Top 12 Must Have Utility Addons for Microsoft Flight Simulator!

what's going on there guys my name is Matt or Chewie as most of you will know me as and in today's video I've got something which has been hotly requested on my twitch.tv very recently and that is a full walkthrough of everything that I am using in terms of add-ons for Microsoft flight simulator in June of 2023 now in this video I'm not going to include aircraft and individual scenery packages if you are wondering about this one by any chance it's the gorgeous fly Tampa Sydney scenery which I actually flew out of uh today on my twitch live stream um but I'm not going to be talking about aircraft add-ons I'm not particularly going to be speaking about Hardware or anything today just utility add-ons which make my life a lot easier now I'm sure some of you will have heard of quite a few of these however hopefully there will be a few that you won't have heard of before I'm hoping to also do time stamps down on the timeline at the bottom of the video so if there are any that you're already familiar earlier with you can skip past those and as always I will have links to everything down in the description as well I apologize that this video will mainly just be me talking and no other audio hopefully you won't get sick of my voice so let's jump into the first one which is going to be Navi graph two elements of Navi Graf the first being the charts and the second part being the nav data as you can see here at the top of the screen we've got the navi graph charts panel and if I bring that open we can see our routing that I've loaded in from simbrief another thing that I'll speak about very shortly and this is a really essential add-on for me it's probably I would say my most essential add-on within any flight simulator especially Microsoft flight simulator because what Navi graph is going to allow us to do is to be able to see the relevant chart information for all of our airports so here we go we've got the chart information for yssy Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport where we are right now and as you can also to see is really nicely up-to-date information this uh was last updated on the 17th of March of 2023 for example for this year Navi Graf have been innovating and doing so much great work over the most recent years and they've really kind of evolved as a company and come up with some really great ideas including now where some of the aircraft in the simulator like the citation longitude which is a default premium Deluxe aircraft can actually have full Sim brief and Navi graph integration built into the displays it's really cool we can also get new things with the latest Navi grav where you can actually zoom in you should be able to zoom in any way and be able to see ground information of course it's what I call Soldier as soon as I try and show it on stream it doesn't work but there are so many cool features with this we can obviously click on our arrival airport here go and click through and find information about our Landing that we were doing earlier on today into New Caledonia so much stuff again I know a lot of you folks are very familiar with this so I won't go into too much detail on Navi graph but the charts function is really really great and something that I couldn't live without within my Simulator the other thing as well that comes with Navi graph is this the navi Graf Hub and this is for installing nav data if you don't know what nav data is to put it into simple terms it's essentially like um you're updating your GPS in your car so if you've got road closures and all sorts of things like that it's a monthly update that happens in the real world where you have navigational data so if anything changes at different airports around the world in terms of the arrival or departure routings or waypoints or all sorts of different things Navi graph keeps it all today up to date and you can actually install it for the base simulator you can see I've got the in-game panel which we've already had a look at and then on top of that we've got add-on packages as well so I've got the pmdg aircraft fly the Mad Dog MD80 there we've got the Phoenix simulations A320 so we can import the most relevant up-to-date nav data every single month into the simulator and this works really nicely because it links in with the charts as well so that we know that the charts that we're displaying on this panel are going to be correct for the information that the aircraft sees as well there's nothing worse than when you're looking at an approach plate and you're looking at a chart and it doesn't match up to what you've got being programmed into your aircraft so that's an average graph for you again a common one which I'm sure lots of people know but it really links nicely into our second add-on or website this one which is simbrief so up on the screen now is the website simbrief.com which actually just a few months ago was purchased by Navi Graf so it's all linked together now which is really really cool to see as well and simbrief is a free completely free for absolutely everybody Flight Plan tools so you can actually see our generated Flight Plan details here for the flight that I just had on that Navi graph panel from Sydney all the way to November whiskey whiskey whiskey numea I think it's pronounced in New Caledonia but we can create flights in here we can choose our departure and arrival airport we can choose our um aircraft that we're going to be flying and one thing that's really cool in here is that actually if you click on a specific type of aircraft you can also select the individual configuration of it as well a really nice new feature that they've added recently as well you can change the different Flight Plan formats as well so you can have real world British Airways format Delta Lufthansa for example again linking