Bush Flying in X-Plane 11

Guide about the basics of bush flying, aircraft choice, routes, equipment, navigation, etc

Bush Flying in a Simulator

Bush flying means aircraft operations in "the bush".
Usually for the purpose of mail, supplies, medical care or similar bush pilots will fly into the roughest of terrains to fulfill these tasks. Bush flying is a challenging experience and requires a lot of experience and expertise in real life. Flying into remote areas is dangerous and can also be deadly. Yet the views are priceless.

Here's a short video showing some footage of bush flying in northern canada, just so you get an idea of what bush flying looks like ;D

So how do we get this experience into a simulator. X-Plane 11 is currently the most advanced flight simulator available to us with advanced worldwide scenery and fairly acceptable vector and landclass data as well as advanced blade theory flight dynamics out of the box.
It can provide a flawless IFR experience but also VFR flying is very enjoyable and that's exactly what we need for bush flying.

OK, so we have the simulator, for a complete bush flying experience we need a bit more and that's what I'll be covering in this guide.(please note this guide is pretty much a work in progress so it will be updated and expanded)

Here's what I will look into:

• Aircraft
  
• Equipment
  
• Addons
  
• Areas and Routes
  
• Airfields and places to land
  
• Navigation
  
• Weather
  
• Dangers and Risks (and how to avoid them)

Choosing an Aircraft

To fly you need a plane and to fly in the bush you need a bush plane.
Actually there is no such thing as a bush plane, just planes that have been modified to be a bush plane or planes durable enough to operate in remote areas and under harsh influences.
They come in all shapes and sizes, usually piston props or truboprops, single or multiengine, taildragger or normal three wheel configuration, with wheels, big wheels, floats or skis. Two seats, four seats, six seats or more, transport or passenger. Always the right thing for the task, you get the idea. They all share some common features though, they are durable, have decent range, a good reliability record, easy to maintain and have STOL capabilities (short takeoff and landing)

for bush flying in X-Plane you need to choose the right aircraft for you and the places you will fly into. X-Plane comes with three Aircraft that can be used as bush planes out of the box.

Default Planes

Cessna 172 Skyhawk
The Cessna 172 Skyhawk is an absolute classic, an icon of aviation and everyone with just a basic knowledge of aviation will recognize a Cessna at first glance.
With over 44,000 172s built it's also the most built aircraft in the entire world, the numbers speak for themselves: this is a great plane.
The Skyhawk is a single piston engine four seater with high mounted wing, due to it's good flight characteristics, easy and cheap maintenance and good performance this plane is used around the world as trainer, military scout, private and charter aircraft and well, also as bush plane. often with a couple modifications but we will get into this later.
In X-Plane there are three major versions of the 172. A wheeled version, one with floats and an option to change the instrumentation from the classic gauges to an advanced glass cockpit equipped with the garmin G1000.

The standard instrumentation for the real bush flying feel

The G1000 is a nice to have but feels out of role for a bush plane, you want something durable not extremely fancy, use it if you want but I reccomend the normal version.

The version with floats turns the 172 into a seaplane allowing water landings
The floats version also has a gear lever to toggle between sea and land mode, wheels can be lowered to allow for landings on airstrips.

four seats and a bit space for luggage, the 172 is perfect for operations in remote areas.

The Skyhawk is an awesome and versatile plane, it is great for beginners but still fun for advanced simmers and will never loose it's charme, it's simply a cessna.

Stinson L5
The L5 is a high wing, single engine warplane, designed in the late 1930s this plane is old. It was built as a scout plane but also found civil use. The L5 is a taildragger, it's light and has a good STOL capability. The gear bends well and the wheels are free so you can also land in rough terrain without a runway. The L5 lacks some equipment though you might want for bushflying like some basic GPS. If you are looking for a navigation challenge this is the plane for you, the bush flying experience will not get purer than this with default X-Plane aircraft.

