Tips
Want to get the best out of Location Manager? Use the included help tools.
There is a small learning curve with the Location Manager user interface, and the most efficient way to learn it is via a simple process.
- Use the tool tips that show up when you mouse over the column header
- Read the annotated quick help guide image that is included with the download, and shown above here. Click where shown, understand what happens as a result.
- Watch the videos linked above here for deeper insights, while referencing “How to best use Location Manager” section directly below.
- Ask support via the form at the bottom of this page if you don’t understand something, or have found a bug/issue to report.
You will then have a more complete understanding of how it works, and then you can decide how you want to use it, the way that suits you best. It’s quite flexible in that regard.
How to best use Location Manager
How It Works
From the main map, it’s not possible to start on the ground from any custom saved location via the Fly button due to sim limitations. The functionality to do that simply isn’t exposed to use, so the method to “Start Anywhere” in Fly Mode is the following:
-
- Explore the map in Map Mode and save interesting locations as starting points as per the video guide
- You can only initially start from the main map at an existing airport, in either hot or cold start mode, so pick a starting airport close to your target location and enter Fly Mode in either cold or hot start mode as per normal, or start in the air via a custom location (height will vary depending on the type of aircraft chosen).
- Once in Fly mode open the Location Manager toolbar, choose where you want to go from the saved locations, and teleport there from the saved location to start your new flight anywhere on the ground or in the air, depending on the settings you choose, which are explained in detail below.
Map Mode
-
- Map mode in the main MSFS user interface is where you do most of the saving and managing of locations.
- In flight planning, save all ICAO or POI/City/LM/Custom Waypoints you like.
- Choose where you want to go from your saved favorites
- Save airport ICAO’s to do some take off and landing practice at unique locations at different times and in different weather.
- Save interesting POI’s, cities, animal locations that of are special interest
- Save custom waypoints so you can start anywhere on land or water, your own private bush strip. Note that Custom Waypoints saved in map mode will always have a height (ground elevation) of 500m/1640ft. This is by design, confirmed by Asobo devs, and will not change. In Fly mode Custom Waypoints will be saved with correct ground elevation as it doesn’t have this limitation. In either case you will still end up at the correct teleport position as I compensate for the incorrect height.
- Find your own use for it.
- Make sure ICAO’s have been saved with the runways/parking spots. Check the message, and you can also confirm by seeing the auto tag added eg: r2, p4 type tags.
- Some ICAO’s, mainly user, don’t have any runways or parking spots and a message will show stating that.
- Heliports are currently not returned by the Javascript SDK, nothing I can do about that.
Fly Mode
-
- UI Scaling
- Make sure your MSFS UI scaling is sized so you can see the training bar drop down selections properly (see image below).
- You may also want to adjust your screen resolution.
- You can adjust the width and height of the Location Manager toolbar by dragging a corner, then hit “Resize Grid”.
- Selecting a location
- Click on a location name in a row to select it. It will highlight as a green row, and load into the training bar at the top of the Location Manager toolbar window (see image above). The training bar above the grid includes:
- Font size slider
- Reset Grid Button to reset the grid to default state and resize it to fill the window
- Heading slider to adjust the heading of the plane
- Time slider to quickly adjust time of day. Great to test yourself in different lighting conditions.
- Wind direction indicator relative to the planes heading. Real time, changes depending on wind strength/direction at height AGL.
- Weather dropdown to conveniently change the weather for different scenario training
- Save location. Saves the current location of the plane as a custom waypoint with the ground elevation it is at.
- Help & Support button to open a browser window that goes to the website
- Training bar activity fields that differ depending on the type of location selected. See below for more info.
- ICAO Locations
- If the location has an ICAO, you can quick filter to just that ICAO by clicking on the ICAO column in the grid for that selected row
- Selected ICAO’s have dropdown options populated as shown in the training day video above
- Non-ICAO locations – POI, Cities, Animals, Custom Waypoints
- Selecting these locations loads them into the training bar but with only three random options in the position drop down
- As these are point locations with no airstrip direction reference, planes will be assigned a random direction when Fly or Park is used. You can easily adjust the planes heading with the heading slider just above the training bar
- Note: When you initially load into Fly mode and open the Location Manager toolbar you should (generally) see a location already highlighted in green. This is because LM auto highlights your closest location as a convenience. You still need to click the name to select it and load the location into the training bar. Sometimes you may see multiple rows highlighted in green. Don’t panic, this is just LM telling you that it’s found more than one location within the distance threshold (~500m) from the planes location. Just select one of them to load it into the training bar and the rest will be cleared.
