Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) Full Review!

it's hard to believe that there's a new release of microsoft flight simulator on the market it almost feels like pink floyd or led zeppelin getting back together for a new album on the one hand it just seems so unlikely but it's something we've all been waiting for for a very long time this review itself is admittedly late but i've got a good reason for that i was preparing for my own real-life commercial multi-engine checkride and i figured as long as we waited this long for the sim itself what's another couple of weeks for my review while it actually debuted on other machines the original microsoft flight simulator was one of the first killer apps for the then new ibm pc back in 1982 the series stayed one of the most successful gaming franchises on the pc up until the late 2000s when microsoft decided to refocus their gaming efforts on the xbox a system that didn't lend itself well to a complex resource intensive and largely keyboard driven sim yet here we are after a shock announcement at last year's e3 the new microsoft flight simulator confusingly just called microsoft flight simulator with no year or version number is here so let's grab the yoke fire up the engines and find out if this new microsoft flight simulator meets its sky-high expectations or if it crashes and burns instead [Music] i mentioned that i'm a real-life pilot but i've also been a flight simmer for about the last 38 years in fact microsoft flight simulator the series not this release is part of what got me into aviation in the first place i'll be looking at not just how this sim compares to its competitors and previous iterations but also how it compares to real life i should also mention that i bought this game i don't know anybody at microsoft or a sobo studio the games developer nobody sent this to me for review with a note attached saying i hope you enjoy it we'll talk soon i have no obligation implied or otherwise to anybody but myself and you guys this is going to be an honest review a couple caveats microsoft flight simulator the game not the series is a platform and the company both hopes and expects that third parties will be adding on to and extending the sim over time some of these add-ons that sim being one of the biggest are officially supported right out of the gate i'm only going to be reviewing what's actually included with the game mainly because trying to account for every possible add-on in a review is going to be well impossible but i might mention one or two in passing while talking about some of the game's limitations i'm also reviewing this sims shortly after launch and the experience will almost certainly change over the years with updates patches and possibly even new functionality in fact there's already been one patch though it hasn't addressed a single one of the nitpicks i'm going to mention so if you're watching this from the future just take that into account the sim may be fundamentally different 10 years from now and yes i do think it'll still be around at that time remember that fs10 is 14 years old and was just replaced so let's get down to brass tacks right now and yeah here's where at least one of you in the comments is gonna write video starts at three minutes or whatever microsoft flight simulator is a glorious beautiful buggy mess of a sim with a revolutionary world building engine jaw dropping weather effects great graphics all around the most realistic feeling flight model of any home pc sim and some pretty major failures in aviation systems and procedures in other words as of september 2020 it's a mixed bag its highs are very high but its lows are frustrating enough that depending on your flying focus you may want to hold off on buying this sim until some of the kinks are worked out i'm pretty confident most of them will be though nothing seems fundamentally broken just badly in need of tuning or fleshing out let's take a look at the experience of just setting up and then flying a flight this is what greets you when you start the game here you'll find flight training and activities for those of you who need some structure and or guidance as well as challenges and a seemingly useless thank you tile that maybe they'll use for something else later and the world map tile from which you'll do most of your flying from here you can also access tabs for your profile marketplace and the many options the game provides the profile provides a place to manage your content and this is going to come in handy over time because almost everything not procedurally generated is going to be in here and taking up space on your hard drive there's also an overview of your hours and achievements here and a pretty handy logbook it also features a hanger where you can look at the pretty airplanes from various viewpoints speaking of which the list of airplanes is fairly long with many of the more popular general aviation aircraft available as well as a few airliners this is the diamond da40ng the new generation version of a plane i actually fly so it's one of my go to's in the game i do hope the game eventually has a lot more planes available as add-ons because having the actual plane you fly in a sim can actually help with learning procedures plus it's just fun to try other aircraft the marketplace tab is where you'll find the official add-ons that are available for purchase but keep in mind that this is not the only way to modify the game in fact add-ons and modifications