The L5s cockpit is simple, just the instrumentation you need to fly the aircraft. a radio and basic navigation with compass, if you can fly with paper map and compass the L5 can be an interesting plane to fly, for beginners not so much, you can get lost easily in remote areas.

Beechcraft C90
The Beechcraft King Air is by far the biggest plane of the three, she is a double engine turboprop with low mounted wing. Country landings are a no go with a plane like this, grass and gravel strips might be acceptable but paved is much preferred by the C90. The Turboprops deliver some serious thrust and allow for a much higher cruising speed and, in combination with the pressurized cabin, higher cruise altitude. The C90 still has STOL capabilities and is great to fly into small airfields possibly high up. It has space for 8 passengers and some cargo in the back of the plane. The C90 found use as military aircraft, trainer and is popular as charter aircraft in more or less remote areas.

The cockpit greets you with all kinds of fancy equipment, glass instrumentation and a GPS. This plane is a workhorse. If you enjoy longer range flights and want to have the pleasure of advanced instrumentation, high speeds and high altitudes, this is the plane for you.

Payware Addon Planes
X-Plane users can enjoy a large variety of third party payware addons, these include addon aircraft. I believe there are some aircraft that just have to be mentioned when talking about bush flying and some of them are available as addons for X-Plane.

de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter and de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter
No bush flying without the canadians and no bush flying without the Otter.
The Otters are true icons in bush flying, old planes indeed but so versatile and modifyable they are used to this day as bush planes and small charter planes

You can find both aircraft as addons for X-Plane
The DHC-3 Otter by RWD: https://store.x-plane.org/DHC-3-Otter_p_578.html
The DHC-6 Twin Otter by RWD: https://store.x-plane.org/DHC-3-Otter_p_578.html

Cessna 182,185, 206 and 208
Cessnas come in all shapes and sizes, besides the already mentioned Skyhawk we have the Skylane, Skywagon, Stationair and Caravan. I cant say much more about Cessnas, versatile, reliable, popular. All of these can be found as addons as well, for example this Caravan
https://www.carenado.com/sitecarenado/product/c208b-grand-caravan-hd-series-xplane-11/

Piper J3 Cub and Super Cub
The Cub is a legend and a true bushplane, this is one of the planes that comes to mind when I think of bush flying. Taildragger, STOL, country landings possible.
find it here: https://store.x-plane.org/ASDG-Super-Cub-_p_737.html

Pilatus PC-6
Single engine turboprop, STOL and made for unpaved runways, used as military aircraft and as bush plane. Sadly the production of this bush plane has come to an end in 2019 but I am sure these will remain in service for decades to come
you can find one for X-Plane here: https://store.x-plane.org/Pilatus-PC-6-Turbo-Porter_p_1235.html

There are many more, I just wanted to have some iconic models presented here.

Aircraft Equipment and Addons

WIP

What do you take with you when heading into remote areas, well in the simulator of course. Over my time bush flying in FSX and X-Plane I have some equipment, little tweaks and addons that come in handy when heading out into the wilderness. You can build yourself a great C172 bushplane completely free with a couple great addons

EFB, Avitab
The Avitab is a no brainer, it is a dumbed down EFB, comes with airport information, in sim METAR data, a moving map, acess to navigraph if you have it and a document and image reader to scroll through your favorite cat images in flight.
Especially the moving map comes in handy when bush flying, small prop aircraft usually dont have a terrain radar and the standard GNS430 GPS does not have a sufficient topographic map, Avitabs moving map has a topographic map that also includes streets and other VFR navigation points that will greatly help you navigate. This is by no means a replacement of your vision but it assists you. (to be fair: the G1000s map does the same but if you prefer the gauge cockpit the avitab is very useful)
you can download Avitab here:
Mounted in the Cessna:

AoA Indicator
I personally do not use one but an angle of attack indicator can be useful when flying heavily loaded or on very short strips (or both) you will be able to operate your aircraft right on the edge of stalling. What's better than being in danger? being in danger but knowing it.
An AoA indicator is also included in the bush cessna pack.
you can download the normal AoA indicator here:

