Microsoft’s moonshot Flight Simulator is an amazing, unfinished trip to Earth
In a world where real aviation and air travel has become a scarcity, there’s an irony in the new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. In the brief span of time we’ve been adapting to a global pandemic, so much of our world has gone virtual. Before COVID-19, a flight simulator would be an exciting augmentation, not a replacement for one’s exploration. In many ways, the platform’s availability, and its beauty, is a melancholy reminder of how much of the world — the real world — has become off limits to us as travelers.
Yet, in the middle of the most severe downturn global aviation has ever seen, the cultural underpinnings of the aviation community globally need Flight Simulator now more than ever before.
Thankfully, Flight Simulator, which goes into wide release on August 18 — one day before National Aviation Day — is no substitute for the real thing either, and that’s a relief. Sitting behind a desktop simulator is great fun — as I’ve done countless times over the last two and a half decades — but, like any great simulation, it only stokes the desire to fly that much more.
The Air Current: Exploring the vast Earth Microsoft has created for Flight Simulator
For almost the entirety of the last year, I have been hands-on with Flight Simulator as part of the final phase of Microsoft’s multiyear development by Asobo Studio, the French game developer working with the Redmond, Wash. technology giant. Late last summer, The Air Current, the aviation publication for which I am Editor-in-chief, was part of a small group that got the first public look at the new platform at the new platform during an event at Renton Municipal Airport.
“The visual fidelity is expletive-worthy,” TAC wrote back in September, when we detailed the ins-and-outs of the platform built on a two petabyte database (it’s a 91 gigabyte initial installation) of two and three-dimensional imagery that lives inside Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
In December, Microsoft made available a pre-alpha build and a half dozen major updates on which to provide feedback and find bugs. In July, the alpha program became a beta test preview as Microsoft moved closer to release. For the sake of full disclosure, Microsoft provided some hardware to evaluate the software along with a copy of the final release at no charge — on which this review is based.
By any measure, reviving Microsoft’s venerable title after a 14-year hiatus since its last full release with all the trappings of modern graphics processing, cloud computing and artificial intelligence is a moonshot-level of technical aspiration. It’s an unequivocal visual feast with endless possibilities for exploration. Its release represents the largest contemporary expansion of aviation enthusiasm in years, if not decades, and brings that interest in flying to a larger audience than ever. Every word of the superlative set of initial impressions from September remains true today.
Though like a commercial airplane program that has staked a claim as a “game changer”, Microsoft’s new version of Flight Simulator has enormous potential to transform the world of virtual flying — both for the virtual and licensed pilots alike. But also like a new commercial airplane program, its game changing potential also faces some teething issues that take some of shine off of its promised capabilities.
The involvement with industry has been extensive. Companies like Garmin, Airbus, Textron, Boeing, Daher, Robin, Diamond, Pipestrel and Icon have lent their products and planes to be replicated in the virtual world. And increasingly this virtual world is having an impact on aircraft development and training in the real world.
Jeorg Neumann, the Microsoft executive that has led the platform’s development since the middle of the last decade said that the visual system that Microsoft has created is being looked at for inclusion in professional simulators, that are part of a 2019 estimated $4.6 billion market, according to Grandview Research. Even with the pandemic and the seismic changes within the industry, the need for training (and retraining) will still be enormous.
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“The manufacturers are talking to us about powering their Level-D simulators,” said Neumann. “The manufacturers obviously have really good control over their avionics, they have all the telemetry that they ever want for their particular planes, but they are sure are attracted to other things we have that they don’t have. Oftentimes they have simplistic renderers, they’re not modern, and they’ve with jealousy looked at that this games group over there doing because their stuff looks better than our $4 million simulator.”
Neumann reiterated that the company’s focus was first on completing the consumer release before moving toward commercial applications of its visual system.
Taming the Wild West
Since Microsoft disbanded its own development effort in 2009 (three years after releasing its last iteration of Flight Simulator and later selling the code to Lockheed Martin), the global community continued on as an extremely active and passionate, albeit decentralized and disorganized, subculture. What Microsoft had abandoned was dragged forward by the community of third-party developers that were committed to making ever-more realistic simulations of aircraft of all shapes and sizes. To take an aviation metaphor, the flight simulator’s users and developers flew in uncontrolled airspace, attempting to deconflict, with no central organizing force. Microsoft’s return is a welcome, if not somewhat jarring, force for a community used to playing by no rules at all.