are much easier to manage than they were in fs10 the exact process is a little different depending on where you bought the sim to begin with but basically you're just going to navigate to the community folder where you installed the game and drop any add-on you want in there the sims should recognize it as you can see i have some liveries installed for some of the default aircraft of course anything you buy from the marketplace will be installed for you by the sim itself not that there's much yet that i feel like is worth purchasing in fact some of what's in here right now seems to have relatively low review scores over on the options page is where you can set graphical and other options i should mention here that i'm filming this in 1920x1080 but i actually play at 38.40 by 1200 that's my monitor's actual resolution if i filmed at that resolution though you guys on phones or tablets or even a lot of laptops would just be looking at a tiny sliver of a picture so i just picked something standard for you guys i have a pretty powerful system albeit only a launch rtx 2060 with six gigs of ram so i do have to limit certain things like texture resolutions like fs10 was at launch playing this game does require some trade-offs it's a same that was built to last so there's probably not a machine out there that can run it at very high resolutions with all settings maxed out at any sort of reasonable and consistent frame rate but it can run pretty well and still look phenomenal on even a mid-range system and no i don't really have a problem playing it at 3840x1200 although it does chug a bit in places you'd expect it to there's a ton of other stuff in here that you can change from how the smart camera works to what voices are used for air traffic control to where the sim gets its ai traffic data from you can also of course adjust the flight model modern is much more realistic than the legacy flight model oddly all the other realism settings are in the assistance section you see there is a developer mode option here which is going to be interesting for those developing mods but the couple things you might want as a regular user are a built-in frame rate counter and slew mode turning on developer mode adds another menu to the top with those options now selectable though beware that it also automatically turns off in-game crashes the kind you want in a flight sim not the kind that kicked you out to your desktop it may also make some other changes by default so just go through there and look here's a quick look at that assistance section you'll definitely want to take a run through here because this is where you'll really make adjustments to the flight model and overall realism of the game i've seen people complain about the flight dynamics being unrealistic in ways they are not for me and i wonder if those people just haven't looked in this menu lastly yes you can pretty much adjust everything about the controls including fully remapping them something you'll need to do if you have two throttle quadrants and adjusting sensitivity and control curves i find the sensitivity in the game to be really twitchy and you'll see that later in some of the footage that's even after making adjustments so i'll probably need to do some more tweaking in here if you think landing in this sim is hard that's because it is real planes are just a lot less responsive at slow speeds so i'd advise turning the sensitivity way down in here you can also save multiple profiles for your controllers here which comes in really handy when switching between airliners single engine and multi-engine props so let's get set to fly here i'm setting up a flight that i've actually flown many times before from falcon field in mesa arizona to murano regional just outside tucson setting up a flight plan is very easy and just feels like a refined version of how it was done in fs10 just set departure destination and what type of flight you want i'm setting this up as an ifr flight using low airways which is what you'd realistically want to do in a ga aircraft when flying ifr you can pick an altitude from the nav log area which is an odd place for it that took me a while to find the routes the sim picks are usually pretty realistic and more often than not at least one of them will be something atc actually clears on a regular basis one little niggle is that while it calls what you're selecting airways it never actually shows you the airways just all the waypoints on them i almost forgot to show you guys the flight conditions screen and that's mainly just because i normally fly in the afternoon using live weather i'm lazy that way but here we go this is where you set up your multiplayer options in-game air traffic weather and time if you don't want to see other players just shut them off i usually leave them on because i like to see what other people are doing they don't get in the way for air traffic you can pick live which is supposed to use actual flight data of planes really flying around although the data the sim uses seems really incomplete ai which just generates some planes flying around or you can turn it off completely and then we get to weather live weather which has been in every sim for a while now is supposed to use actual data for any given area usually this works pretty well but the downside is obviously that it's not your choice what you're flying in realistic but not always the most fun still it is what i usually leave on because i know that at the very least i'm