Free Wheels or Tundra Tires
When operating on dirt and gravel strips or doing country landings a cowling around your wheels is not really an advantage. This small little addon removes the wheel cowling of the 172 and gives you the free wheel version, not that it would change anything in performance but it looks cool and adds to the atmosphere.
Alternatively you can use tundra tires, these actually change the aircrafts behaviour and are especially useful in country landings, they are included in the bush cessna pack.
you can download the removed wheel fairings here: https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/46813-xp11-c172-removed-wheel-fairings-modification/

Skis
Sadly, there are none... no skis for the default 172 and no other Cessna with skis available for XP11 (there used to be a couple for XP10 or FSX) However, the Aviat Husky and Quest Kodiak both come with an option for skis.

Radio Stacks
There are a couple different radio stacks available for the default cessna, one removing the GNS530 GPS and one removing both the 530 and 430 to replace them with the old school radios with four communication and four navigation frequencies. This can be very nice to get a more oldschool feel in your cessna and ease up radio navigation as the normal radio dials are much simpler to use and bigger in the cockpit.
With GNS430:https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/45784-xp11-c172-gns430-commnav-stack/&page=3&tab=comments#comment-310571
With only Radios: https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/46354-xp11-c172-a-slant-alpha-no-gps/

Cessna sound Mod
The sound Mod for the cessna includes many sounds ranging from engine, over switches to ambient sounds. I personally made some modifications to this mod to turn it into what I want from the mod. I dont want the artificial voice or the radio chatter, I fly on VATSIM if I want chatter and when bush flying we are usually pretty alone and on remote airfields so I replaced the airport ambient sounds with Nature sounds and deleted all the unwanted sounds.

Librain intergration
A must have really, the librain integration for the cessna lets 3D raindrops appear on the winscreen of the cessna when it's raining, this is a great addon, not only useful to notice changes in weather but also adds to the atmosphere.

The Bush Cessna
I already mentioned the bush cessna pack, this pack includes two modified cessnas with new interior and exterior as well as new tires one in a normal three wheel configuration and a taildragger, I personally rarely use this cessna but it is a must have in your hangar if you like bush flying.
Depending on how much payload you set the 172s back will fill with all kinds of boxes and crates, a lovely little feature.
download it here: https://propstrikestudio.com/products/172-mod-workhorse

Simulator Addons and Scenery

WIP

There is a ton of addons for X-Plane, here's a small selection of addons and types of addons which will greatly enhance your bush flying experience.

Satellite Scenery
Love it or hate it, Orthoscenery. The most widely spread source for orthophotos is Ortho 4XP. I personally used to dislike Orthophotos but learned to love them when choosing the right sources. Sadly more remote areas dont have very good orthoscenery available to them, but in Europe and the US you will find lovely tiles also for the more remote places such as Alaska or northern Europe, the more I was playing around with it the more I learned to like Orthophotos.


SAM Trees and Seasons
This free plugin is a must have for bush flying, new trees of which much more are placed compared to default, with this forests will look like actual forests. Besides that it includes 5 seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter and deep winter. Flying in a snowy alaska in winter is essential for a true bush flying experience, if you dont have this plugin yet, you are missing out. This can be heavy on framerates especially when having the detail settings all the way up.
With SAM Trees above and default below, just for reference


Winterizer
You liked Orthos? You liked SAM seasons? You are going to love this!
Winterizer puts textures over your Orthoscenery making them covered in snow. You dont believe this could look any good for a couple mb of extra disk space? Let me prove you wrong!
before Winterizer above, after Winterizer below
Winterizer will automatically change from summer to winter when temperature is below 0 and precipitation is above 30% but you can also use the four seasons addon or even SAM if you know how to tweak the library.txt a bit.


