Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has received Sim Update 7, according to the official release notes. The headline addition is the National Championship Air Races, which are now available from the Activities menu and are covered in a separate article here.
Elsewhere, the update adds a virtual keyboard for sliders on console. It also includes several stability and performance fixes. These cover a potential crash for aircraft with more than 10 flap states, a memory leak in the visual transition that caused visual degradation after long flights, and faster canvas rendering in HTML/JS instruments. General fixes address a Safe mode popup that appeared even after a clean shutdown, taxi ribbon and assistances showing up in photo mode, and subtitles disappearing when the game is paused.
The aircraft section of the notes is long. Lufthansa liveries have been added for the Airbus A310-300, A320neo, A321 and A330-300. The Aero Vodochody L-39, a Czech jet trainer, gets a particularly large batch of corrections covering collisions, canopy highlights, ground contact points, instruments and livery issues across its variations. The Aviat Pitts Special S1S receives similar work, along with fixes to exhaust effects and preflight elements.
The Airbus H225 helicopter gets a long list of fixes, including tooltips, checklists, engine starting and shutdown behaviour, and the autopilot buttons. The Boeing C-17 Globemaster III gains a custom electronic flight control system replacing the stock one, as well as a corrected basic operating weight. The Boeing 737 MAX 8 has a fix for lateral flight path calculation at flyover waypoints. The AeroElvira Optica now uses a different KAP140 autopilot and CDI gauge. The notes we were given are cut off partway through the C-17 entries, so further changes may follow.
Microsoft also warns PC players that outdated packages in the Community folder can affect performance and behaviour. Anyone with stability problems or long loading times should move their Community packages to another folder before relaunching.
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