- Location Teleporting
- Teleporting Options
- Please read the Known Issues/Teleporting Issues for important info.
- Sometimes you may get a bad teleport to ground and the plane will be in an unusual attitude. No problem, just hit Fly again to regenerate the teleport and reposition. Teleporting is dynamically adjusted based on distance, so it will be super quick and in cases like this it just takes 1 or 2 (at most) extra teleports to set the plane correctly. If you really need to reset the planes attitude before teleporting use a quick slew mode on and off again, usually bound to the Y key, and the plane will be reset in the best position attitude for teleporting.
- Please turn all your Assistance Options/Failure and Damage options to OFF in order to avoid issues that may happen with teleporting collisions (ie: ground/aircraft while the new location loads in). Also be aware there may be some issues with Aircraft using custom damage modelling that may override these settings. I suggest testing first with a base aircraft that does not have these issues.
Fly or Park in each row are active buttons with the following teleport functionality
-
-
- Park
- Park will teleport you to the lat/long of the location if no parking spots are available (ie: Start anywhere on ground or water), or to the selected parking spot.
- Note: Be careful, this currently works on selected locations (row is green) and unselected locations.
- Plane state will be:
- Flaps up
- Gear down
- Engine off
- Trims are untouched
- Plane direction
- ICAO locations: Plane direction will be parallel to the first runway
- Non ICAO locations: Plane will be assigned a random direction. Adjust it with the heading slider at the top as needed.
- Fly
- Before using the Fly options make sure your flight systems are all up and running, either by hot starting on the runway, or cold starting and doing a full startup procedure (or Ctrl-E if supported). Fly only turns the engine on, not the associated flight systems.
- You can teleport to a selected runway for take off or to the air for landing practice (ICAO locations only).
- If nothing happens when you click Fly please check the message in the top left
- Position in the training bar has the following selections when a location is loaded
- Take Off (ICAO location only)
- Final (ICAO location only)
- Base L / Base R (ICAO location only)
- Cross L / Cross R (ICAO location only)
- Downwind L / Downwind R (ICAO location only)
- Random – assigns a random position and bearing at the specified distance from the location lat/long
- RandomTo – assigns a random position at the specified distance from the location lat/long, pointing at the location
- RandomFrom – assigns a random position at the specified distance from the location lat/long, pointing away from the location
- Set options for Distance, Height, or Speed lets you choose from the following ranges at stepped intervals:
- Distance: 0.25 to 25km
- Height: 125 ft to 30000 ft
- Speed: 50kts to 400kts
- Random options for Distance, Height, or Speed will select a value from the following subset of number options:
- Distance: 0.25 to 6km
- Height: 125 ft to 5000 ft
- Speed: 55kts to 125kts
- Take off practice.
- This only needs you to select Position: Take Off & the runway you want to take off from, then click Fly to teleport there
- Plane will be aligned to the runway magnetic bearing
- Plane state will be:
- Flaps up
- Gear down
- Engine on
- Trims are untouched, so check as per normal take off checklist before take off.
- Take off practice is totally doable in non-ICAO locations, but as they are point lat/long locations without “real” runways your start direction will be random. Use the heading slider up top to adjust your heading before take off.
- Landing Practice
- The following positions are for landing practice: Final, Base L/R, Cross L/R, Downwind L/R, Random, RandomTo, RandomFrom. You need to select all the dropdowns marked * to be able to click Fly. Check the warning message.
- Pause checkbox at far right controls whether you will be paused after teleport. This is useful so you can double check things before unpausing to continue the exercise. Best to bind active pause to a button for easy access.
- Plane state will be set to:
- Engine on
- Gear up
- Flaps up
- Trims untouched, so reset them if needed before hitting fly.