UHD Mesh
Now this is sweet with the default scenery too, what it does is replace the more or less blurry mesh data of default X-Plane with much better and more accurate data, download it for the area you will fly in and the mountains will look a lot better. The downside is, it eats ungodly amounts of RAM (I have 32 gigs and that is really what you need to run this) and you will have to expect framedrops with this addon.

Reshade
Tired of the pale appearance of default X-Plane? No worries, Reshade has you covered, for a small framedrop you get a greatly enhanced visual experience, too good not to have it. Play around with the effects and see what's for you, there's also a couple presets you can use if you dont like tweaking.

Weather engines
Some people really seem to like those... I personally do not use one but it's worth mentioning in a guide about bush flying.

Addon Airports
I personally dislike these addons, not because they are bad and the airports look ugly, but I can't wrap my head around buying an addon that I will only see a couple times when coming across this airport during a trip, not for me but still worth mentioning.
A noteworthy airport for bushflying is Machmell Fisheries, small dirt airstrip, nicely modeled and completely free.
Download it here: https://propstrikestudio.com/products/fisheries

Fly with Lua
Obvious really, Fly with Lua allows for scripts that, for example, can do the following things:

Allan Rivieres water preset
This LUA script fixes X-Planes broken water, with real world weather the water will always have the right wave height and look great. Nothing special but enjoyable.

Better Nights
So, if you come across some small cities when bush flying it's nice if they look a bit diverse at dusk or dawn right? This is exactly what this LUA script does, again nothing special but nice to have.

Areas and Routing

WIP

Alright, we have a plane beefed up with some nice addons and our simulator set up for the best bush flying experience, but where to go? What are good places to fly in? This is a question often asked when people want to bush fly in a simulator, and it's not very hard to be honest, the world has tons of remote wilderness, I will present some areas that are worth going to and show some routes and how to properly plan your routes.

North America

Two of the most well known areas in which bush flying is conducted are in North America. Canada and Alaska. Both will provide you endless northern forests, mountains, rivers and fjords. They are not the easiest places to fly in, weather can be rough and unpredictable, airstips can be at high altitudes and there are not many airfields you can head to when going into the really remote areas.
California, Washington and Arizona are much easier to fly in, tons of airfields, easier terrain, easier weather, not bush flying areas per se but still nice places to discover and fly around

South and Middle America

Bush flying in south america is diverse, it ranges from the rainforests of Brazil over the mountains of Chile to the fjords of Fireland. South america is a true experience with the bush plane and there is much to discover.

Europe

Europe is not really known for bush flying. Or is it. Even though Europe is densly populated and with over 740 million inhabitants this is not a surprise. Most areas have large towns, lots of streets and little nature, not the remote wilderness we are looking for. Europe does hold some gems nonetheless. Scandinavia has deep forests, and spectacular fjords, Icelands rough icy and volcanic character is unique and even simple flying in the Alps can be very enjoyable even if not very challenging.

Asia

Asia will present you some of the highest and roughest terrains and crazy airstrips in the mountains. The Himalaya is the highest mountain range on earth. Flying there is very challenging and a great experience for more advanced simmers. Besides the Himalaya Asia can provide some wide rainforests to fly in.

Africa

Africa is the cradle of humanity. It has everything, mountains, savannah, deserts, rainforests and steppe. The wide ranges are impressive, not very challenging mostly but very beautiful. This continent is suited like no other for offstrip landings.

Australia and Oceania
Australia is a huge country, steppe as far as you can see, flying in Australia is beautiful and remote. The largest share of Australias population lives on the coastlines in the big cities. Exploring the outback with your bush plane is a unique experience.
New Zealand is another notable place, another country which is extremely diverse, it can present you everything from beaches, to rainforests and mountains to fjords. Very beautiful place to fly in.

paved, unpaved and no runways

X-Plane comes with five types of runways for fixed wing aircraft, grass, dirt, gravel, concrete and tarmac.
Planes behave very differently on different types of runways.