going to get some wind and turbulence that way without having to do anything you can also select from various presets ranging from clear skies to storms and we'll take a look at some really crap weather later or you can create your own custom weather including multiple cloud and wind layers and look at how the sim actually calculates gusts i haven't seen another sim with a frequency selector which really makes wind feel a lot more realistic after filing your flight plan you'll be presented with one of the many long loading screens throughout the game i have an nvme ssd and it still takes about two minutes for the sim to load this can be even longer if you're taking off from a very complex area like new york city or it can be shorter when departing from smaller more remote airfields in rural areas when the game's done loading you'll be either at the end of the runway with the engines running and ready to go or parked at your chosen parking spot with the airplane cold and dark you can open up the games checklists and even have the ai complete them for you but i'll get us started here and set up while i tell you that this is not a handcrafted airport it's a procedurally generated one and these can be a crap shoot in terms of quality handcrafted airports like jfk london heathrow and tokyo haneda of course depending on which version of the game you have are highly realistic and look fantastic every other airport in the world is a mix of satellite imagery overlaid with pavement markings and buildings that the game thinks seem right but aren't always for example most small towered airports have no actual tower in the game and falcon field at least seems to have taxiway lighting just placed at random in the middle of taxiways i've also never seen a city bus driving down the ramp oh and almost every airport seems to have these pushback carts what a luxury airport this must be i'm just going to drive right through this guy once i'm ready poor guy isn't even paying attention the ifr clearance i've received here is fine although the sim always clears you as filed this does happen in real life but more often you'll get something slightly different than what you requested i have to believe that isobo and microsoft just think this would be frustrating after all most people aren't going to want a game telling them to do something different than what they asked for in the menu screen but i personally and i'm sure a lot of other pilots feel the same would love an option for a more realistic clearance somewhere of course you can just use something like vatsim for more human atc with a headset but that sim has its limitations too airports like falcon field are often not staffed and since vatsim is a hobby too not all of its controllers are going to give you realistic instructions either in any case we're all set up so let's tax it to the runway i've complained that x-plane feels floaty and detached on the ground microsoft flight simulator is the exact opposite it's overly sticky it feels like your tires have melted to the pavement which honestly could happen in arizona but a happy medium between the two would be nice look out behind you buddy these info cards you see in the sky all around are other players flying in the world around me they don't seem to really affect anything it just makes the world feel more alive though i don't know if them not affecting my flights is just because they're all flying around uncontrolled or if atc doesn't even see them in my world and we've got a forklift on the taxiway for some reason so at this point in the flight i'm just following the pink needle in front of me though i actually do have the departure backed up on my nav radios like a good pilot on my mfd on the right you can see my flight plan this is basically how the real g1000 works but there are some major differences too that make it super frustrating to use in the game and basically impossible for any kind of real training or practice it would take me too long to get into this and it gets pretty technical so i won't bore you you will see an example of some of my frustrations later in the video though x-plane actually allows you to connect simeonix pretty decent ipad g1000 simulator to it so you can use that instead of the one in the game this is not officially supported in flight simulator although there may be a third party work around for it there is for electronic flight bag apps like forflight my experience with that though has been death to the frame rate even with the frame rate fixes that have come out recently here's the area where i fly and yeah it looks basically just like this microsoft flight simulator is the first flight simulator of any kind and this includes multi-million dollar full flight sims used by airlines to even attempt to accurately model the entire world and every airport in it other sims will let you fly anywhere but their land masses and population centers are just estimations of what they actually look like microsoft flight simulator is using real satellite imagery and terrain data from microsoft's own being maps for the entire planet and it's also using that to generate buildings trees and other automatically generated scenery the sim looks phenomenal most of the time as a result x-plane with ortho for xp installed will give you a somewhat similar experience but without this density and quality of generated buildings and other scenery and only in the areas that you install tiles for that can take up a huge amount of local