Reflection and Review: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

The beginning of the decade is not something a lot of people feel terribly fondly of. The degree to which globe-spanning disease ground everything to a halt, disrupted lives, and took loved ones from countless people, is something we are still reeling from. It’s not hard to see the current state of things and see the multitudinous ways in which the pandemic affects personal lives, interpersonal relationships, economics, politics, and virtually everything those different spheres touch. Which is, to say, everything under the sun.

As for myself, I was nearing the end of my graduate studies when life as I knew it screeched to a halt. My student work positions at the university ended unceremoniously as we pivoted to online learning. Thankfully, my pay continued through the end of that contract, but I had to figure something else out. I spent most of that spring fighting an uphill battle with my comprehensive exams, alongside crippling loneliness living by myself in a small apartment. Rarely venturing out beyond a trip to the park, with a sleep schedule that shifted out of sync, an hour or two every night, until I found myself never waking up or going to bed at the same time. Thankfully, I had friends to play online games with. That made it a little better.

Once the semester was over, I was looking for work. Thanks to come professional connections, I interviewed at an aviation museum. Initially, it was for a gift shop job, but once they realized my public history degree was nearly finished, I was better suited in their archive. There, I visited with the incumbent curator, who had been wanting to retire for some time. He got a good impression of the care with which I would show the collection, then greenlit my hiring so he could move on.

One tiny problem: I knew virtually nothing about aircraft, flight, or the aviation industry. I had family who very briefly worked at an aircraft factory, but that was a matter of months. One of my great uncles was in the Air Force during the Cold War, but he’s the most pompous, arrogant, self-aggrandizing prick that I have the displeasure to call my kin, so he was not a reliable source for information. All I had to lean on was the collection and their exhibits, and whatever I could seek out on my own time.

A couple months into the job, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 came out. The last MSFS release was roughly 10 years old at that point, a casualty of Microsoft shuttering the development studio that made the last edition. The new sim was unlike anything that had come before, in terms of visual fidelity; the globe had been rendered using Bing map data, with many cities faithfully recreated using photogrammetry. If you’ve ever seen the 3D view on Google Earth, it’s using essentially the same method. This fidelity comes at a performance cost though, and you need to have a beefy computer to run it.

My gaming rig struggled mightily with it. A 4th gen i5 and a GTX 970 is not an ideal setup for something this bleeding-edge, and I had to sacrifice both visuals and framerate for the sake of getting it working. Still, it ran!

Since the latter half of 2020, I have over 900 flight hours in the game. I have gotten to fly old open-cockpit biplanes, fighter jets, airliners, and civil aviation craft of all shapes and sizes. Along the way, the job that global circumstances forced me to pursue led to a passion that I hope stays with me for life, even if the museum sucked eggs to work at.

As mentioned before, my first impressions centered around the graphical detail of the game world. While my machine could only run higher fidelity graphics at around 15 frames per second, I stomached the god-awful framerate flying over cities familiar to me and marveled at it. I had never been on a flight before, so seeing my corner of the world from the sky felt magical.

That was, until I wrecked. I had no idea what I was doing.

Ordinarily, this is the point I would talk about the game’s training and tutorial. However, those features were half-baked on release, and I probably would not have used them beyond the most basic instructions anyways. Instead, I opted to set up a flight to the nearest major city to me, take off, and figure things out once I was airborne. It went about as well as you might expect. I didn’t understand how to arm the autopilot, what any of the buttons did, or anything. It took my several flights to figure out that “FLC” was the button for climbing or descending to a selected flight level, and “ALT” was for staying at your current altitude. I was getting so frustrated when I pressed the “ALT” button and nothing happened!

Slowly but surely, I started getting those systems figured out. Thankfully, those systems have a lot of similarity across different planes, so once you know one, you can trial-and-error your way through the rest!

Once I had flight controls and automation figured out well enough to get by, I started exploring a bit. The whole world was open to me, which created a bit of choice paralysis. I’ve often said “If you want to take off some random place like Ulaanbataar, you can just go!” but I often find myself compelled to explore closer to home. For most of those early months, I mostly stuck to my own back yard, exploring the route to my old hometown, to the cities near me, and around the airports that serve my area. I avoided New York City because my computer just simply could not handle rendering it, though I eventually started taking flights around the US once I felt comfortable with airliners.