Tarmac and Concrete

Now this is very common, you will see tarmac and concrete runways all over the place and they come in various sizes from large runways of international airports to your local airfields landing strip. these runways are often ideal, good grip, good acceleration that will give you a nice takeoff run and a good rollout for landing. They also allow for more fragile landing gears. But we are out bush flying and the more remote the areas get the thinner the airports with such runways get.

Grass

Grass runways are really not much more than a bit of mowed lawn with some border stones around them. But they do the job if you have the right plane, you will need a somewhat rigid landing gear to land on grass and not be too heavy otherwise the resistance grass puts in your way will become a problem. A normal cessna gear is fine.
You will need a significantly longer takeoff run to get to the same speed compared to paved runways and its a bumpy ride, that's pretty much all you need to keep in mind for grass runways

Gravel and Dirt
These two are very similar, like with grass a rigid landing gear is advisable and you shouldnt have wheel fairings as stones could get stuck in there (this is really not a problem in the sim but it would be in real life). Your takeoff run will also be longer than on paved runways. The main speciality about gravel and dirt is that you can easily ♥♥♥♥ in it, so keep that in mind for these runways.

Offstrip Landings

Now this is the true heart of bush flying, putting your STOL plane whereever you wish, on a sand or gravel bar in the river, on a clearing in the woods, on a field, in the snow, on a hilltop, it doesnt matter, you can land everywhere as long as its long and flat enough. This is the true fun of bush flying. And I have to admit, X-Plane is much inferior to the recently released FS2020 by Microsoft in this regard. but its fun nonetheless.

Visual Navigation

Visual Navigation will be your primary means of navigation in the bush, yes GPS and radio navigation come in handy but you cant always rely on either of the two. There are two main types of visual navigation I want to cover here.

The Navlog Method
Flying with a navlog is especially advisable when there are little visual navaids in the area you can use, for example when you are flying over a relatively flat area with say lots of forests. When creating a navlog you will take a glance at an aviation map and look for landmarks between you and your destination. By drawing a couple lines between the landmarks you can determine the heading and distance from one landmark to the next. With your approximate cruise speed you can calculate an ETE (expected time enroute) between the landmarks, In the air you will fly from landmark to landmark with the headings you set in planning and let a stopwatch run. When you are closing in on your ETE you should be able to visually identify the landmark and then fly from there to your next landmark using the next heading.
This Method has some major disatvantages. Bad weather and low visibility will make it extremely hard to identify the landmarks, your ETE is only an approximation and never accurate and you will get pushed off course by wind which could result in you not finding your next landmark and getting lost.
this is an example route from Auburn Municipal near Seattle to Anderson field. We can use https://skyvector.com/ to plan our route, we open the flight plan menu, enter departure and destination. We also enter our approximate TAS (true air speed) at around 120kts in our cessna and cruise altitude which is 50 which means the FL50 which means 5000ft. This will draw a pink line between the airports, we now drag the line over certain landmarks we can make out on the VFR map, for example the reservoir lake east of our departure airport. This will give us multiple options, if we choose the GPS coordinates this will create a user fix point. We can get a navlog if we press the navlog button. In this pdf file all our user fixes will be listed. Since we know on which landmarks we put these user fixes we can enter the landmarks for each waypoint.
we can disregard the fuel calculation since we did not enter a plane type and fuel, we will just load more than enough fuel for this trip. As you can see I already replaced all the User Fixes with our landmarks. There are some cloumns in this table that are important for our naviagtion: TAS: our airspeed we have to fly at so our navlog works, MH: the magnetic heading from each waypoint to the next, Dist: the distance from each waypoint to the next, ETE: the expected time enroute from each waypoint to the next, ETO: the expected total time at each waypoint.
There are some important things we have to do before departure to make this work. On top of the glareshield we have our compass, we have to align our directional gyro with the heading indicated on the compass using the knob left of the directional gyro.
On the left side we have our stopwatch and thermometer. Using the top button we change the thermometer to degrees celsius. We press the lower left button until ET is shown on the display, the lower right button starts and stops the stopwatch and pressing between the two buttons resets the stopwatch to 0.
After takeoff we circle around the airfield until we reach our planned altitude of 5000ft.
once we reach 5000ft we check our thermometer, in this case it indicates 5 degrees celsius, on our airspeed indicator we turn the little knob and turn it until the little indication needle between 4 and 6 (so 5, meaning 5000ft) shows on +5 degrees celsius. This changes the TAS indication which is below the green band on the airspeed indicator. We now adjust our throttle that we fly the planned 120kts on the lower scale.
We then align our heading in a way that we pass over the airfield at the planned 83 degrees magnetic heading, 120kts TAS and at 5000ft. The moment we pass over the airfield we start our stopwatch.
If we disregard the TOD in the navlog and add up both times we should arrive at the reservoir in about 12 minutes. Note that especially the first leg is very inacurrate in terms of time and heading.
As soon as you see the reservoir you may correct your heading to pass directly over the reservoir, the moment you pass over the reservoir you fly the next heading in our navlog which is 80 degrees magnetic and reset the stopwatch, in about 18 minutes we should pass the airfields.
And indeed, at roughly 18 minutes we pass over the two airfields. Same procedure as before, new heading (96 degrees magnetic) and reset the stopwatch, in 20 minutes we should meet the river.
20 minutes on the stopwatch and we're almost at the river, once we pass it we fly our next heading to the town and reset the stopwatch. Pay attention to your airspeed and also to the temperature, adjust the TAS scale and throttle if needed. I think you know the game from here on and can continue to our destination on your own ;)