“It was the wild west before prior to what we did,” said Martial Bossard, Lead Software Engineer and co-founder at Asobo in an interview with TAC. “We would like to bring a simplification. At the end I think it will be the best for everyone to get adapted to the new systems. We’re trying to make a solid platform for the long run.”
Robert Randazzo is chief executive and founder of Precision Manuals Development Group, which is widely considered to be the “Microsoft” of third-party developers, and has been developing high-fidelity Boeing replicas for desktop simulators for the last 23 years. (I interviewed Randazzo whenI was a beat reporter for The Wall Street Journal in 2013 when the company released its Boeing 777 simulator, a product licensed by the plane maker.)
Because of Microsoft’s long hiatus from this world, the company’s return has caused some discomfort from those who have been using a platform incrementally adapted, but tethered to, a piece of software that was released 14 years ago and itself based on years of legacy code.
“Simmers have always struggled to adapt to change, and I think watching MSFS roll out is going to be a master-class in change management,” wrote Randazzo in the company’s public forum. “Some users will leap right in, adapt to the new environment and delight in all that the sim has to offer. Others will get lost in decades of expectations about how things should work and will become frustrated by the newness and the change.”
PMDG was one of the roughly 300 developers that Microsoft worked with extremely closely during the creation of the simulation to ensure they’d endorse and build for the new platform, along with the community involved during the last year of testing
“The earlier you can embrace the core of your consumer, and listen to what they want the chances are you’ll make a better product. And games, in particular, are often done in this ivory tower thing,” said Neumann.“People like hold on to their story, and hold on to their world…they don’t have the access to what we had the benefit of having access to: Lots of passionate people who have lots and lots of insight and have tons of experience and they give it to you freely.”
While the initial excitement around the platform is red hot at release, the platform’s full capability will be necessarily limited until those like Randazzo’s PMDG, combine the extraordinary visual realism with the technical realism that so many inside and outside of the aviation industry crave.
Promising the world, and getting close
It’s admittedly unfair to a team of 200 developers spread across two continents during a globe-disrupting pandemic and point to what has been missed, but while Microsoft has quite literally promised “the world”, there are limitations inherent to its effort. Take for instance an area where older satellite data lacks an airport, for which the AI engine is unable to infer.
Last week, a photo was posted on the aviation photography site airliners.net from Bosaso, a coastal airport in Somalia. The now modernized field on the north coast of the horn of Africa re-opened in 2016, as one of China’s numerous aviation infrastructure projects across the continent. The airport lives inside Microsoft’s world, but it’s an unpaved dirt strip according to the AI-interpreted satellite data streaming from Bing Maps.
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Neumann said Microsoft’s maps team is “flying overhead right now in various places on Earth. We’re happily waiting for new data because it’s going to make our sim better.”
These are small nits to pick when you consider the expansiveness of the world built from the ground up, but there are also major commercial airports missing from the initial release. The new Daxing International in Beijing and Istanbul International are both absent. And other long-established commercial airports are missing altogether like Norway’s Svalbard in the arctic circle, for example.
While fully customizable with hundreds and hundreds of commands and options, the user interface can be disjointed and out of the box lacks a consistency that has taken considerable tweaking and modifying to understand over the preceding months. Take for example, something as simple as zooming in or out, changing the height of your eyes inside the cockpit, outside the aircraft or controlling an external “drone” camera are all inconsistent sets of commands on the keyboard.
And there are numerous instances of controlling systems like the autopilot, flight management computers that are inoperative or buggy. Manipulating these avionics (even when working) simply isn’t able to be performed while “flying” an aircraft. The user interface is still the aspect that will require the most polishing and gets in the way of experience that Microsoft wants users to have.
Yet, even with these headaches, perhaps the most important thing to know about this new simulator platform is really about the title — or rather what’s absent from it. While many have called it Flight Simulator 2020, in the tradition of many of the predecessor versions, the “2020” has been appended as a community descriptor. It’s easy to joke that being associated with 2020 is a yoke (think cattle, not flying) around its neck, but the absence of a year in its moniker is significant. Microsoft has created every inch of a world that won’t remain static and that is something to behold.
“It’s just the beginning of the journey. We have a product that’s ready to go to the public, and that’s a huge step for us but that’s only a beginning,” said Bossard. “It’s not like a box that you put on the shelf and we’ll never touch it again. [Release is] a milestone for the project…but we’re already thinking about what’s coming next.”
Jon Ostrower is editor-in-chief of The Air Current, a news and information service on the technology and strategy of aviation, a veteran aviation journalist and a 25 year flight simmer.
Write to Jon Ostrower at jon@theaircurrent.com
