The Tech Preview for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is now underway and you may have already started to see content trickling out. Let’s look at how you can get into the preview and a talk a bit about expectations at this stage. We’ve also got a schedule for upcoming live stream events from the Microsoft team. Here we go!

Sign up for the technical alpha

Microsoft are inviting players to sign up and take part in the technical alpha for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Alpha tests are typically part of testing with a still in development product (while beta testing is typically done when the product is content complete and bugs are being sorted out). The alpha is a limited test with a small amount of content and features intended to work on specific features and that’s what this appears to be.

Here’s a little of what Microsoft had to say about the alpha:

Your participation in the technical alpha will automatically provide us with most of the data we need. While the technical alpha is ongoing, we’ll be tracking health and usage of the new online services through telemetry. The technical alpha is not intended to gather feedback on the overall design or features of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and the scope of what is available will be limited.

As this and other elements of the sign-up state, the alpha is aimed at testing the systems that support the sim. As its a technical alpha it is not testing the overall scope of the sim and so some of the early comments I’ve seen have focused on UI, usability, graphics (which are quite good) and other aspects of the sim that we as users interact with. But the test itself is aimed more at the underlying systems – the streaming data, weather, traffic, and so forth.

There will be glitches and missing content and issues aplenty I’m sure but I would caution against reading into some of those pieces when were not looking at the complete picture. That will come when it releases and I will be writing an awful lot about it when it does!

If you are curious and want to take part in the technical alpha, more information and the sign-up form are available here.

I’m personally going to wait until release day and see what that looks like!

Get ready for live streams

Even if you aren’t keen on the technical alpha, we’re going to get a ton of content from content creators, live streamers, and from Microsoft themselves thanks to a series of developer updates and live streams intended to tell us more about the sim and its content as we work our way towards release.

We’ve got a schedule of upcoming events!

It’s going to be a busy few weeks with streams on October 16, 23, and 30 and then three more in November as we work towards release. Aircraft partners, the developers that Microsoft have partnered with to make many of the aircraft in 2024, are going to be a big feature with three streams with four developers planned for each. These will undoubtedly include developers like iniBuilds, BlueMesh, Carenado, GotFriends, Miltech, and others who have contributed.

There’s also a Marketplace discussion on October 30 and a World Partners talk which will no doubt cover some of the scenery that we’ll see in the sim. Those dates and more are covered in the October 10th development update.

Lots coming up. Lots to be excited about!