Following Landmarks
This method is much less prone to errors than the navlog method. And it can work great in combination with the navlog method.
You will find Landmarks you can follow to your destination or another Landmark, that can be rivers, ravines, fjords, traintracks, roads and much more. Following say a river is extremely reliable. The only downside is that you will actually have to see the navaid at all times, if you loose it you might get off track and not find it again.
As example flight we do the same flight as before, just that we now choose landmarks that lead us to our destination completely instead of flying headings from one landmark to the next. A quick glance at the VFR map shows some ideal landmarks we can follow to get where we want.
After takeoff there should be the reservoir between two mountains, once we arrive there we can follow down a road, if we follow this road we should arrive at the river where the road crosses it on two bridges, if we turn left then and follow up the river we should arrive right at our destination airport.

Both methods have their atvantages and disatvantages, major downside of both is that they require actual visual contact. Many pilots fly into their death every year trying to remain under visual flight rules in low visibility conditions.

Radio Navigation (VOR, DME)

People always seem to have trouble wrapping their heads around radio navigation, especially VORs. But these systems are simple and extremely useful. So I will try my best to explain the different types of radio navigation equipment and how to use it.

VOR

VOR, or Very High Frequency (VHF) Omni-Directional Range (VOR) are short range Navaids. They operate in the VHF band between 108.00 and 117.95 MHz and are the most used form of radio navigation as of today. So expect to stumble across them a lot.

Principle
To understand how a VOR works I will elaborate on the principle it operates on.

Imagine a lighthouse with a blue rotating light and a green flash everytime the blue beam passes through north. If you see the blue and green light at the same time you are directly north of the lighthouse, if you see the green and blue light alternately you are directly south of it. The time between seeing the flash and the blue light will give you exact information of your position relative to the lighthouse. And this is exactly what your plane does with a VOR station, just with VHF waves.

So your airplane can find out on wich radial (these are the arrows all originating in the center of the VOR) it is. There is one crucial thing you need to understand to not get confused by VORs. Your heading and the radial you are on have nothing to do with each other, remember this one thing, the point of reference is always the VOR never your aircraft. you can align your aircraft with a VOR to use it for navigation. You can select a radial and fly on it TO or FROM the VOR, if your heading is alinged with the radial you are flying on you will stay on given radial, if it is not aligned you will pass through the lines and your radial will constantly change.