storage too the reason msfs doesn't take up quite as much hard drive space though the initial install is a hundred gigabytes and most of you will be downloading that is that to get the best experience you need to be online all the time the game streams a lot of its scenery data as you're flying so if you're offline your world may look like a higher res version of fs10 depending on where you are even if you are online the illusion in msfs does break down a little in areas that haven't gotten quite as much attention from the developers here's doha qatar it looks not all that close to the real thing the land masses are of course exactly where they should be and for the most part buildings are arranged as they are in real life but they're all low quality full autogen and the overall effect is really no better than you'd see an x-plane or other sense but there are still plenty of areas that are either naturally beautiful where it seems like a sobo hasn't had to do much of anything other than input the satellite data and let the game handle a rest or where they've clearly spent some time and effort hand crafting famous landmarks buildings and scenic areas and of course there are the airports there are three levels of the game for purchase standard deluxe and premium deluxe with 30 35 and 40 handcrafted airports respectively there was some confusion about this before launch so i'll just restate this in case anyone's still not sure all levels of the game come with every airport in the world the differences in the number of handmade airports that are paid add-on level quality doha is an example of an automatically generated airport here's the premium version of jfk for comparison the premium airports all look pretty phenomenal though they do put a noticeable hit on the frame rate some of that's down to the parked planes realistically sitting on the ramp which is something you can dial back in the settings if you want i personally want all the other traffic in the game i can get modern aviation is an interconnected system and if you're not simulating that then you're not simulating flight anyway back to our flight the low visibility here is because i'm technically flying through a light cloud how cool does that look now this is much later in the flight as i'm actually approaching marana this is penal air park in real life this is kind of a boneyard slash storage area for commercial and military aircraft and as you might expect right now it's jam-packed with big airplanes unfortunately there's nothing there in the sim don't expect the game to be 100 true to real life i'll also just mention that i'm hand flying this entire flight which is what i'm used to doing in real life i've only flown a single general aviation flight with autopilot on for any amount of time stick and rudder skills baby but the game's autopilot is a subject in itself and it's definitely worth talking about keep watching for that or skip to the time listed in the description one thing that sim has a major problem with is atc forgetting about you until very late or even forever the other night i flew a flight into st martin where i just never got any kind of approach clearance on this flight here's what happened and note that i am already past the airport here despite the sim earlier telling me to expect vectors to the runway 3-0 visual i never got any stinking vectors maintain present heading and altitude diamond x-ray golf sierra diamond x-ray golf sierra has the runway in sight diamond x-ray golf sierra are four miles southeast of kilo alpha victor quebec maintain present heading and altitude um is that a clearance the game seems to think so as the only options are acknowledge approach clearance and say again but the actual instruction was to just fly straight and level away from the airport in real life this would be a good way to get someone killed notice i'm flying around mountains higher than i am and the whole point of ifr is that i could be flying through clouds here but it's pretty much par for the course in msfs i'm not sure i've ever received a proper approach clearance at the proper time i ended up just turning around here and landing on my own which i think is maybe what the sim really wanted me to do anyway on the way here we can see one of the game's many graphical glitches despite its general good looks that's actually a mine not a mountain on the left someone must have forgotten the minus sign in the elevation data for that hopefully stuff like that will disappear over time as actual humans pour over the automatically generated scenery now this was an ifr flight and i started with that for a reason vfr is much easier for any sim to do and you can just look at the same footage and tell that you could pretty easily fly vfr in this sim all the major landmarks from a real-life sectional chart are there one thing i will add is that atc does still work in vfr just like it did in fs10 and it's no better or worse but it is better than x-plane in that you can just request takeoff from a towered airfield then ask for flight following in the air as you may have seen me laughing about in my last video it's just uncommon to get flight following in an a320 but ifr is more difficult it's more procedural and has more rules and in many ways msfs falls flat in ifr flying it forgets you're there gives weird instructions and the g1000 in many planes just doesn't work right now that we've flown a proper flight let's see what kind of stupidity we can get ourselves into i'm gonna