One thing, I wanted to add that earlier and then forgot it: you said you want to do continental flights and international flight. Well, reconsider that. Doing that in an airliner, already is boring. Doing that in a simulation is even more boring, because once you are on travel altitude of let's say FL410, you just watch out of the simulated window, gaze at the simulated always same sky, and the simulated blue down there that is the simulated sea. And that you do for hours and hours.
That is entertaining
not!
Better plan short hops between airports, even with heavy iron. I flew - very unrealistically!
- 747s from Hamburg to Cologne, or 767s from Innsbruck to Stuttgart. I plan trips between my addon airports exclusively, and in such a way that between reaching top of climb and beginning of descent there is, if possible, not more than 20 minutes time. That way I always have something to do, with no boring time . The moment I reached travel altitude, I almost start to think about the descent again. I try to fly SIDs and STARs according to my charts, and do a solid flight planning and fuel calculation. But I must not fly the distances specific models would be used for in reality, so why not using a 747 as a local commuter, instead of staring 8 hours at the Atlantic.
I do not know how it is with the default planes, but for complex addons there is a strong recommendation that the time acceleration should not be used - it can seriously mess up your flightplan routing and the FMC. I always run at 1x time, I never use acceleration. NEVER.