Basics
you can skip this part if you know the basics and continue straight with Navigation with a VOR

Layout
The VOR equipment consits of five main components. Two CDIs (Course Deviation Indicator). Two radios with the freqencies NAV 1 and NAV2, Audio equipment to listen to the NAV frequencies and identify a VOR with it's morse iden and a DME (Distance Measuring Equipment) which will display the distance to the VOR. The TO/FROM flag indicates if the radial is towards or away from the VOR.

finding your radial
To find the Radial you are on you tune the NAV 1 frequency to the desired VOR, verify it via it's morse code (printed on the map next to it) and then turn the CDIs OBS knob until the needle is centered, then the yellow arrow points directly on the radial you are on. The arrow on the bottom indicates the opposing radial.

pinpointing your position with a VOR/DME
This is easy, find your radial, check the DMEs distance to the VOR, measure it in the map.

position with two VORs
Tune NAV1 and NAV2 to two different VORs, find your radials to both of them, draw the two lines on a map and you are at the intersection. Pay attention if the radial is TO or FROM.

Navigation with a VOR
So let's see how to use a VOR. In this scenario we use the default Cessna 172 with the radio stack mod to ease up dialing in the correct frequencies.
Let's first check out an aviation map, we will be flying in Canada in a relatively easy area. With the use of just one VOR we will fly from Salmon Arm airfield (CZAM) to Kelowna airport (CYLW)
Our VOR for this flight is Enderberry VOR, frequency 115.2 and code YNY. We know that we can fly on a selected radial of the VOR and we are flying towards the VOR so we will selected a TO radial. Our initial heading from Salmon Arm to the YNY VOR is 076° so we want the 076° TO radial of the YNY VOR. After 11nm we should reach the VOR, from this point on we will continue our flight towards the Kelowna NDB, we dont want to use the NDB but we know that if we want to get from the VOR to the NDB we will have to fly a 186° heading. So we choose a 186° FROM radial of the VOR. If we continue for roughly 40nm from there we should get out around CYLW airport. Let's see how this looks in the cockpit, we spawn in on runay 14.
We have two CDIs, you select a radial and the needle will show you if you are left or right to this radial, you can then correct your course to align with this radial, at the moment they dont recieve anything so the little red and white flag indicates they are off. Both are accompanied by a NAV 1 and NAV 2 radio in which you can select the correct frequency.
We now dial in 115.2 into both NAV frequencies as we will use this VOR twice, first we will fly to it on a 076° bearing so we dial that in on the CDI with the OBS knob, the flag indicates TO so we know the radial we selected from our position heads towards the VOR, then we will fly from it on a 186° radial so we dial that in on the second CDI using the OBS knob, we can disregard the flag on this one for now, we will need it later.
On the first CDI we can see that we are currently right of the planned radial so we will have to turn left after takeoff. The DME also indicates that we are 11.2nm from the VOR which we expected from flight planning. By pressing the NAV 1 audio button we can identify the VOR with it's morse code that is also printed on the aviation map.
Now in the air we will align with the selected radial by steering left on a 030° heading as we know from the CDI that the Radial is to our left
As the needle approaches the centerline we know that we are closing in on the correct radial so we will turn to the right and align with the radial to fly on it.

When we are aligned with the VOR and are close to it we can try to establish visual contact with it, VORs are big, red and white painted ground installations, hard to miss in this case as it is on top of a mountain.
Now the second CDI takes over as we now fly the 186° from the VOR, we see the needle rocketing to the right so we overshot the correct radial, we correct this by flying to the right. We can also observe the flag indicating FROM meaning we are flying away from the VOR now. We can also see the DME going up again also indicating we are now flying away from the VOR.
The CDI now indicates we are closing in on the correct radial so we align our heading with it and remain on this course until at around 40nm from the VOR we should see the airport we want to land at, remember the map.
And indeed, 39nm from the VOR we can already see the runway, from this point on we can take over the controls again and land the aircraft. With this we covered flying to and from a VOR and how to use it as a navaid, not bad eh?