try to land on the street in front of my house now most of the videos on my channel were shot at my old house just outside of new york city so let's go there here we are at runway 4 right at jfk airport i'll cut a couple of times here for brevity but you can get a sense of how close i lived to jfk it was great for traveling i fly a lot around the southwest now but i miss really traveling the scenery here looks okay from a distance but this is a mall in real life not a prison like this looks like to me you're gonna see the scenery really break up when we get down closer you see how the plane swings around all over the place here that is totally realistic and not something other sims get the feel of right fs10 was always too robotic whereas x-plane does something like this for turbulence but it's not that it's just the way the air moves the air is a fluid just like water but less dense but just imagine how you feel swimming in the ocean just like that the air is in constant motion so the airplane is going to move around with it this effect is less pronounced the heavier the airplane gets here i'm flying the icon a5 which is very light but the way the wind affects your plane seems pretty realistic for every given airplane in the sim so here i'm about to try to land on my old street this giant warehouse looking building is a much smaller normal office building in real life off to the left on the corner here that apartment building is actually a 7-eleven and a dunkin donuts i miss having those close enough to walk so this is the best i could do there are just trees too close to the edge of the street or maybe even in the street to be able to land without hitting anything next i tried landing on sunrise highway this main road you see here and just taxi to my house unfortunately this happened so screw it we'll just do a low pass over my house which will give me a chance to talk about the game's active pause feature as well and here we are that's my old house or rather that's where my old house is supposed to be does it look like my house well here's a picture i do see my driveway the accurate outline of my lawn and the sidewalk cutting through it in the satellite imagery but obviously the same is generating the structure out of some database of generic houses and that's not a criticism i don't expect it to have every single real life structure in the world it's still pretty convincing most of the time since we're stopped here let's talk about active pause which is what i'm doing right now this keeps the sim running but just stops your plane in midair a lot of people seem to think this is pretty cool but the problem is the sim is still simming what's actually happening to your plane so for example if you active paused with the throttle and control surfaces at some inappropriate setting this could happen to you there is an actual pause just by hitting the escape key but that takes you completely out of the sim there's nothing like x-plane has where you can actually pause the sim but still interact with your instruments and controls for setting up things like approaches mid-flight of course there's no pause in real life but there's also no frustrating virtual knob turning in real life either setting stuff up just takes much longer in any sim more fun stuff let's see if the sim lets us land a 747.8 at lakla i'm not the first to do this in the sim but it is a first for me for those of you who don't know luckla is a famous or infamous airport near mount everest with a tiny dramatically sloped runway it's been called the most dangerous airport in the world though i'm not sure how accurate that is and it requires both special pilot training and a certain kind of airplane to land at which the 747.8 most definitely is not landing a 747 there is kind of the ultimate challenge in any sim though but it really should not be possible so if a sim lets you do it without setting some crazily unrealistic wind speed or turning off crashes then something's wrong with that sim i didn't even do that i just tried flying it in with all the realism still on it was legitimately terrifying this was my first attempt [Music] yikes now what can we realistically learn from this fellow kids well how about don't fly a 747.8 into luckla but more seriously did you notice the illusion the terrain and runway create it looks like it's descending but it's actually the opposite at the end of my flight i was at full power and actually ascending but still going below the runway pilots aren't used to seeing runways with that kind of slope on an actual mountain i'm sure not but msfs simulates the illusion well as it does the high density altitude where engines are neither as responsive nor as powerful and lifting surfaces aka wings are less effective incidentally this type of crash seems to be about the most common at luckla there is wreckage all over that cliff my guess is that dealing with this illusion is the main part of that extra luck luck training that pilots need this is probably the closest i came to sticking the landing i believe i actually sheared the main gear off on that cliff unfortunately there's currently no replay mode in the sim to check from outside though a sobo studio says that that's coming but seeing this convinced me there's no possible way i could have stopped on this runway even with wheels still attached but let's get back to this at the end of the video i think we can have some more fun with it right now let's talk about weather so far i've shown