One of my favorite experiences from those early days stemmed from the glitchy release: There were some buildings and airports with messed up size and elevation data, leading to spires that towered thousands of feet into the country side, and mountainous airports whose runways were placed at sea level, creating 1500+ foot fissures in the ground. I remember making a landing attempt at one of the borked airstrips, bouncing off the warped terrain and landing on my wheels at the bottom of the chasm. Not exactly the experience the devs intended, but one that brought me a lot of joy in the moment.

MSFS is a big, messy, complicated game whose issues can bubble to the surface at times. Though it is a much smoother experience now, it still has its hiccups. The most pronounced issues early on were shockingly bad performance on even the best hardware of the day, a problem that seemed to improve quickly over those first months as the devs optimized CPU use.

Another problem stemmed from how the game drew graphics onto the aircraft. As I understand it, you previously applied graphics by “wrapping” an image around the plane’s surfaces. They moved to using a system that applied elements as decals, similar to that of a racing game livery designer. Something with this change in technology broke basically all the third party aircraft liveries for two of the three airliners. One funny but frustrating issue that cropped up for the designers who learned the new system was that the game mirrored whatever you put on one side, which led every livery from those first batches with reversed text on the right side. It took time for modders to find a way to get things to work right, but that time period was especially frustrating.

Server issues can also plague the game. MSFS relies on Azure for synthesized voices, and Bing map data is beamed in as-needed. You need a stable and higher-bandwith connection to fully utilize it, and it can still be spotty and messy some days. If the voice synthesis breaks, you sometimes get Windows’s onboard voices, or sometimes you get nothing. And if it breaks during a flight, it’s anyone’s guess whether it’ll come back later.

Sometimes the main menu’s flight planning can get wonky. I swear it worked better on previous versions and got worse with a recent update. Now, there’s always a chance for a “route discontinuity,” meaning that, between one waypoint and another, no connection was made to get you between them. If that happens and you do not intervene, your plane will just fly whatever heading it was on and never intercept the rest of the flight path. Lately, I have seen it mostly on departures, with the idea that a real-life pilot would get instructions from Air Traffic Control to fly a specific heading until they’re on their planned route. MSFS’s simulated ATC is nowhere near that clever though, so you’re on your own to fix that.

ATC can also get a little mixed up with elevation. Sometimes it will assign altitudes above what your plane can handle, and it can also be late and slow when bringing you down for a descent and approach. I had two flights recently that were late to bring me down from cruising altitude, and I was lined up with the runway TWELVE THOUSAND FEET higher than I should be. In real life, you can ask for “track miles” out of the way to descend before coming in for a landing. There’s zero chance any real ATC would bring a plane in that’s that high, but it’s doing the best it can.

Crashes happen, but I have never had especially pervasive problems with them.

All in all, the game has its technical hangups. Most of the issues aren’t game-breaking, but can be terribly frustrating if it throws your plans off or disrupts the experience.

Once I upgraded my hardware a bit, the game became much more playable. Over the last couple years, I upgraded to a newer AMD GPU, a 4th gen i7 CPU, and doubled my RAM from 16 to 32 GB. Those changes, collectively, have massively improved my experience. I waited until I had over 800 hours of flight hours before making this change, so I am still learning what the game is like when you can actually see what’s happening soon enough to not over-correct at bigger airports and the like. The game is very CPU intensive with all the math that it factors in, between the aircraft’s own performance and surfaces, aerodynamics, and weather changes that affect things. My old i5 was such a significant bottleneck, it feels like a completely different game now.

When I started using Linux in Spring 2024, MSFS was one of the top things I wanted to try and get working. 5+ years ago, this would have been a pipe dream. Linux and Windows are different OSes with different parameters for how they handle programs. You can’t just drag and drop from one to the other and expect things to work.

Thankfully, the 2020s have seen a concerted effort on multiple fronts for gaming compatibility to reach near-parity between Linux and Windows. Valve, the company behind Steam, has been working on a tool called Proton for several years. Proton is a compatibility layer that turns Windows-specific instructions into ones that Linux can interpret and execute. This sounds like an absolute nightmare to me, as someone not familiar with the inner workings. But, it works! Roughly 90 percent of my Steam library works just fine on Linux, with MSFS headlining the set. Once I got it up and running, I was amazed. I had roughly the same performance on Kubuntu LTS that I had on Windows 10, aside from some odd screen tearing. Turns out, I would have had a smoother experience if I used the 6-month regular release version, but the fact it ran at all felt like magic.

