Chapter 11 of 16
VFR jobs
General aviation routes: a chain of points to be flown in order
A section for pilots who have an hour and a Cessna and no wish to invent a destination. A catalogue of general aviation routes: short legs between runways that genuinely exist, with a chain of points along the way. Pay here is per HOUR of hand-flying rather than per litre of fuel or tonne of airframe — so a Cessna earns just as well as a big machine.
How it works
- 1Pick an aircraftThe section shows the catalogue through one specific aircraft: money, ferry distance and eligibility all depend on it. General aviation and utility types qualify — an airliner does not.
- 2Open a route and take a legThe list holds whole routes; legs, money and the map open inside a route. The unit of work is one leg, runway to runway. You can only take it while parked at its start: the ferry to the start is a separate flight, and its distance is shown before you click. You do not have to fly that ferry — the aircraft can be positioned to the departure point at once, for money.
- 3Fly the chain of pointsThe points must be passed IN ORDER, each within a one-kilometre circle. The circles are drawn on the job map to true scale, and every point's coordinates are listed beside it.
- 4File your report as usualThe condition is checked against the flight track along with the normal analysis. Miss a point and the job fails — and the analysis names which one.
You can take the route into your simulator as a file: the leg card offers a .PLN plan for MSFS and an .fms plan for X-Plane. Waypoints are written as coordinates, so the simulator's navigation database is not needed. The .PLN also carries a cruising altitude set by the semicircular rule — legal for your direction, but not a safe one: the catalogue does not know the terrain between the runways.
Loading the plan into the simulator is optional. The condition is judged from the track ONLY: build the route by hand from the coordinates if you like — the job still counts.
The capture circle is a kilometre, and it is sized by corner-cutting on a turn rather than by track frequency. Passing a point on a tangent is enough: a single sample inside the circle closes it.
Worth knowing up front
- A live pilot flies it — you, or someone you assign the flight to. A hired crew cannot take this job: the condition is confirmed by a live flight track, and a crew flight has no track at all.
- Paid positioning buys time, not distance: it is priced as an ordinary ferry plus a premium for skipping the wait. The aircraft appears at the departure point immediately, its owner pays (the company or the pilot), and it does not come back on its own — that leg home is yours too.
- A contract is one leg, not the whole route. You may fly a whole trip, but each leg is taken and paid separately — otherwise the seventh would burn the six already flown.
- A leg you have taken closes to you for a week. That is the only limit on repeats — the catalogue is not a lottery and does not disappear.
- Leg numbers have gaps. Some legs of the original trip failed validation, and numbers are never renumbered: «leg 5 of 6» with no fourth is normal.
The routes come from simulator-proven trips rather than being generated: the runways exist, the distances add up, the terrain is flyable. That keeps the catalogue small — but free of strips that are not there.