My first flight in MSFS 2020 was, like many, to my house. Holed up in quarantine, dreading each day of my “essential” retail job, MSFS was a connection to all of the outside plans that were put on hold. While I only knew that the throttle meant “faster,” and though I had all the assists turned on, it was clear from the first stall face-first into my parents’ virtual backyard that I’d found a home.
Four years later I’m a licensed pilot on track for an aviation career. I’ve found belonging in both the real and virtual aviation communities, and I get to share those experiences with you all here, on FSNews. I’ve loved aviation for as long as I can remember – but it took MSFS, at just the right time, to rekindle that ember into a burning flame. As I am writing this retrospective, I’m departing on my last flight before MSFS 2024 releases, and the circumstances surrounding it couldn’t be more different than my first, so I thought I’d take a moment and reminisce about my personal sim journey and look ahead to tomorrow when I get to start it all over again.
The Right Time in Bad Times
Enough has been said about the world during the height of COVID-19, and its effect on our lives, so I will keep it brief and say that MSFS was one of those games (and yes, at the time I definitely saw it as a game) that released at just the right time to give my friends and I a connection to the rest of the world. While we held birthday parties on each others’ islands in Animal Crossing, MSFS brought the real world inside. My friends slowly dropped off, not interested in the simulation behind the game, but I held on – and I started to learn.
This, I think, is the real genius behind Microsoft’s grand simulator. Not the world, not the flight physics, not even how good it looks, but how easy it is to jump in. I think that it’s essential for the hobby to have something accessible, slick, and frictionless for uninitiated future simmers to cut their teeth on. Asobo’s assists made it very intuitive for me to fly any of the small planes I started out on without more than a cursory introduction. I didn’t have to learn about coordination, I didn’t need fancy controls, and I had markers and maps to navigate to what I wanted to see. As a new simmer with short-sighted goals (“Buzz My Friend’s House”), MSFS did not throw any obstacles in my way.
Microsoft Flight Simulator has never told me, “No, you can’t do that!” but rather “Try it and see what happens.” It simplified my barrier to entry to the point that the only point of friction was deciding what I wanted to do next, and when to start to take off the training wheels. This is something that I think the Career Mode in MSFS 2024 will excel at – giving people defined steps in their virtual pilot progression that they can then take into the sandbox.
Learning Curve
When I did decide to step up to bigger and more complex aircraft, I was immediately humbled by the scale of the task before me. Even the TBM 930, an aircraft that was at the time (Before its Avionics update) extremely simple, overwhelmed me with its speed and capability. This is actually something I have experienced in real life, as I step up to higher-power and faster aircraft: getting behind the airplane happens fast, and even a modest increase in speed puts an immense extra mental load on the pilot.
My first flight in a jet – the Citation – was a disaster, and that’s when I decided to actually learn what to do. It was obvious to me that bigger aircraft had a lot more to their systems that I needed to learn, so I got to learning. It is here that I must credit the FlyByWire team and the 320 Sim Pilot YouTube channel for being the catalyst, I believe, for my flight sim education.
The default A320 NEO in MSFS was, at the time, a steaming buggy mess. But by the time I decided I was ready to learn how to fly it, FlyByWire had just released the first version of their improvement mod, and 320 Sim Pilot was starting to release very easy-to-follow videos on how to fly it. I think that, for me, it was almost fortuitous that FlyByWire had such a mountain to climb in improving the A320 – it was through their bite-sized and incremental feature releases that I learned about the intricacies of aviation.
I think that the learning curve is something that MSFS 2020 did poorly – the “flight school” was barebones at best and bug-riddled at worst. With no “step-up” training, someone who was enticed by Asobo’s ease of entry could easily find themselves lost and frustrated by the lack of in-sim information. It remains to be seen how MSFS 2024 will fill this gap, but I’m thrilled that there are so many wonderful content creators and community members who take it upon themselves to fill in the blanks.
Virtual to Reality
In my MSFS vs. Reality series, I chronicled my journey from fake pilot to real pilot. By this time, I considered myself an “experienced” sim pilot and had long since abandoned many of the default systems that Microsoft Flight Simulator offered. I was flying almost exclusively third-party aircraft, I was planning my flights using VFR charts or Simbrief, and I had learned how to read and understand the kind of charts and manuals that I would be seeing in my real-world journey.
While I do think that Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) has a lot to offer the advanced simmer, we still have to look elsewhere for so many things. Microsoft integrated a lot of things into MSFS 2020: Ground equipment, a live weather engine, basic flight planning, and more – but the sim is not yet truly self-sufficient. You can use MSFS, and only MSFS, for all of your sim needs – but you’ll quickly run into a fairly low ceiling of what it can offer you.
I am excited to see what MSFS 2024 can offer in this regard, and if it still tries to become the “complete” flight simulator. Integrating LIDO charts with their new flight planning software is a huge step in the right direction, and I’m excited to dig into it and learn how to read and brief a third chart format! It does not, however, look like other aspects of the simulator have received much attention which is disappointing. Ground handling and ATC in particular need a lot of attention.
Becoming an all-in-one simulator is an admirable goal and one I will wholeheartedly support should Microsoft choose to go down this path. While I love all the utilities I use, from Volanta to Navigraph to SayIntentions, REX, and more, I would love even more to streamline the experience from sim to engine start.
Looking Ahead
My last flight in MSFS 2020 is my favorite airliner test route: Denver to San Francisco, in the just-released V.1.0 of the iFly 737 MAX 8. It’s a route that somehow never has gotten old for me, for as the seasons change, so they do in MSFS – thanks to Rex AccuSeason, although I’ll be relying on MSFS 2024’s built-in seasons going forward. Tomorrow morning, we will see lots of opportunities to explore.
But in a lot of ways, I hope things stay very familiar. I hope that Microsoft will pull off a smooth launch, but I fear that server issues will overshadow my day-one experience. I hope that all of my favorite add-ons will work out of the box with the new simulator, but I fear that it will be a while until I’m flying the same aircraft day-to-day as I do now. Part of me hopes that we’ll just be looking at MSFS2024 “plus” – all the things I love, but with all the rough edges shaved off.
I know it won’t be like that, but I am ready for the change. I’m ready to take off from my local airport tomorrow morning and buzz my house again. Maybe the tree we cut down last summer is gone, and hopefully, I won’t crash looking for it. If the past four years have seen me go from sim-novice to proficient pilot, maybe the next four will get me in the right seat of an airliner. Regardless, I know that Microsoft Flight Simulator will be a part of my life. I look forward to seeing you in the sky tomorrow morning – or, just as likely, in the menus waiting for one more MSFS download.
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