My machine has changed so much this last year that I can’t really say if it works “better” than on Windows by any means, but there’s clearly little to no drop-off. I have seen minor lighting and shader differences, seemingly related to the DirectX-to-Vulkan translation under the hood. But the initial screen tearing and audio crackles are nonexistent in up-to-date linux desktops, When Azure goes on the fritz, the on-board speech to text on linux doesn’t seem to play nice with the game, which usually leads to ATC radio silence. Still, it is spectacular to see such a beefy, complicated game run so well on an operating system for which it was not designed. It sold me on the possibility that I could go full-tilt into Linux as my daily driver, knowing that gaming was in a good place, and that most of my other needs are pretty OS-agnostic.

All that to say, it works well on Linux with little to no tinkering on my hodgepodge of 5 to 10 year-old midrange hardware!

Despite MSFS being far-and-away my most played game on Steam, there are lots of things I have not done in the sim. As mentioned, I taught myself how to fly mostly by trial and error. Better tutorials came about a year or so after I got the game, but I was already entrenched in doing things “my way” and never bothered.

I have also mostly avoided the landing challenges and sight-seeing excursions. Though virtual tourism is something I enjoy doing from time to time in-game, I prefer to be self-guided.

As such, there are massive chunks of content I have not meaningfully interacted with. There is nothing obviously wrong with them to keep me from playing them, though I have no further insight into them either.

Instead, the vast majority of my time has been spent on free-flight, setting flight plans from different starting points to new destinations.

When I fly, I tend to do either of two extremes: either shorter flights, less than an hour, for the sake of testing a new plane or seeing a specific place, or longer-haul flights of 3 hours or more.

On those long flights, you may wonder what exactly one might do with the time. It usually takes around 30 minutes to climb, and 30 minutes to descend, which can leave 2 or more hours of flying at cruising altitude. Typically, I do not sit through a cross-country or international flight. Once you are set, you can turn your attention to other tasks. I have cleaned my apartment, cooked, gone on walks, gotten groceries, or any number of things while a flight is underway. Since you get an ETA before you start a flight, you can plan around it.

It may seem a little pointless to let a computer run during a Dallas-to-Shanghai or Boston-to-Paris flight, but there is something really rewarding about seeing one of those long-haul flights through to the end! I usually save those for a quiet and lazy Saturday, where I can take off in the morning, enjoy my day, and bring the plane in to land that evening.

One tradition I have picked up is flying the route of the 1929 Women’s Air Derby once every couple years. In late summer 1929, a group of women carried out a multiple-stage cross-country flight from Los Angeles to Cleveland, Ohio, all in open-cockpit planes. They raced each other and battled the elements over multiple days and a couple thousand miles, with Louise Thayden eventually winning in her Travel Air

I made my run in 2022, and hand-flew basically the entire route. It was arduous. I cannot fathom how difficult the endeavor must have been in the heat and the rain over consecutive days; I was fighting for my life to keep at it, despite dedicating a few July and August weekends to it in the comfort of my own home. I did another run in 2024, using a newer plane with a basic autopilot, so I could better enjoy seeing the route they took. I initially started to do another run this summer, but work and life got in the way. I may try and complete it this Fall, but we shall see.

While my time at the air museum lasted a little over a year, aviation got its claws in me and has been a major interest for me ever since. As a human endeavor, flight is compelling. The early pioneers sought to do the impossible, and though it is a relatively young technology, the last 100-odd years have seen a concerted effort to make air travel safer and more affordable. At a grander scale, we gone from fledgling heavier-than-air flight, to landing man on the moon, to sending space probes out of our own solar system. It's incredible stuff.

As with all other things, the 2020s have brought backsliding, with Boeing’s continued corporate problems leading to safety issues, the US’s current regime undercutting agencies that oversee ATC and air travel safety immediately leading to an uptick in incidents and accidents, and the enshittification of airline services leading to worse products at higher cost. Hopefully, those problems will be a blip on the radar and not a sign of further decline.

Current affairs notwithstanding, learning about aviation has given me a great deal of insight into safety practices. One of the earliest things I sought out to learn about aviation was air disaster investigations. There are a handful of YouTube channels that provided detailed breakdowns of accidents and incidents. Among them are blancolirio and Mentour Pilot, as both provide a really even-handed and unsensationalized explanation of what happened and why. Though a bit macabre, I soon learned that the collective knowledge that comes from every incident contributes to the knowledge base of the industry that lead to changes in design, training, and planning that have collectively made flying safer over the course of several decades. Flying today is leaps-and-bounds safer than it was in the 1970s beacause we know more about human psychology and physiology, management, engineering, training, crew resource management and best-practices that, together, contribute to a better safety culture.