into that navigation or Air Act data that we were speaking about just now with merry graph all of these bits of information are in here you can change your arrival your departure Runway your altitude the fuel that you want you can select routings all sorts of absolutely amazing things on here and again it is all free what you can also do then as soon as you finish making your flight plan is you can export it you can export it as a file type so it gets saved into your aircraft and you can load it through there or you can file it on the vat SIM network as a flight plan as well this is kind of your central hub for everything I guess if you were like a virtual dispatcher for your own flight this would be your Hub it's completely free and again it links so well with Navi graph it is just an absolute Game Changer to use these two together please go and check out the website if for some reason you've been living under a rock and you've never heard of simbrief before but this is my everyday flight planner that I use for every single flight that I do on my stream number three on our list is a relatively new add-on to Microsoft flight simulator that virtually every day on my live stream I get questions about it's called flow and this is what it looks like it is essentially a Microsoft flight simulator toolbar replacement add-on I'm sure all of you who are familiar with Microsoft Flight Sim are well aware of the white toolbar that usually appears at the top when you hover over the middle of the screen and there you can select the panels for weight and balance and everything like that well flow is a complete replacement for that and it tries to make it its own thing but if you get the pro version which is payware there are three options available as well but if you get the pro version which I do highly recommend you can actually download external widgets these little tiles here are all called widgets and what those widgets will do is people in the community have made different add-ons to be able to use with flow let's just give an example of some of the things that are include included with it so if I click on the time widget here it just gives you a much nicer UI experience here being able to change the time of day within the simulator as you can see at the bottom here we can change the date we can change the month we can roll ourselves back by six hours 12 hours so on and so forth and then we can just click back there we can also bring up the weights and balance panel and so many more things and flow is completely customizable so if I went on to the second page here I could just hold down one of these widget tiles and then move through and have a look at all of the different options for things that we could include on here you can even control your aircraft's autopilot all through here there are almost infinite options with some of the really cool features on there I'm not going to go through them all now because I could very easily dedicate an entire video to it what I do want to do though is highlight all of the absolutely incredible people within the community who have been making these widgets for the pro version so these are all custom coded as I say by members of the community to make our life easier so we've got if you use the ATR aircraft you can click and actually load your simbury flight plan or the the weights and balance into the aircraft with the click of a button you can do all sorts of different things and you can even play Spotify through Pro through flow if you really want to I personally have a couple of different widgets mainly enabled at the moment the first one that I have is a vatsim atis I actually don't know if there's any ATC on at London Heathrow at the moment but if there was I could just do V8s and then type in egl and I would be able to see what the atis was there we go so there's some ATC that symmet Gatwick right now and I can see that information on here so that's one of the cool widgets that I use I also have a simbury flight plan ofp looker here so we can see the relevant essential information from our simbri flight plan I use that ATR loader as well there's all sorts of different things in here it's really cool another great feature that I absolutely love with inflow is the portal and essentially what you can do with this is you can search an airport you can let's go and find another one here we can click on another airport here and visualize all the parking positions click on it and if we pressed go our aircraft would completely move its position from our current stand here in Sydney to this exact position here this is really useful if you don't want to have to go back to the main menu within Microsoft flight simulator click on another airport and then load the scenario this will slew your aircraft directly to that position I know I've been raving on about this long enough already but flow is absolutely brilliant again I'll leave links to that down in the description it is absolutely essential for me in the flight Sim another add-on which is a staple within the flight simulation community and again I have to give full credit to the developer FS Dream Team for this is GSX ground Services X they have been absolutely phenomenal with the relevant updates that they've been putting out for quite a while now and as you can see what this is is essentially it's just a ground Services software so we can see that it'll connect the jet wave for us and we've got all sorts of different things going on there's a pushback tug that's arrived there's going to be some vehicles moving over there to load the luggage onto the aircraft you can see passengers walking to your aircraft you can also see um well all sorts of different things fueling catering absolutely everything you can do with this and there's so many great features that they're adding to it not too long ago they added a