If you’re into space weather, you’ll know that we’ve recently had a large solar flare spark some very impressive aurora activity in the skies over the poles. I unfortunately was under thick cloud and light snow at home, however, my Aurora spotting in Microsoft Flight Simulator was incredible. Here’s how it went!

Keflavik departure

I’ve been meaning to do a couple more flights with the Asobo 737 MAX8. The initial state of the aircraft left a fair bit to be desired, however, Asobo has been making updates to it. These days it’s a pretty decent 737 simulation albeit not at the level that some folks are going to hope for. No, it’s not an iFly or PMDG level experience but it’s not bad either and it is included in every 2024 install. I do wish it had some SimBrief integration as an option but it does have great integration with the EFB flight planner so that’s good.

I downloaded an Iceland Air livery for the aircraft from Flightsim.to before setting out on this flight.

Departure point was Keflavik airport. I have a very good scenery set from MK Studios (and bought through Orbx) that helps bring it to life. But that life was further added to with some very impressive Aurora displays! My first such experience in this sim.

Running through the checklists and getting the aircraft setup for the journey, I couldn’t help but take lots of screenshots including those above to highlight the display.

As near as I can tell, Asobo are loading in some sort of data from space weather to inform the aurora display. I’ve checked back a few times since and it hasn’t been there so its not there all the time which is really interesting. My sense is also that while the aurora system within the sim is tied to real world conditions in some way, it doesn’t capture the full extent as this was a particularly impressive sub-storm with visibility extending as far south as central America. I don’t think the sim captured that. This was an a-typical storm as well so it may well be that they made some decisions on just how much would be displayed and it didn’t factor in a bigger moment like this.

Following departure, the skies remain lit up for quite a long time with dancing green and a little bit of red in a vast animated display. The artists really spent some time to get this right and its spectacular when you see it! It also casts its own lighting within the sim as evidenced by the glow reflecting off of my wing.

The further south I went, however, and things began to disappear behind me.

As I approached Ireland, I could no longer see the aurora activity. I guess that’s ok because it was time to think about doing my arrival. Now I don’t know if this was an error I made in the moment or not but I couldn’t for the life of me get the approach phase to activate on the autopilot so I elected to fly the approach manually. It wasn’t the smoothest approach but I did manage to make it work.

And then there was touchdown with an almost buttery smooth landing despite a slightly wonky and less than fully stabilized approach. Still, I managed to get it cleaned up in time for a smooth touchdown.

Taxi, park, and shut down the jet.

This was mostly a typical airliner flight but the appearance of the aurora really helped make it a memorable one.