you either clear skies or some light clouds but this sim can get nasty at least in terms of weather visuals this is what stormy weather looks like and yeah i'm having a little trouble keeping it on the runway though if anything the winds and turbulence are too benign storms can literally rip a small plane like this apart look how this cell is just sitting halfway over the runway that looks totally realistic let's get back into it at this point i am no longer vfr this would be an emergency in real life but hey that's what the sim is for seeing these mountains higher than i am through the fog is like reliving an actual nightmare that i've had the cool thing too is that you can bust out of it it's not 100 even coverage it's realistically spaced out and yes during monsoon season there are actually days that look just like this in arizona there's more impressive weather here than i've seen anywhere else let's check out some snow here i'm flying a tail dragger that has only basic instruments no synthetic vision to help out and not even an attitude indicator this is crazy would i do this in real life hell no for so many reasons by the way take a look at what my airspeed indicator does here now i don't actually know where the savage cubs sensors are or even what it has but that's an accurate reaction to a pitot tube blocked with ice i didn't set that in the failures options it just comes with the hard settings in the assistance menu look at this a double rainbow i eventually decided to see if first i could really ice over the airframe itself and second if i could knock myself out with hypoxia i'm guessing the savage cub is not a pressurized aircraft some aircraft do get visibly iced up the a320 definitely does but i've never taken it to the point where i could feel it in the controls that it happened a lot faster in a small plane though but no matter what i flew through the wings and airframe of the cub never seemed to ice up i have a feeling this is actually modeled but maybe isn't working for all planes right now or maybe the conditions just weren't exactly right here i'll keep trying i also didn't get hypoxia no matter how high i flew here you see me at about 16 500 feet in x-plane you actually can black out which is just a cool little extra if nothing else it limits you to realistic altitudes for a given airplane about a year ago just after taking my discovery flight i put together a video comparing fs10 to real life i flew out of farmingdale long island in that video you can watch the whole thing here if you want though the in cockpit footage isn't the greatest but here's that same area in msfs as you can see it's got a few bugs but i do like the texture of the grass though it looks a bit overgrown compared to the real thing all of these buildings off the end of the runway are retail in real life not these nondescript office parks shown here but at least there is something there and in all the places they're supposed to be that is the major improvement of the new msfs graphics i do wish they'd create some procedurally generated retail though every area looks very utilitarian right now as realistic as the game is it'd look even more so with some fun stuff on the ground now let's finally talk about the game's autopilot because it is a wild and wooly beast a lot's been said about the autopilot and msfs elsewhere already it's definitely one of the hot button issues in the game most of the complaints seem to center around certain features not being implemented fully like vertical navigation or vnav while others are about how the autopilot just doesn't work the way you might expect it to my experience is that some of these complaints are 100 valid especially when it comes to general aviation aircraft modern autopilot systems tie into the flight management system so both have to work and talk to each other properly i mentioned earlier that the g1000 in many planes is barely functional and here i'm just trying to enter an approach properly and get the plane's autopilot to fly where it's supposed to instead it's flying clear off in some random direction while i wrestle with entering the approach something i never managed it does seem to be trying to fly a leg from user to godly but i don't really see that leg on the map or at least not to godly and it's definitely flying well away from godly keep in mind i enter flight plans and approach procedures into the g1000 almost every day in real life it is just not this hard earlier in that same flight this was happening i had set the autopilot to nav mode which should be tracking the gps course but instead it's just wallowing back and forth like a platypus remember this for later it calmed down when i changed to heading mode and then tracked the gps course properly when i switched back to nav airliner flight management systems and autopilots seem to work a little better strangely enough despite being a lot more complex but they're definitely not perfect either i have actually managed to fly full flights realistically using auto throttle and autopilot in both managed mode using data from the fms and selected or semi-manual mode i've been kind of delighted to watch the modes realistically change during different phases of flight and the modes i've used do seem to at least basically follow similar logic to the real thing at least to the extent that i notice i'm sure it's all really vastly simplified under the hood but some airliner autopilots are better than others the a320 for example does this