New scenery and new planes! That’s what’s coming to Microsoft Flight Simulator with a series of announcements coming in rapid fire motion happening at GamesCom 2022 in Germany. Some of the announcements are already in the marketplace too so let’s have a look!
Junkers F.13!
The world’s first all-metal transport aircraft is the next local legend and its available on the marketplace right now.
The single-engine F 13, designed at the end of World War I, took its maiden flight on June 25, 1919. Crewed by one or two and able to accommodate up to four passengers, the F 13 would remain in production for more than a decade and in service for more than thirty years, with over 300 built. Early in its lifespan, the F 13 formed the basis for the airline Junkers luftverkehr. One of the world’s first air carriers, Junkers luftverkehr would ultimately form an important component of the German airline Luft Hansa.
The aircraft comes with 10 liveries, comes with two variants including a restored version with modern avionics as well as a classic version with original gauges, there’s also a ski and seaplane version and its available to you right now in the Marketplace for $14.99 USD.
Free City Update
A new free scenery update is also now available for download. This is City Update 01, a new kind of update for MSFS, and it brings with it new photogrammetry for several German cities. Those cities include Hanover, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Bonn, and Cologne.
New 40th Anniversary Edition trailer new reveals
A second trailer for the 40th Anniversary Edition has been revealed and it gives us a ton of interesting new content to pine for while we wait for this update. The 40th Anniversary update includes 12 new aircraft, 12 heliports, 12 glider airports, 6 classic commercial airports (including the famous Meigs Field in Chicago), and 20 historic franchise missions.
Among the reveals today we’ve learned that the famous (or perhaps infamous) Hughes H-4 Hercules transport, also known as the Spruce Goose, will be available to fly. Another Goose, the Grumman G-21A Goose is also being included. Also spotted are tow planes for gliders and ground crew walking the glider wings along the runway.
All of this will be free and is coming November 11.
You can watch the whole thing including an interview with the Asobo and Microsoft team on the Xbox Booth Live Stream below. Exciting times ahead for Microsoft Flight Simulator!
Stormbirds 
City updates? I like it. Maybe we’ll see those more frequently than world updates. Nice.
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I hope the smaller scale allows them to expand the areas they cover.
I can understand the EU & US centrism due to market demos and available data, but there’s a huge world out there…
Then again, it’s all included in the original $$ paid for the sim, so I definitely appreciate it!
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> but there’s a huge world out there…
Amen, I’d really love to see them touch areas of Africa, the Middle East and Asia eventually. There’s amazing places to visit which unfortunately need some extra love and tidying up both in texturing and terrain data.
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It might! I suspect this may be an acknowledgement that they can get some good city photogrammetry but may not be able to get better DEM or imagery in some areas of the world. So we might see some more diverse locales get an update. I hope anyways!
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one wonders what is the point of all these “local legends” airplanes.
they are all the same, no sputtering engines, no awkward flying dynamics, no character at all.
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I think they have a few uses. One of them is that there is a preservation aspect (Jorg has said as much) so just doing the scans and getting them into the sim with such high fidelity adds another layer of preservation of the history. That on its own I applaud.
MSFS does have some flight model issues, no doubt about it, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that they all fly the same or that they lack character. They also aren’t all that deeply modeled.
At this point they surely have data on the sales of these and have a good development cost to sales ratio. It must be working out.
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If their not churning, they’re not earning. And MSFS2020 are churning out a lot of aircraft at the moment.
The Hughes H4 “Birch Lurch” managed to fly for less than 30 seconds and never left ground effect. It represents the death of the seaplane airline concept. But it doesn’t seem like an interesting addition to the game.
The MSFS2020 aircraft are very shallow with plastic flight models, so the value is really just in the historical-awareness aspect and the “what if” factor. They do look very pretty though.
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What an amazing content cornucopia!
I would be very interested to see the usage details for the classic aircraft, though.
I love the seaplanes, and I love the fact they’re “preserving” the prominent historical aircraft, but even a devout plane geek like me will probably only ever use them a handful of times.
Except for the Spruce Goose – now THAT’S gonna be interesting!
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I think it may depend on which classic airplane you’re talking about. The DC-3? I think that will get a ton of use. The Goose? Yeah probably. Spruce Goose I’m not sure if I’ll fly all that much by contrast… but if that sounds like a blast to you then it may be a good indication that many of these will get a lot of flight time.
And, as you say, there’s that preserving element which I think is really cool too.
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I don’t know what to call the 40th Anniversary upgrade because in the past all this content would have been a paid expansion or maybe a whole different version of MSFS to buy. And when I also take the GOTY content, the World Updates and the free Top Gun F/A-18E DLC into consideration, my purchase of the Standard Edition (on sale at that!) has been one of the best investments in my flight simming career. I don’t particularly love MSFS yet but I do like flying it in VR. I also like the direction MSFS is going and I think I’ll really enjoy some of these new aircraft.
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The value is a almost absurd with all of the stuff that they have thrown at us. I can only imagine that the Marketplace is basically printing money.
They are doing good stuff!
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all i’ve ever wanted is aircraft specific key bindings. It would solve so many issues. wobble pump you say… err is that the same as an electric fuel pump? who knows but lets make things interesting by creating one arbitrary binding library.
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