Microsoft Flight Simulator

We're going to spam multiple achievements all at once here.






It will add progress towards these as well, but you don't need to do all the extra stuff for these.




Select your plane. I used the Extra 330LT because it flies low and slowish. Rain isn't constantly falling so you want one that won't fly through it too quick when it does rain, and if you get to high you will see less rain.

Select a departure and an arrival airport that are far apart. I used EIDL Donegal in Ireland to KJFK Kennedy Int'l in New York USA. It's almost completely over water so their are no unexpected obstructions to fly into. Now under the airplane thumbnail you can change from VFR, to IFR (Low-altitude airways). (VFR stands for Visual Flight Rules, IFR stands for Instrument Flight Rules. The more you know...)

Set Flight conditions to Rain, and time to night. You will have to periodically adjust the time so it stays night during the flight.

You may want to save the setup at this point so you can easily get back to it.

Now you can go to the runway and get ready to fly.

Go to Assistance and Airplane Systems then turn Unlimited Fuel on.

As soon as you are on the runway, pull up the weather window and select the lowest cloud level. Raise the slider for "Altitude (Top)" up to 20,000 or so, this will keep you from flying above the rain level. Now slide the Coverage slider to 100 so there are no clear areas for you fly through. It won't rain all the time, but it will rain a lot. There is an upper limit for getting rain, but I rarely went above it using this method.

NOTE: If you are flying out of far northern airports (like Canada), you may need to manually raise the temperature in the Weather panel or your plane will ice up and crash. On the Weather Settings look for the 'Temparature MSL' slider and increase it to around 25 or higher.

Close the Weather window and pull up the AI Control window. Turn all 3 of these on and go do something while the AI does the work.

User KawiNinjaRider7 commented on the solution for IFR that progress is only saved when you land for that achievement. I had an issue where I lost hours of progress for all time based achievements when the game crashed after 8 hours of flying. So to be safe, land or exit to main menu periodically to keep from losing progress.

There are two very good guides that include this achievement, but as of the XBox release (and PC SU5), when I used them to try for Hydroplaning I just wasn't getting much progress as the ATC would ignore my requested planned altitude and put me up at 11000 or 13000 feet. As you are probably going for the 100, 500 or even 1000 hours achievements as well, I found the following Rain specific (could add Night) method worked flawlessly for the Hydroplaning achievement:

Set up a GPS-Direct flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo (Not IFR Airways). Set the cruise altitude to 4000 feet and the weather to Rain. Any slow plane would do, obviously with fuel consumption disabled, but I used my once IRL Cessna 172.

Let the AI fly the plane, and as soon as you start flying go into the weather menu and set all 3 cloud layers to be 100% coverage and scatter, and adjust their heights so that they meet. I find that you need to set them from highest to lowest and I set the bottom layer to be 1500 feet up to 13000 feet. This ensures maximum rain!

Then just let it run, starting from the beginning again (save the plan) if XBox crashes or you want to do something else (progress does update dynamically so no need to do anything special to save it but just use the 'hamburger' XBox controller button twice to pull up the main screen and then back to the flight if you want to be extra careful. At this point you'll see a small progress 'circle' in the bottom right corner confirming update on the server).

I'm currently sitting at about 80% progress (This site always seems slow getting the current numbers from the XBox site) and should complete it today.

Edit: My XBox 'crashed to desktop' with 6% to go 😢. I simply reloaded the flight plan, reset everything in flight, and the achievement just popped!

I hope this helps others.

My biggest tip for this one is to set your IFR low airways route over an ocean. Using a prop plane with unlimited fuel turned on in the assistance settings, choose an airport to depart from on a coast, and another one as far away as you want it on a different coast across the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean. In a slow prop plane, some of the routes take well over 50 hours over the Pacific!

Before you take off, open the weather settings and choose "rainy" from the presets. Then crank up the aerosol level, precip per hour, and lightning if that's your thing. Click on the lowest cloud level and crank coverage up to 100% and make sure the cloud ceiling is overtop your highest altitude. (ATC had me flying at around 3,000-3,500 feet over the ocean in a prop plane)

Once you've taken off, turn on the AI Pilot and let it do the flying. It doesn't rain 100% of the time, but with these settings, you'll never actually fly out of the storm. I've found it rains about 80% of the time. Of course you can also knock out the night flying, IFR flying, and 50 pilot hours while doing this one as well.

I ran this for a few nights while I was sleeping. You don't actually need to land for this to accumulate. If you pull up the achievement tracker, progress should go up a percentage point every half hour or so.