remote de-icing feature where you can taxi your aircraft to a specific spot on an apron and initiate de-icing and de-icing trucks will come to your aircraft and spray virtual DIY icing fluid onto your wings and everything it just adds so much immersion it's really great um GSX has been around for a long time and throughout the lifespan of it within Microsoft flight simulator it's got to a really great level now because there is a dedicated group of amazing people in the community notice the theme here about how many great things you've got through community members who actually create GSX profiles for airports now what's that essentially what that means is within GSX let's say you're pushing back from a particular stand but you can only push back in One Direction because it's in a cul-de-sac and you have to do a tight turn to a specific spot while GSX airport profile creators they basically model those things and make them accurate for the airport they go into so much more detail though they make sure that each stand and area of an airport has the correct company controlling all of the ground services so many different things I've even got some friends who create GSX profile that when you see the passengers walking on and off the plane you can actually see them walking through the terminal building onto the jet way before arriving at your aircraft or disembarking your aircraft it's so cool and just adds so much level of detail into the simulator so I'll not only leave a link to GSX but if you haven't already or if you have already got GSX but you've not explored the custom profiles that people are making for the airports I will absolutely leave a link for that down there as well another highly recommended payware add-on for Microsoft flight simulator next one on the list for me is FS realistic now this add-on originally I believe started as XP realistic for X-Plane and then the developers um added it into Microsoft flight simulator as FS realistic and essentially what this does is it's another kind of immersion Builder within the simulator where you can add different effects to your aircraft so you can see some of them that are listed here for this specific aircraft I've got things like Auto speed brakes so you can hear the speed brake being deployed and you'll get a little bit of rumbling going on the brakes as well and the one that lots of people use is the um is the touchdown effect so uh by default within Microsoft flight simulator your camera won't really shake or move anywhere when your aircraft touches down on a Runway but with FS realistic all of those features are in there's also a first person mode as well so you can actually do a physical walk around of your aircraft or your scenery if you want to as well which I think was a really nice feature that they added recently my favorite feature though is the fact that you can actually if you're really lazy not create these profiles yourself so if you don't want to sit here and go through all of these different settings for your aircraft and decide which ones you want and don't want on if you you go to the profile tab you can actually go to the profile Cloud here and you can see look the top ones that we've got this person they've had over 2 800 individual downloads on this exact profile that they've got all you need to do is Click import and every single one of their settings and the values that they've selected within those will be active for that aircraft and as I say that's just for the aircraft so then if I load it into say the Phoenix Airbus A320 I could go back onto that profile Tab and download another profile and it might be completely different to this one I wouldn't necessarily say that FS realistic is an absolutely essential add-on within Microsoft flight simulator if you're wondering where to spend your money but it is another one of those immersion builders that if you're looking to take your flight simulator to the next level can really add some cool effects now as you can see I've zoomed out a little bit so I've got more of a view of our simulator at the moment and I'm toggling a button here I wonder if anybody who's watching the video can see the difference there can you see the shaders and how the colors in the simulator have changed what if I told you that this isn't default shaders and colors within Microsoft flight simulator this is look at how much more yellow the simulator looks well the way that I'm changing the color temperatures and everything is with an add-on called reshade This is free and it's really great really simple and easy to download it is a little bit more of a difficult or different process to install it if you use the Microsoft store version of msfs over the steam version but all the same it's really not too bad um and as I say it's free and essentially all it does is there's loads of different effects files which you can edit to your heart's content to change the look of the simulator and believe me some of them get very very wacky indeed again if you're really lazy and you don't want to sit here and go through all of these settings luckily once more there is a set of very dedicated individuals within the flight simulation Community who have set up their own profiles which you can just download move the file into a folder and then activate it within that reshade window that I just pulled up on the screen here and it will put all of their settings in for you the current version and profile that I'm using is final light I think version 1.3 unfortunately the final light reshade uh profile itself was uploaded to flightsim.to and due to a disagreement between the developer of the final light reshade package and flightsim.to they've actually removed it from the website at the moment so I haven't got a direct link to the exact Shader package that I'm new using on on screen right now hopefully I'll