ATIS:
 Be sure to contact ATIS at the airport from which you're 
 taking off to file your flight plan and start the chain 
 of air-traffic-control steps that will guide you to your 
 destination. 
 
 Navigation:
 To learn the art of navigation without relying on GPS, 
 start with a short flight between two nearby airports 
 and concentrate on learning the VOR and DME equipment. 
 Then plan longer flights with multiple waypoints. 
 
 Tune your radio:
 Open the Vector Map (Shift-M) to get an overhead view of 
 your position. Click airports and nav aids to bring up 
 their info boxes and then click the radio frequencies in 
 the box to tune your radio automatically.
  
 Kick out dead weight:
 The default loadout for each aircraft is a passenger in 
 every seat and fully loaded baggage compartments. 
 Kick some of this dead weight out to make your plane 
 lighter and more responsive and to get more mileage