A career mode, new aircraft, upgraded graphics and an advanced flight planning system are just a few of the exciting new features in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Thomas Haynes was granted an exclusive preview ahead of its November 19 release

The Boeing 737 MAX 8 is making a debut in MSFS 2024, along with more than ten other airliners

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Microsoft took the flight simulator community by storm when it released a new iteration of its long-running franchise in 2020, after a hiatus of just over eight years. The return of the American software giant marked a new era for the hobby, which over the last four years has reached new heights. In June 2023, the company announced its intention to release a new version: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (MSFS 2024). Airliner World was invited to a global preview event at the Grand Canyon in Arizona in September to learn more about this latest iteration ahead of its general release on November 19.

In his opening remarks, Jorg Neumann, head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, reflected on the last four years and the impact of the sim: “We learned a lot, and it exceeded all our expectations. It was the 11th simulator to be released and what’s interesting is how much has changed in the last four years. The franchise began in 1982 and has so far reached 45 million people. But what’s fascinating is that 15 million were in the last four years, so there really has been an explosion in this hobby.” The previous most successful version was Flight Simulator X, released in 2006, which reached five million people in 16 years. So what’s new in MSFS 2024?

The short answer is pretty much everything. The programme has been designed to take advantage of the latest technologies in simulation, cloud storage, machine learning, graphics and gaming, to create the most sophisticated simulator currently available. The previous version utilised the cloud for storage of up to two petabytes (two million gigabytes) of information (scenery, aircraft and other data), but MSFS 2024 takes this to a whole new level as practically everything will be stored in the cloud rather than on a local device. With the addition of an increased rolling cache, local storage and bandwidth usage will be significantly reduced as the sim will only download what the user actually needs. A huge benefit of this approach is shorter install and loading times. The average download and installation time for the simulator has been reduced from about two hours, down to five minutes. However, this means that a reliable internet connection has never been more important.