Hello Captains and welcome back. We’re approaching the 15 month anniversary of the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and I wanted to share my thoughts on the new sim. As I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t purchase MSFS 2024 immediately on release. Microsoft released the new sim on 19 November 2024 and I was in the middle of unpacking after arriving in Texas just a few days before. My father had been in ill health and passed away in mid December. Between my move, my father’s passing the new sim was not the highest thing on my list of priorities. As my life started to get back to a new normal, I purchased MSFS 2024 with the purpose of using it for flying General Aviation VFR flights as I had a few requirements which needed to be met before moving to the new platform 100%. Of course these requirements were of my own making, but I chose to wait until such time as both Chaseplane and the PMDG 737-800 were available. Both of these add-ons were released just before Christmas and with those boxes ticked, I made the move and honestly, I haven’t looked back.
My delay in purchasing MSFS 2024 allowed me to avoid much of the initial teething problems which frustrated many in our community. By the time I purchased MSFS 2024, SU 2 was live and SU3 was on the horizon. During my Around the World Adventure in the A2A Piper Comanche, SU3 was released and of course that delivered much needed performance and stability enhancements for the sim. SU4 dropped in early December and that further tightened up performance in the sim. Today with DLSS 4.5 the performance of MSFS 2024 is far superior than what I had experienced with 2020. I experience solid performance regardless of the aircraft I’m flying or the scenery I’m flying into.
Speaking of scenery, the vast majority of the 3rd party scenery which I owned and used in MSFS 2020 is now available for 2024. I did make a decision with MSFS 2024 that I would install all add-on scenery into a folder outside of the Community folder and utilize Add-on Linker. While I never experienced issues in MSFS 2020 with just installing everything into the Community folder, I did suffer with long sim load times. While I realize that some users of Add-on Linker will only link their to and from airports at one given time, I’ve not experienced any issues having all airports within a specific region linked. At the time of me writing this article I’m mainly flying in North America, so all my scenery is organized by global region and I just select everything in North America and never need to make a change unless I decide to go elsewhere.
I realize there are still many issues with MSFS 2024 which impact those who enjoy both Career Mode, Missions and default ATC. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll ever have a default or in-game ATC system that will meet all our expectations. We’ve never had….going all the way back to Flight Simulator 2002 when ATC was first introduced it has seriously lacked in functionality and didn’t improve much through the years. While this won’t help those on console (but then again I really don’t write for that audience), if you want better ATC then look to Beyond ATC, Say Intentions or even better the VATSIM network. As for better Career Mode progression I highly recommend A Pilot’s Life or perhaps join a virtual airline and there is none better than American Virtual Airlines.
Having said all the above, my move to MSFS 2024 wasn’t without some headaches. Even before I made the switch from 2020 to 2024 I had realized the difficulties in getting some of my external hardware devices setup correctly. In Microsoft/Asobo’s infinite wisdom they decided to change various keyboard shortcuts which had been in use for decades. Thankfully they gave us an option to revert back to the old ways and that is what I ended up doing. My first flight in the PMDG 737-800 ended in near disaster when I flew from DFW to SEA and realized only when it was too late that the PMDG doesn’t like realistic turbulence. It was a stormy approach into Seattle and the PMDG 738 fought hard to maintain the ILS onto 16R. The weather was at minimums and once the runway was visible it was too late. I was running out of time and instead of doing the right thing and going around, I decided to try to stick my landing. Needless to say, the landing was rough but I managed to get her down. I’m pretty sure I blew a tire on the landing, but I survived to fly another day. I did some digging on the PMDG forums and found a message from Mathijs Kok who recommended dialing the turbulence setting down. I’ve set it to medium and once I did that, I’ve not had any other issues.
Since moving to MSFS 2024 full time, I’ve logged over 100 hours in the sim flying a mixture of the Fenix A320 family, PMDG 737-800 and 777 Family and loving every minute of it. As previously stated, the performance for me in MSFS 2024 is much better than 2020 and life is very good. So much so, it’s time for me to start up the PC and plan another flight.
Until next time…
Happy Flying!!!
Jerry