be able to have a link to you all soon which is a real shame because as you can see it makes a big big difference not something that I would say again is essential but it's a really good thing out there if you do fancy changing the look of your simulator a bit another option if you don't want to go with reshade is the Nvidia filters if you have an Nvidia GPU graphics card that is you can also use these shaders within the Nvidia overlay to be able to manipulate things in there as well as a secondary option and I know there are loads of great YouTube videos about how to use that if you do want to go and try something a little bit different to reshade next on our list is an add-on that was gifted to me by a developer called TDS and this is the TDS gtn XI which is a Garmin module that you can incorporate in a number of different aircraft now I have to say working title who are a developer working directly with Microsoft have done phenomenal jobs upgrading the default Garmin avionic systems within Microsoft flight simulator however this is an add-on that I specifically use for a particular number of different aircraft specifically the one that I'm in now which is the high performance group h145 helicopter this is a really really great alternative if you're looking for something that's a little bit more in depth than the PMS I think it is gtn 750 which is free I know there's so many different developers doing different things out there it's difficult to keep track of all the names of them but the TDS gtn XI is just a step up it's absolutely brilliant I love it there's so much great stuff that you can do in here I'm not going to do a review of it in the moment I just wanted to quickly note it one of the things that I absolutely love about this add-on is the custom user points that you can do so I like to do lots of heli medops and so for example if I am going to be doing helymedops I've got lots of different um helipads here for different hospitals based in the UK and all sorts of different areas where I can select so for example we've got leads General infirmary here which I've saved as vh08 it's 9000 nautical miles away so we need a lot of fuel to get there but I could just click on this custom Waypoint click direct and then from wherever my location is it would take me direct to from where I am to there which is really great if you're doing those heli medops again so many more features that you can include on this I could do a whole video on it but I wanted to give a shout out because they were so generous to send this add-on to me for free to try out and so this is the TDS gtn XI so we're actually going to be moving outside of the simulator now because pretty much everything else that I need to show you I can show you outside of Microsoft light simulator this add-on here Works hand in hand with the aircraft that I just had very quickly on screen the high performance group h145 this is little nav map I really like little nav map when I'm doing VFR things or little GA aircraft or helicopter Ops because I love the map that's included with it you've got lots of different details again this is Sydney where I was looking at earlier on but if I was moving around and actually flying my aircraft would leave this kind of little black dashed line across the screen and I could see where I was going and what's really cool is there are some great scenario loaders for Microsoft Flight Sim so if I'm doing helymedops I can get like a a crash scene loaded in with an add-on through the helicopter and then on little nav map it will actually update in real time the exact location of where that incident is so if I need to reference it at all whilst flying my helicopter I I can look across on this add-on again I could dedicate an entire video onto little nav map but if you are looking at doing general aviation helicopter flying heli-med flying anything like that GA stuff VFR stuff I think little navmap is a really great place to start I know there are alternatives that are out there a lot of them being payware for this kind of thing but if you just want something that's free easy to use easy to download but with still a lot of customization that you can do and lots of different fun features little nav map is definitely worth a try I'm sure a lot of you will be familiar with the next add-on that I'm showing on screen right now and this is valanta volanta is a flight tracking uh software created by orbex and essentially what this is is well what it says it on the tin it's a flight tracker so here's my profile you can see all of the different things that I've been doing if I click on the flights tab you can see all of the flights that I've done and tracked on volanta yes there's an embarrassing amount over 1 000 in fact so far on my profile but there's so many more great things that you can do with it there's activities that you can get involved with challenges that you can do you can have a look at a list of all the countries that you've actually flown to and all the ones that you are yet to fly to which is pretty cool if you are a completionist with things like that one of the things that I love to see as well is events so if you are a member of the vat Sim or the ivao network you can go and have a look and see what multiplayer events are happening on those networks to see if you want to be a part of them and join in and you can see what airports are covered as well loads of cool things with that another feature some of these features are within the paid subscription of velanta I must add as well before I go any further is the schedules tab so if you go on here you can select An Origin airport to begin searching for flights so let's just go into London Heathrow for example and look at this we can see the current schedule at the moment of regular flights that happen out of Heathrow so if I was to click to Oslo in