- Landing practice is totally doable in non-ICAO locations, but as they are point lat/long locations without “real” runways your start direction will be random depending on which random direction option you select (see Position in the training bar above for descriptions). It’s fun though, try it. Use the heading slider up top to adjust your heading if you wish.
- ILS Landing Practice
- If a runway has an associated ILS frequency it will be loaded into the ILS field next to the runway dropdown when the runway is selected.
- Tune & activate the frequency, align yourself to the runway, and at the ILS detection distance you will see it on the PFD
- Make sure you activate the ILS frequency when unpaused, as if you do it in pause mode it sometimes doesn’t trigger properly
- Saving custom locations in Fly mode
- Fly mode save location only saves as a Custom Waypoint at the current lat/long of the aircraft, with altitude set to the height of the ground at that position.
- You can use these saved custom waypoint locations to start anywhere on ground or water where there isn’t an airport with an ICAO by using Park to teleport to that location. Use Fly and the training bar settings to start in the air as an alternative.
- This area may be developed further, but performance and reliability are always the key criteria for implementing new features.
V1.2 Save Location changes for airports with ICAO
You can update your currently saved airport locations by quickly going to them from the grid, and then save them again. They will be updated with the new runway and parking data, if available, but your tags will be overwritten with auto-generated tags to show runways, parking, and ils. You will lose any existing tag data. Apololgies for that, but I not could come up with a good solution in the case where someone did multiple saves, so just went with overwriting tags for now.
I want to start a flight cold at the last location I stopped at in the sim. How do I do that?
You can do that with location manager pro. Whenever you stop, engines off, save that as a new location in Location Manager via the toolbar. That location will then be automatically added as the last saved location in default mode (unsorted & unfiltered).
Next time you start the sim, you can choose that saved location to start with (which will place you in the air if it’s a custom waypoint) or somewhere close to it. Then when you are in fly mode, select that saved location in the Location Manager toolbar & use the teleport to ground feature for that saved location (pro version) and it will place you there engines off. Now start the flight as per normal.
I don’t implement automatic saving of the last location you are at, as there are so many possible use cases that can happen here that it’s too much to cater for. There are also storage implications if you constantly auto-save locations and don’t manage them, so a simple manual process is best here if you wish to do this. Delete older locations as you go if you don’t wish to keep them permanently in order to save location slots.
So, if you wish to pick up a flight at the exact spot you stopped at last time, follow the above process and you’ll be able to do it. We use the tools we have, not the ones we’d like to have, or that may not be possible to currently implement.
First time user and you clicked on the grid and all your locations disappeared, leaving a blank grid?
This is likely because you clicked on the favorites quick filter/unfilter trigger, which is accessed by clicking on any plane name in the grid. If you haven’t yet set any favorites (yellow F in far left column in image above) then nothing will show. Use the Reset Filters button (pro) or manually reset the Favorites Filter on the top of the far left column. To open the Favorites Filter on the top far left, make sure you click on the hamburger menu icon, the three little horizontal lines, and not the filter icon. Once open, press the reset button to clear the filter and all your planes will appear. It’s a narrow column to save space, so if you click on the filter icon just to the left of the hamburger menu (3 horizontal lines) you will actually trigger a sort of that column. You can see the sort icon by clicking on the column header when the filter is cleared, and you will see an up or down arrow on successive clicks, changing the sort order, and no arrow when the sort is cycled back to off.
Please check the quick help guide included in your download, as well as watch the videos for insights into how things work, then devise your own system using it that suits you.
Issues with 3rd party add-ons in MSFS?
MSFS Safe Mode is a new feature that will allow players to launch the sim in a basic state to ensure stability.
- MSFS Safe Mode FAQ
- To force start MSFS in safe mode, crash or force quit the app with alt+F4 or end the process from Task Manager. You will then get the prompt to boot normally or in safe mode on restart.
- It’s also possible to trigger safe mode on startup by dropping an empty file called running.lock into your local MSFS directory. This appears to be a lock file that MSFS uses to detect if MSFS exited correctly the last time it was used, and is deleted if MSFS successfully exits. If it exists, it triggers the safe mode selection screen. See this thread Command line parameter to start the sim in SAFE MODE for more info.