Radio Navigation (NDB, ILS)

NDB

A NDB or Non Directional Beacon is much simpler than a VOR. This Radio station puts out a signal into all directions equally. In most areas these are all replaced with a ton of VOR stations all over the place. The frequencies are in a much longer wavelength though and can therefore travel much farther. NDBs are still pretty common in remote areas as they are cheap and easy to maintain so you will come across them when bushflying. The ADF (Automatic Direction Finder) in our aircraft can detect this signal and will point a little arrow into the direction of this signal

Basics
Much simpler than the VOR this is the layout in the cessnas cockpit:
The Radio to tune to a frequency of a NDB and the ADF with heading knob. If inactive it points directly right.
If we tune to a NDB and activate it using the softbutton the arrow will point directly towards the NDB, if we align the ADF with our heading using the HDG knob we can read the heading we have to fly to get to the NDB on the ADF. Unlike the VOR we can not choose the radial we want to fly on but with clever navigation we can fly perpendicular to the NDB until we get on our desired track. Whilst impractical its also possible to fly outbound on NDBs, it requires a little more practice to get where you actually want to get though. NDBs can also be the main navaid for instrument approaches, usually in areas where both VORs or GNSS/RNAV navaids would be impractical.
There is one thing I need to mention though, the range of NDBs is a major concern in X-Plane, this is not the NDBs fault but how XPlane depicts them. Many NDBs have very short ranges which are simply not realistic often rendering long range NDBs intended for radio nav routes useless and creating deadzones in the navigation network within X-Plane.

ILS

The ILS or Instrument Landing System is widely spread in commercial aviation, all major airports have at least one runway equipped with an ILS. It allows the autopilot to guide the aircraft down to the runway using a Localizer for the lateral component and a Glideslope for the horizonal component. If established on both these paths the pilot can perform an approach without actually seeing the runway yet, this can be especially helpful in harsh weather conditions.
ILS comes in different categories ranging from just having a localizer and no glideslope to high accuracy systems allowing equipped planes to autoland.
In remote areas ILS is literally absent, you will barely find airports equipped with these systems, it is still an advantage to know how to use one as it is surprisingly simple too.

GPS Navigation

GPS navigation, duh right?
Well maybe not, but still kindof.
Look GPS navigation is great and GPS is a great tool but it becomes less useful when the areas you are flying in are not made for GPS flying. Alaskas tundra or the rainforests of Peru dont have that many waypoints off the major routes that you can use for your GPS flight planning and they often result in highly inefficient routes too.
It can help you at airfields that have procedures, fly an RNAV or ILS but... still most remote strips dont even have ILS or procedures so...

What GPS can help you greatly with in the bush is two things.
Find your location to not get lost
and stay clear of terrain in low visibility conditions.

Weather

WIP

Dangers and Risks

WIP

[O1lec1]

How do you get those EFB, Avitab type maps, they look great but I cant see the links? Thanks, great guide by the way.

[EL Kopfsalato]

bababoey

[Guy]

cool

[Matt0_0]

PS: Enjoy the award, you earned it.

[Matt0_0]

Obviously so much work was put into this, thank you for making it. I read over the whole thing and now have a better understanding of what bush flying really is now.

[Prering]

@Gibas Dont really have a fav airfield for bush flying, there are some areas and routes I love to fly in, I will upload them in the Routes section of the guide :D
@RMC I will, I just finished up something long term today, this guide will be continued this summer, I will cover radio nav regarding the NDB in more detail, thanks for the feedback
happy friday and happy landings

[RMC]

please continue this, the anologies are great, i wish however you would cover what ADF and ANT mean more in depth on the NDB

[lowkeystupidasf]

What's your favourite airport for bush flying?