Crew Resource Management, or CRM, has been especially vital to me. Basically, CRM describes the way in which duties and responsbilities should be split between pilots. Whoever is flying should focus on flying, and whoever is monitoring is keeping an eye on systems and handling communications, making the pilot flying’s job a bit easier. You would think this would be standard practice, and indeed it has been for some time, but it has only been codified and standardized in recent decades. Whenever an accident stems from poor decision making, there is often a breakdown in the command structure of the flight deck. Sometimes, captains can be arrogant, foolhardy and downright mean, and if they take things out on their first officer or otherwise diminish the FO’s confidence, disaster can result if the captain gets them into a dangerous situation. It taught me a bit about leadership; you have to be able to take critique and correction. If you are too arrogant to hear out people you believe are below you, it will eventually come back to bite you.

That lesson has shaped the style of leadership I try to practice as a mentor and manager in my current job. I have the privilege of leading young interns as they take their first baby steps into my field, and I take my role in their development seriously. Not all of them will ultimately choose to stay in the museum and archive field, but I hope all of them gain something working under me. As I go through the hiring process, I look at personality differences, strengths and weaknesses to get the big picture of how they might fit. Rather than seek out those who will be most like myself, I appreciate those who think and operate differently, who bring a totally different skillset to bear, and have fresh perspectives that allow me to see things in a different light. While showing them the tools and disciplines of my trade, I have also learned a lot about areas where I am not as strong, by virtue of working alongside them.

I try to approach them with humility. While I am in charge and carry the responsibility of overseeing things and making sure things are right, I also am willing to admit my limitations and acknowledge my mistakes and occasional shortsightedness. I have been told by those who moved on from my office that I helped them feel more comfortable and at ease, more willing to bring problems and mistakes to my attention, whether they or I were the ones who messed up, knowing I would focus on correcting the mistake without taking it out on them. That is precisely what good CRM does! It puts both people on the same “team,” so to speak, working together to lessen the load the other is carrying and keeping communication open and honest.

On the other end of the spectrum from workplace leadership, a love of flight has given me a source of whimsy! I have retained a childlike fascination with flying, which was on full display when I finally got to take my first plane ride in 2022. I was glued to the window on the way to see family, taking tons of photos and yapping about every little thing I saw. I love getting to the airport early, watching the hustle and bustle, and enjoying the experience. I feel like a little kid every time I feel the thrust of the engines as they spool up for takeoff, exhilirated to feel the power they harness to get us up in the air. Looking down from over thirty thousand feet, I marvel at the generations of applied knowledge that led to technology this crazy becoming pedestrian. I love loving aviation. There’s a depth and breadth to it that you could spend multiple lifetimes and dedication to without ever running out of things to learn.

Do I recommend Microsoft Flight Simulator? Absolutely!

Do I recommend becoming an aviation geek? Most definitely!

Will getting into aviation make you absolutely insufferable? Yeah, probably!

Despite its technical issues, MSFS has had a meaningful and positive impact on my life. It entered my life in a moment where I was navigating a lot of new things under scary circumstances. It gave me a means of escape when I could not go home to see family to travel to see the world. It served (and still serves) as an outlet for wanderlust. The rhythm of starting up, setting up, taxing out, climbing, cruising, and bringing it in at the destination is intoxicating for me, and something I love to do whenever I have some free time. It has also been a launching-off point for learning other facets of aviation that the game itself doesn’t meaningfully touch on, especially with regards to aviation history and accident investigations. I am also an excited and enthusiastic flyer, when a past version of myself would undoubtedly be prone to anxious catastrophizing.

If you have the time and desire to learn, I think MSFS can be a good launching off point. It is a massive game, both in terms of content and file size, so expect to need to set half a terabyte or more aside for it. I also recommend MSFS 2020 over 2024, partially due to better Linux compatibility, 2024's overreliance on generative AI for frame-generation and other sim aspects, and due to teething issues in new game modes that still disrupt the experience.

If you have a thirst for knowledge an a desire to take to the skies, MSFS is one of the most approachable and enjoyable ways to explore it! If you don't want to deal with Microsoft, X-Plane is the other consumer grade simulator. I have not played it, but many people swear by it. In any case, I recommend trying flight simming out if you have the patience and time to learn.