constantly look familiar it's less extreme than in the baron i showed you before but it continuously wallows like this whenever it's trying to follow a gps track the a320 autopilot is also very abrupt in catching altitudes it'll suddenly level off about 500 feet above or below then re-engage the climb or descent to find the real target the 787 autopilot is a lot smoother and it doesn't wallow all of the airliner autopilots are slow and imprecise as well i'm still a small plane pilot but i've had some real-life training on a couple of airliners one of which is the a320 real life autopilots work reasonably quickly you press a button and within a second or two it's pretty clear what the system is at least trying to do the systems in msfs take about 10 seconds after a command before they do anything then whatever action they do take is very slow for example rolling the engines back by about five percent per second in preparation for a descent it may take 30 seconds or more to actually start down if the plane needs to slow before descending this slow response is less noticeable in light aircraft but it's a big deal in an airliner where everything moves a lot quicker i did try out an arrival procedure with a few altitude and speed restrictions on it the roebuck arrival into boston if you'd like to try this yourself i have flown this procedure a few times in a full flight sim i did it in vnav mode to see if the plane would try to honor these restrictions and no it did not now maybe i just did not enter something right but in the real life systems i've used it should just have the restrictions in the database when you call up the arrival procedure so either the database in the game isn't really complete or vnav just isn't fully fleshed out which is what i've seen others mention basic vnav does work you can use it for a simple climb or descent it just doesn't seem to manage anything which is kind of the whole point of it all that said i think i'm safe in saying that at least some of the complaints i've seen about the airliner autopilots are what you'd call user error these systems seem to work a lot more realistically than the ones in fs10 did and not every mode is going to work in every flight regime nor are they probably going to act in the less realistic ways you're used to from previous sims the real a320 has about 30 different autopilot modes for example and that's not including the auto throttle modes that each ap mode interacts with understanding all this takes a lot of studying for real-life pilots it's not something anyone knows intuitively or just figures out flying on autopilot isn't just about pushing a single button sitting back and drinking your coffee in fact i'm only even semi-comfortable with the a320 i'm a little lost in the 787 and weird things always happen to me when i try to fly it using autopilot but they're weird in ways that probably mean i just haven't set something up right for example descending when i first engaged the autopilot after takeoff until i disengaged v-nav and then re-engage it could be a bug but way more likely it's just improper setup by me the a320 was similar for me until i just refreshed my memory on the fcom which is the real-life manual yes re-reading the actual real-life manual for the a320 is how i learned to use its autopilot in microsoft flight simulator now i can fly the plane pretty realistically in the game at least if i just take into account the slow performance and the swaying go home a320 you're drunk finally let's get back to some fun stuff i'm back at luckla and i've turned off crashes hey i'm perfectly willing to cheat if it means i can land a 747 at luckla first let's see if we can take off i'm pretty confident that without crashes we'll be successful one way or another i've set the fuel and payload to be as light as possible i've even got myself as the sole pilot none of that co-pilot dead weight short field take off [Music] whoops [Music] sort of made it now let's turn around and come back one seeming bug is that for some reason my throttles in the 747 keep getting stuck so i'm not only landing at 747 at lucla i'm doing it with stuck throttles so there you have it that's how you land a 747 at luckily so to sum up should you get microsoft flight simulator on balance for now i'd give it an enthusiastic but qualified yes it's a sim that does a lot of things really really well clearly better than its competitors and it's fun in all the ways every release of this game has ever been there's no end to the goofy situations you can get yourself into without having to actually risk your life doing so or to the number of pretty realistic locations you can visit now just to see what they look like or just to the flights you can fly and the feel of flying is better in this sim than any other although obviously it's still not perfect there are some really frustrating problems with certain types of flying and i wouldn't recommend this sim to help with real training but it is a fun sandbox to go play in even as a real-life pilot and it'll only get better as both the sobo and microsoft improve it and as third-party developers add on to it so that's about it for now let me know if you're enjoying this sim as much as i am and i'll see you guys next time bye you

Channel: Modern Classic

Views: 300,685

Rating: 4.8523898 out of 5

Keywords: flight simulators, msfs, msfs 2020, flight simulator 2020

Id: RmbDkXI9Qcs

Length: 43min 2sec (2582 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020