You’d think a couple of years after release with regular world updates and patches that most bridges would now be modelled as bridges, and not photogrammetry draped over elevation data. At least significant landmark bridges such as the Golden Gate and Bay Bridge are now (very beautifully too) modelled accurately and yes you can fly under them without hitting a brick wall:
Bay Bridge, San FranciscoGolden Gate Bridge, San Francisco
You don’t have to fly too far however before you start to see these again, here’s the Carquinez Bridge in Crockett, about 6 miles to the NE:
Carquinez Bridge
Don’t try flying under this one, it doesn’t end well.
Some Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) apps such as FltPln and ForeFlight can also connect to most of the popular flight sim apps like Xplane, MS FSX and FS Flight Simulator 2020.
FlightPlane has some great instructions for connecting to flight sims using a number of different approaches. The easiest option I’ve found so far is to download the Flight Events app from https://events.flighttracker.tech/ . Press the Join button top right and follow the instructions.
Enable the ‘Broadcast data to local network’ option. Initially ForeFlight didn’t show the Flight Events panel under ‘More… Devices’ until I entered the current ip address of my iPad on my network in Flight Events (instead of the default broadcast option) :
and the Flight Events appeared in the Devices panel here:
Click ‘Flight Events’, enable, and then ForeFlight is sync’d with your sim.
I’ve been doing some sightseeing in Microsoft Flight Simulator, flying over some of the major atoll locations around the world, and other famous Pacific island locations (e.g. Wake Island, featured in many Battlefield and other games)
In less than 10 months the disk on my new custom PC I built specifically for play Microsoft Flight Simulator is already full:
I put a 500GB m.2 NVMe drive in this machine, so while 500GB is not massive, it’s surprising that the updates, patches and scenery cache so far has already filled the entire disk. This main NVMe was a Corsair Gen 4 m.2, so was slightly more pricey than alternatives but faster than the other Gen 3 m.2 sticks at the time. I have since added a second 1GB m.2 stick, a cheaper but not as fast Sabrent Rocket.
Rather than reinstalling MS Flight Sim from scratch (which would have required another multiday download from Steam), I moved the packages folder from C: to D: – steps to do this are described here.
In summary for Steam installs, edit the UserCFG.opt file in this location:
… to point to any new location. You can move the existing content of this folder to the new location, and when you restart, any new updates or add-ons will go to this new location.
