Time Lapse Global Flight model.

    With the ability to fly around the globe and new regions getting added, it would be great if we could A.Fly between regions and B.Skip forwards through time or more likely distance.

    I'm thinking of the scenario where you can set SFO as the departure point and select Paris say as the destination airport using the Navigation page if Paris was an available region. Now when you take off and set autopilot for your heading, it would be great if there was a distance skip feature where by tapping it progressed you in 100 mile increments. This would make long haul flights a real option in the game as you could you keep tapping the skip distance button to progress through your flight and then fly the last ~ 100 miles in to land. A real long haul flight could be completed in about 20 minutes if needed. At the very least, you could skip past all the lower resolution imagery and focus on the more involved parts of the flight.

    I think this could be a great future feature.

    Sounds like a good idea. I personally would not fly long flights on a sim for that reason. The longest I would fly would be one hour which is still long enough to fly internationally in Europe. That's why I am keen to see more regional jets, turboprops or GA aircraft as they suit the sort flying I will do.

    The atlantic should not be that hard with no wind.

    The great circle route looks great until it is plotted on a practical mercator type chart

    You could divide the route into 10 degree intervals and use the mid interval headings at the start of each interval, hard work. Or you can use a site like
    http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html
    to calculate a rhumb line route which means a single true track will cover the entire distance, it takes longer than a great circle (4823 vs 4363 nm) but the fuel is free and the navigation is easier.

    The British Geological Survey variation chart gives world wide values.

    The average magnetic variation at chosen intervals can be used to adjust the local magnetic heading to fly. I tried SFO to Clifden in Ireland which was where the first non stop cross pond flight (crashish) landed in 1919.


    Zooming is available


    Note the same heading all the way.

    To combine the true hdg with local average variation to get magnetic hdg use the old "west is best and east is least", so at SF with east variation subtract from true to get magnetic eg 078.5 -14E is 064.5 M. The variation changes a lot in North America but about 12 West would cover the uninteresting Atlantic Ocean stretch. At St Johns Newfoundland add 18 West to steer 096.5 M and approaching Ireland add 6 West to steer 084.5 M.
    The F18 at full throttle and on autopilot at 1000 kt ground speed at 60,000 feet - the horizon is 290 miles away, (and with Google Earth on a mobile) should have made it easy but I fell asleep over the increasingly low res Utah and found myself approaching mid/southern Greenland so had to re plan (using the mobile and Google Earth) via Iceland. I hit the 100% totally featureless coast at donegal bay about 100 miles north of Galway airport, near the historic Clifden.
    The F18 had no nav aids so I couldn't check out NDBs or ILSs on the far side, did IPACS support say the entire world's nav aids were covered? Must try a shorter section with the slower 747 and see what is around Chicago, Toronto or Gander.