’ll see. Right now I’m running a test with the default XP Cessna 172 and all is working fine. But next I’ll try something a bit more complex like a Carenado plane and see if the internal Carenado plug-ins mess around with the sim. I’ll keep ya’ posted. Might be fun if I can get Air Hauler working in conjunction with the EPOCH flight areas so I can double my fun…
BeachAV8R
Hey…success…! (At least with a default aircraft…)
So Air Hauler gives you messages when you start, takeoff, land, and shut down to indicate you need to unload cargo. If I can make sure the whole thing is working, I might try starting a career (where you work your way up by making money and buying aircraft and leasing airports…)
BeachAV8R
1 Like
