Month: August 2023

It is very hard to succeed at something if you don’t know what the goals are.

I started a YouTube channel in April 2022. At first, the focus was pretty simple: I played American Truck Simulator/Euro Truck Simulator 2 a ton, and would record and upload my game sessions. My biggest influences were Jeff Favignano and my friend Zilla Blitz. There were some challenges with my hardware at the time: The Mac wasn’t great for recording video game content and my PC was ancient. But, I was able to soldier on.

Then in May I got a gaming PC and now it was very easy to record. At the time life got really chaotic and it is hard to grow a YouTube channel with an infrequent posting schedule.

In December, my gaming really got upended when I switched to Microsoft Flight Simulator. The sim looks fantastic, but creating content is harder. There is the first the technical challenge of learning to fly the damn airplane. Using some replay utilities it is possible to create cinematic videos.

For a cacophony of reasons my channel has not been successful. After a year, I have 22 subscribers. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t post because it’s all just pissing into the wind, and it’s all just pissing into the wind because I don’t post a lot. The YouTube algorithm is a harsh master.

The real reason I haven’t been posting is I don’t know the story I want to tell. I am a story teller. Even in my work documentation, it’s sort of ok, we are going to tell a story about how we are going to implement this system.

”He worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium; a master.” – Ralphie.

I am a writer. I enjoy writing. The whole process — an idea for a story I want to tell, how I want to phrase something, fussing over the details. With writing, I know the story I want to tell, how I want to create it, and best of all I don’t need to be sitting at my desk to do it. Words are my medium.

“Saying ‘no’ is actually saying ‘yes’ to other things.” – Patrick Rhone.

It’s not the end of my YouTube channel. I will still poke at it. But maybe the story of my YouTube channel is there just isn’t a story for me to tell there. By taking the focus away from worrying about my channel, I can tell stories in a medium that works for me.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is my latest game addiction. Since the beginning of the year, it is the only game I have been playing. Once I figured out how to fly airliners, it all clicked and I got hooked.

Part of the appeal for me is recreating real world routes. For instance United flight UAL679, is an Airbus A320 flight route from Boston to Newark. I have sceneries for both airports, as well as an A320, so I will fly that route with that flight number.

To organize this, I have a fairly complicated Excel sheet.

A Brief Aside About Tracking Sceneries

The default, AI generated, airports in MSFS are a blight on humanity. I simply refuse to fly into or out of them. There is an important distinction here: often MSFS creates a handcrafted, reasonably accurate, representation of an airport. In my database these are not treated as regular default airports.

So, on the aforementioned Excel sheet, there is a worksheet called “Handcrafted” into which I capture:

• ICAO code for the Airport (KEWR for Newark)
• The source of the scenery:
  
  • World Update: The handcrafted MSFS sceneries.
  • Freeware: Usually from flights.to. There is a sub category for free sceneries I have found lacking.
  • Owned: I bought the scenery.
  • Paid: I’m not tracking all the paid sceneries available, but if I plan a route and there is a paid option, I document it here. This scenery is usually wish listed.

When I capture a route on a separate worksheet, there is a VLOOKUP that returns the scenery source. If it does not show up on the Handcrafted worksheet in any form, it displays a value of Default to tell me there just aren’t any good options.¹

My Research Sources

Volanta:

Volanta is a flight-tracking app for MSFS that shows the routes I have flown, the airframe used, and a few other stats. There is a subscription-only service that displays real-world route information. I can filter the main view for installed sceneries, and when I click on a departure airport, I can also tell it to only how installed sceneries. However, and this is a reason behind why I use Excel, it does not see the MSFS Handcrafted airports as installed sceneries.

Volanta is my first-stop for real-world information

Flightaware:

If I doubt something in the Volanta database — usually when a streamer who focuses on real world ops has a flight, and I can’t find it in Volanta — I go to Google and type in “flightaware KBOS KEWR” that shows me the list of flights between those two airports and their airframes. If I enter a streamer route into my collection, it’s after I verify the information.

