I’ve found a working chopper in my run but don’t have a training manual, so all I could do is start the engine & shut it off again. That’s now a mini quest of mine, to find a flight manual so I can one day rule the skies
Yeah, at the moment you are not able to become a pilot.
I tend to assume that the realistic approach to learning to fly a craft in CDDA would not be trial and error, as that would likely be a waste of far too many perfectly good mid-game characters. Honestly worse than just injecting yourself with random mutagens with no purifier on hand.
You’d want to find flight manuals for basic flight skills, and/or flight simulator sd-rams that you can use on your laptops to get a little higher, and then ideally combat flight VR pods hidden in labs or military bases for serious flight training.
This sort of training path could legitimately get a real-world person up to the point where they’d have an excellent chance of not just instantly killing themselves on their first take off attempt.
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Either these do not exist or are lacking so much infrastructure (including in the form of people with knowledge that are totally gone) that they are not remotely feasible to use.
Those other things? Yes, that’s absolutely what you should be doing, and is all mentioned here except the practicing with flight simulators. But those aren’t going to make it so you are totally safe. You will be super incredibly lucky if you do not run into an issue where you get in a very dangerous situation in an aircraft when you’re learning from scratch after the end of the world with basically no ground support.
I really like this idea! I always thought that it’s really fun/interesting to interact with objects/things in the game world.
It probably would be best to not make this the only way, if the player wants to try to fly by himself (and have the risk of falling and dying), let he do it! But… if you want a safer/slower way to learn how to conquer the skies, then good luck trying to find a working VR pod, they are rare but exist! (or fix a broken one if you are really good with computers and electronics).
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There are not going to combat flight VR pods. Please stop suggesting it.
A reasonable thing to find would be a private pilot’s high end computer with a flight controller rig and a copy of MS Flight Simulator 8. All of the dozen or so private pilots I’ve known personally had something like that, and you can learn the basics of flying with MSFS8. It’s still not the same as actually practicing recovering from a power-on stall in an actual airplane - there is a vivid and visceral sensation of “oh dear god” that you’re not going to get in VR or a high end sim - but it would at least give you the knowledge of what a power-on stall is and how you’re supposed to recover from it.
But the infrastructure for that has not been added.
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Actually, i think that the idea of a realistic flight sim rig is even better than a VR pod because it would also exist in the vanilla game, not only in aftershock or a specific mod! At the end of the day i would love anything that allowed the player character to learn and/or improve skills/abilities interacting with the world!
By VR pod I meant things like these:
Or these:
Or even just these:
More primitive variations of immersive training ‘pods’ have existed since at least the 80s in the real world (I got to try out a fully developed tank trainer pod with hydraulic haptic feedback in the early 90’s), so no, it’s not Aftershock, or even particularly futuristic - it’s literally yesteryear’s technology and common for military grade flight training.
That being said, I couldn’t honestly care less if they’re in the game - it was an offhand suggestion - but in terms of realism, they already exist in many forms, and have for some time.
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Incidentally, I’ll be quite impressed if you guys manage to implement working aircraft in any feasible form whatsoever in a tile based roguelike, regardless of the training regimen. 
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Hydraulic based pods exist and are semi-common, but they are a huge piece of technological infrastructure that Yo Random Survivor does not how to turn on, set up, or maintain. I don’t object to the idea of the pods exactly, I object to the idea that you walk up to a hydraulic flight simulator in an abandoned military base, flip a switch, have it turn on and start the “flight instruction 101” program. There’s no power to the base, you have no idea how to work the user unfriendly instruction interface, and when one of the hydraulics stops working you don’t have a shop manual to tell you how to diagnose and fix the problem.
Again, this is why I think the high end personal computer is a viable solution. You can run a high end computer off a 1 kW stand-alone emergency generator unit. Most people know how to set up personal computers. There isn’t a mass of hydraulics and haptic feedback systems to worry about. PC Flight simulators like MSFS8 have explicit tutorials that include teaching you every step of flying a plane. Again, the disadvantage is there is a very real difference between pulling a tight turn while your altitude drops while you are watching simulated scenery go by on a widescreen hi-res monitor or VR goggles, and doing the same thing in the real world as your inner ear sends worrisome signals and you really feel the 3G of centripetal acceleration - I’ve done both, the first does not compare to the second. Getting a simulated pilot’s license through MSFS8 is not the same as getting an actual pilot’s license, but it gives you enough skill that you will hopefully make the transition to a real world’s pilot’s license without requiring that you crash your aircraft repeatedly. You may still crash your aircraft before you get everything figured out, but it’s no longer guaranteed.
That said, this is not my itch and if people want to be able to learn to fly aircraft in game, someone is going to need to submit PRs for computer parts, flight simulators, and flying an helicopter with only simulated flight experience. I can tell you some of the parameters of an acceptable solution; someone else is going to need to do the work. Alternately, someone else could take over as Vehicles Maintainer and define a new set of parameters, but that’s not any less work.
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I’m going to walk out on a limb and suggest that those problems are present for virtually every piece of even modestly complex infrastructure in CDDA. The point of being the survivor is to overcome those hurdles to get to/use the good stuff. 
But in terms of additional implementation requirements, that of course is the real obstacle - particularly given that it’s almost certainly easier to implement another ‘training item’ equivalent in the form of a usable inventory item like a computer, rather than coming up with a whole new static training object use-case for the game, which would presumably be a signficant PITA. I can’t recall any other skill training object that works like that offhand.
In any case, good luck to you with the helicopter implementation. I’m curious to see how it turns out!
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