We’re nearly at the end of May and that meant that Jorg Neumann (Microsoft), Sebastian Wloch (Asobo), and Chris Burnett (Working Title) together with community manager Jayne and a special guest took to Twitch and YouTube to share with us the latest updates for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Here are some of the highlights that I took away from it!

Summary of some of the big points

The May 2025 developer stream started out the way many of them do with some acknowledgements and thank you messages to third party developers, the teams at Asobo and Microsoft and to the community.

Since launch, Jorg reports that efforts being made on the sim include the solving of 62 significant community identified bugs with another 24 in progress and 29 under investigation. He reports that they intended to launch a Local Legend in May and a Famous Flyer in April, however, they were focused on working towards Sim Update 2 launch so these have been delayed.

One of the upcoming aircraft, Famous Flyer 12, has been announced. This is a Piper PA28 Dakota and has been created by Carenado. This will be part of the “Make Good” series of aircraft on offer for free as a kind of recompense for the difficult launch of 2024.

The next City Update has also been announced and it will be focused on the United States North East. This is intended to come out around the same time as FSExpo (more on that below) with Providence and other cities getting updated imagery.

Career mode got quite a bit of discussion. Jorg reported that career and free flight are split about 50/50 on the player base and so there are plans to add more features to the mode and fix some of the issues that it has. Those plans include working on making sure that more third party aircraft are part of the experience too and Working Title went into a bit of detail on how developers can test and make use of that.

Another stat that I found interesting is that 2024 has more people flying it than 2020. I think there’s a perception in the community that it is the other way around and that the bugs of 2024 are keeping most people in 2020 but reportedly the stats do not play out that way. We, of course, did not get detailed ones but its an interesting tidbit from Jorg.

There were some great questions and we learned a bunch of things. Bush Trips in 2024 is something that is going to come back. Great! There are updates and performance improvements for VR planned. Marketplace speed of roll out for updates was talked about and Jorg said that they were again making some changes behind the scenes to move this along faster.

Expert Series 2 got quite a bit of attention with the collaboration between Asobo, Embraer and Working Title. This is the Embraer Praetor 600 project

Chris Burnett from Working Title gave much of the presentation saying that they wanted to set a new standard for Expert Series aircraft. A complete cockpit experience with no inoperable controls, all electrical circuits modeled, realistic INS simulation, GPS simulation, HUD fully functional, all different types of displays in the aircraft using the ProLine Fusion system with two flight management systems running as separate modules calculating their own outputs individually. A lot is still coming together for the Praetor 600 but it sounds like it should be quite an interesting release.

Joining the discussion was Lionel Fuentes from Asobo talking about MSFS 2020 and Sim Update 16. The update looks to incorporate new memory swapping features for Xbox players, updating the GDK for developers, backporting support for various TIN formats from 2024, switching to new aerials and elevation mesh from 2024, fixing avionics (Epic 2, UNS, WT21 and Boeing avionics all mentioned), and using the same world data as 2024.

Sim Update 16 sounds quite a bit like an effort to harmonize the world elements of 2020 and 2024 so that the two sims are easier to support side by side for quite a long time to come.

We did learn during the Q&A that the team won’t be making the trip to Oshkosh or FSExpo this year. Jorg in particular sang the praises of both events, especially plugging FSExpo 2025, but says that the teams are focused on developing the sim further.

Wrap-up

There’s more in the Q&A but those were some of the points that jumped out at me the most. The best part about these Q&A sessions is that I always walk away feeling just a little more buoyant and hopeful for how things are improving.

It’s clear that the teams behind MSFS 2024 are working hard to make it better and that a steady stream of updates and some exciting new pieces of content are all being worked on. This is good for us, its good for them, its good for the countless developers that are putting a lot of effort into third party projects for both 2020 and 2024.

I look forward to the next one!