Flightsim Dispatch App:

This is a fantastic resource for historical routes. Their database stops around 2022 so it’s not great for current-day routes. However, the historical data is very accurate and reasonably matches up to timetables I checked it against. The flight number is often different, but given how often flight numbers change, it’s not a sticking point. When I research US Airways flights, for example, it the sole source I use.

However, this database is not exhaustive. In the case of US Airways, the routing is correct, but it does not show every flight and model; only what the dev had access to. It also does not show the source of the information.

Another Aside on Types of Flights

Keeping with the theme of overanalyzing data, as I research and document routes I group them into these categories:

• Real World: This route has come from a trusted source that this airline actually flies with that airframe today. I use Volanta for some of this, and some of it is from FlightAware.com. Generally speaking, I only log real world flights for airframes I own, or are imminent purchases.
• Historic: This route was flown by a now-defunct airline, and notes the airframe used in this flight. For instance, The “Miracle on the Hudson” flight 1549 was a route from KLGA to KCLT in an Airbus a320. So on my planning worksheet, it would be referenced as historic.
• Defunct Virtual: This is a rare category, but falls into some “what if Pan Am survived” and I recreate a route they flew, but with an airframe I own. In Pan Am’s case, they had ordered A320s, but sold off their spot in line to Braniff. These were likely going to replace their Boeing 737s, so while it would still be classed as Defunct Virtual, it’s almost historic. At one point, I was thinking of leaning hard into a what if for defunct airlines, but ended up backing away from that. In the end, it was hard to overlook the factors that caused the airline to fail.
• Virtual: In this case, it’s not a route pairing I could match up to anything. If I flew it, I would usually use my own custom livery for my YouTube channel.

Both Historic and Real World are very specific on the validity of the data. To get classed in either of these, everything matches against the trusted source. However, the incompleteness of the data does require some creative interpretation. For instance, in 1992 US Airways flew from Washington D.C. to Boston 16 times a day. The dispatch app just shows one entry from 2008. It’s why I don’t pay attention to flight numbers, and I will tend allow myself to fly any airframe the airline used. US Airways flew A319s, A320s, and A321s so any of them are fair game for a route.

Cargo and Executive flights are an interesting challenge. It is very difficult to get flight information for cargo flights. Some routine cargo flights — like Amazon and FedEx, are somewhat easy to get information about. It takes a little digging. Amazon does not fly flights under its own call sign. Instead, they subcontract out flight operations to two groups in the US. Sun Country (SCX)² and Atlas Air (GTI). The main hubs are KLAL (Lakeland Linder International Airport), KAFW (Perot Field Fort Worth), and Cincinnati (KCVG). At that point, using Flightaware I could dig out some flight information. The handful of Amazon flights I have actual routes for I track as Real World. Other cargo flights are usually in my own livery as Virtual.

Executive flights are always classified as Virtual. The only way an executive flight would show up as Real World is if the flight was both an airframe and livery I had, coupled with a flight tracking history. Given how many of these jets opt-out of tracking, they exist this is likely to not happen.

There is appeal to only flying business/cargo. You aren’t limited at all by real route airport pairings. Especially in Europe, there are a lot of cargo air operators that do charters for one-off transport so it’s plausible.

Back to the Topic: Why It’s All in Excel

Were it not for my fascination with historic routes (Especially US Airways and America West), I could just get by with Volanta. I can work around how it displays the handcrafted as default sceneries. Honestly, while I have this massive sheet, I still end up going to Volanta and looking it up.

However, the Excel sheet does have a lot of things going for it: It combines historic and real world routes. When I filter on an airport pairing, I can see if there is a historic flight option.

What is great is it really lets me pair up airports I own. The mot frequent use case for this is I decide to fly out of an airport I own (KEWR), and want to fly to another airport I own. I will set my filter on Origin to KEWR, and my Destination Source filter to Owned. This will report out all the routes I have captured that meet that criteria. I can then filter down to airframe and airline if I so desire.

1. For the Excel nerds, it’s all wrapped in an IFERROR statement. ↩
2. To really mess things up, SCX is also a passenger airline, flying 737s on those routes as well. Fortunately, the Amazon flights are SCX3XXX. ↩