This year should be a big one for flight simulation in general with the likely launch of Microsoft’s new Flight Simulator series and a return to a product title that had been abandoned for several years. This first update talks a little about the next wave of alpha testers and gives us a little insight into top questions from the community – the kind they have a habit of eventually addressing.

Tech Alpha 2 coming soon

The first wave of Tech Alpha testers are already flying away on very early builds of the Flight Simulator product and it’s clear from the notes that there are issues with everything from crashes back to the desktop to key bindings not working properly. None of this is worrying in the slightest as the software is still in alpha and thus still a very early product.

Between the 20th and the 27th of January, Tech Alpha 2 invites will be sent out (and Tech Alpha 1 testers will be automatically added to wave 2) and on the 27th the build should be ready for testing.

As of yet, we don’t really know from a public perspective on what is included in the test but I would imagine it will be very similar to the demo builds that we’ve seen from the team so far.

Key community items

The update also lists some top questions from the community. Microsoft and the developers at Asobo Studio have a habit of answering those questions as quickly as possible so I wanted to highlight a bunch of them:

• Aircraft list
• Campaign mode/Missions/Progression
• Airport list/detail level
• Pricing
• Release date

There are more but of course the community is asking away on all of them.

Of that list, right now I am very interested to know what the final aircraft list will be for launch and indeed if launch is intended for this year. Some have expressed doubts about hitting a launch window in 2020 but at this point it’s still early in the year and we don’t have a full sense of what they intend to have at launch.

I suspect that Flight Simulator will follow a conventional industry launch window of somewhere between October and November and it may even line-up with the launch of a new XBox. We’ll probably know a lot more by June – of course there are many more developer updates coming between now and then.