Norway we could see a list of the different options of all the flights that originate at London Heathrow and end in Oslo Garden at the moment you can see the flight numbers on there you can see the aircraft type all of those bits of information so if I wanted to click on one of them I could update that current flight and add it to there or I could add it to my roster of flights so there are some really Nifty things that you can do on here there is a completely free version that you can get oh there's my flight from earlier on which is just tab does too there is a completely free version so you can get like a lot of the basic features uh with valanta completely for free the flight tracking however if you do want some of the really cool things on there um like the schedules and everything like that you can uh you can get a paid subscription for that which you can obviously opt out of at any other time I feel like I'm beating a dead horse and I keep saying it over and over again I could honestly dedicate an entire video just to how to completely use volanta to its full potential but I'd rather leave you folks to go and explore that for yourselves but this is my personal flight tracker of choice at the moment moving on to AI traffic which is a big topic of discussion within flight simulator at the moment about how you do AI traffic which software do you use how do you use it again I could be here all day discussing it um I purely fly on the vapsim network I actually don't use any offline AI traffic and I have three individual sets of AI traffic installed at the moment that's Overkill but it basically means that I get the best kind of range of choice of aircraft to hopefully get good model matching on the vatsum network if you don't know what model matching is it essentially means that if somebody is flying on the vatsim network as a British Airways A320 when you look out of the window on the vatsum network when you're flying you would see them as a British Airways A320 now there are three kind of real big contenders here at the moment as far as I'm aware there's AIG there's fsltl and there is FS traffic FS traffic is payware um I do have that but I don't really utilize it too much and AIG is got a great variety of different models but is also quite a pain to install or at least it was when I first did it so what I would recommend at the moment if you're just starting out is fsltl which is super easy to install you actually need to download the flyby wire installer for those of you who are fans of the flyby wire A320 Neo project um but this fsltl you simply just install the models from here you can also install the traffic injector if you are looking for offline AI traffic and they also have a DOT VMR file to put in V pilot as well so if you're just starting out if you're just getting onto the vatsim network if you don't know whether you should be paying for FS traffic you don't know if you want to sit through the faff of sorting through AIG just get this it's really really simple almost a one-click install and it does the job fine and then you can potentially look into some more options I'll give honorable mentions to the other two there um just because I do use them myself and it does mean that I've got a vast array of different aircraft showing in the Sim but if you just want something quick easy as I like to call it anti-faff to install for your AI traffic definitely go with FSL TL okay we're almost there folks I hope you're still getting on well with the video thanks to all of you who have watched all of the videos so far I hope you are enjoying next up is another add-on called Rex at Q season now this add-on is payware and I would definitely class this one as not something that is absolutely essential to have in your simulator but could definitely make a difference if you do choose to pick it up it kind of does what it says on the tin it customizes or dynamically automates your Global Seasons within Microsoft flight simulator it does all sorts of different things like changing the color of the trees and the ground textures and so many different stuff to basically match the season that you are flying in you can select which preset you want if you do want to manually do so and you can see the different seasons here and you can kind of see some of the different options you can really see some of those lovely gold yellowy colored trees within the fall so if you do want to select these manually you you can and apply them to the Sim what I do is I just have the automated option and so you can set a time within your PC routine that at a certain time in the day Rex Accu season will open apply the latest automated settings for the time of year that it is in real world and then when you next load into Microsoft flight simulator it will have that applied again really anti-faff to use would I say it's an absolute essential thing well maybe so if you like low level flying if you're a general aviation person and you like that low level of things where you're really going to be seeing that nice dense foliage at a low level for a long time maybe this add-on would be a really great add-on for you if you're like me and you spend most of your time at 35 000 feet in Cruise in an airliner you don't necessarily notice the difference until you're say on Final Approach or when you've just departed an airport do I like the add-on yes would I recommend it yes if you are debating between this add-on and maybe some other payware add-ons that I've already mentioned I would say that this is slightly lower down on the category of essential needs within the simulator but still something that I enjoy using now this add-on right here is what I call a Hidden Gem that I am so unbelievably appreciative of God that's a mouthful that I cannot even begin to describe it this is msfs add-on Linker what this does is on the right hand side of the screen it will show your Microsoft flight simulator Community folder I.E the location of most of your external add-ons within flight simulator and on the left we'll show a custom folder set up that you have made yourself where you can install your add-ons to then what you can do is you can actually add or remove add-ons to the official Community folder clear things up and this is really useful you can see that I've actually got quite a lot of things activated in here and I'm sure I could move quite a lot of this stuff out but what I've got is a really cool system in place so for example if I click on scenery here and then airports I have made a folder for every single country where I've got a custom airport so then if I knew let's say I'm planning a stream for the day and I go right I need to go and plan a flight in New Zealand I'm going to go to New Zealand today I would click on the New Zealand Tab and then I've got all of my scenery installed in here for my airports in New Zealand let's say I'm going to do the amazing flight beam Auckland Airport I would simply click on that and as you can see on the right hand side I've got a green icon here to say that flight beam Auckland is now successfully installed into my community folder and so when I now start Microsoft flight simulator data that scenery will be activated this is so so so useful because not only can everything feel very very cluttered when all of your add-ons are just installed in one Community folder and by having this kind of custom setup where you can activate and deactivate things at your needs clears things up but it also means that you can install this on any hard drive that you want it just so happens to be for me that I do have my add-ons on the same folder as my official install but let's say if you've got a massive four terabyte hard drive where you want all of your add-ons for the Sim to be you can have that on here and then just leave your community folder and your official install on another hard drive if you want as well the other advantage to msfs add-on Linker is that this will dramatically help your loading times for example for me I use AIG model matching and when I have the enable in my community folder my load times into the Sim take quite a considerable amount of time if I then deactivate the AIG model matching which I've got here if I deactivate it within the add-on Linker I can load into my sim a lot quicker because the simulator is not having to read through all of the files for that add-on whenever it loads in the best part about msf as sorry msfs add-on Linker though is that it is completely free it's available on flightsim.to as are so many great add-ons and it's completely free so everybody can use it without a single penny which is really really really great to see I absolutely love this again I could do a video on it if you want to have a look this is what it looks like so I've got an msfs folder here on a four terabyte hard drive I have my official install folder on here so you'll see the community folder and you'll see the official folder in there but I have this folder which I've made myself called add-ons and I've set up all of these folders myself as you can see so if I'm doing air ambulance flying I can click these and activate all of these airports and sceneries that I've downloaded and they will only be activated once I've enabled them in here so if I did UK and clicked on this folder look look at how many things that's just added as a symbolic link into my community folder and then if I don't need any of them for a particular flight I can just click that again and they've all gone I love this add-on it is so so so underrated and I wish more people used it so if you haven't already please think about downloading msfs add-on Linker it will change your life within the SIM okay so that's it a few honorable mentions to some other softwares that I use that spy to be able to look at the vatsim map V pilot for my pilot client to connect to the vatsum network the Sim brief downloader as well to be able to download flight plans to my aircraft is another great one we've got all sorts of different things that I could mention in terms of takeoff calculators I've really not gone into those because we could just be here all day going through those please forgive me if I have forgotten any individual add-ons within this video but I just wanted to kind of get the core add-ons that I use virtually every day or I find to be super useful noted in this video so that everybody had all of my latest information about what I'm using in the simulator I'm so excited to see what's on the horizon though within Microsoft flight simulator I know there are lots more great add-ons that are in the work maybe we'll add some more to our list maybe we'll swap some in our list in the future if so I'll try and maybe update this video um in a later date but that's going to be it for now I really hope you enjoyed this video thank you so much for the developers who supported me by sending some of the products that I've shown on today's stream uh for free but most of them I paid for myself or community members made for free so big thanks to them as well once again hope you enjoyed the video if you did please leave a like subscribe to the channel and also leave a comment letting me know about any of your essential add-ons within Microsoft light simulator but for now that's it thanks for watching

Channel: Chewwy94

Views: 21,176

Keywords: Microsoft Flight Simulator, MSFS, FS2020, flight simulator, fsx, flight sim, aviation, navigraph, simbrief, Flow, Flow Pro, GSX, FSDreamTeam, FSRealistic, Reshade, TDS GTN, Garmin, LittleNavMap, Volanta, ORBX, FSLTL, Model Matching, REX, AccuSeason, Addon Linker, Chewwy, Chewwy94

Id: cZGML1MCHnA

Length: 34min 52sec (2092 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2023