It’s been a long time since we’ve had a developer stream with the Microsoft Flight Simulator team… but they’re back! Yesterday they hosted a lengthy stream showcasing the work that is ongoing and coming up. Let’s have a look!

The live stream

I’m so happy that Jorg, Seb, and Martial together with Community Manager Jayne are back for a new Q&A dev stream. As Jorg expressed during the intro, it has been quite a while since they did one and a mix of the team needing a bit of a rest after a very busy 2025 plus a personal issue that Jorg had to step away from for a little while conspired to create the long delay.

I was even a bit worried that maybe some of the other upheavals within Microsoft had affected the team, however, that doesn’t appear to be the case and they are back with the usual mix of announcements, answers, and so forth. Their genuine enthusiasm always reassures me and fills me with hope for the platform.

Things that we’ve learned

Jorg has given us a new roadmap update showing off a slightly revised outlook for the sim. There’s a mix of sim updates, city and world updates, new aircraft, aircraft and avionics updates and more!

Sim Update 5 is of course on the way and the word from Jorg is that they have a few remaining bugs that they need to have sorted out before launch. It may arrive as soon as next week if things go well. The update will roll out core updates, aircraft updates, marketplace changes, improvements to performance, PlayStation VR2 support, PlayStation Marketplace opens up, and more.

Seb from Asobo spent some time showing visualization updates and technology improvements on storm-based updrafts as well as better helicopter flight dynamics. It sounds like there have been some meaningful changes as we come into the new update.

Aircraft and Avionics update will focus on the An-2, ATR-42-600/72-600, Fokker F.VII, Latecoere 631, Savoia M S.55. There are significant changes and updates to the lot of them so that is great!

World Update 21 has been announced as a return to Australia. The update includes new imagery for major cities like Perth, Canberra, and Sydney, 29 points of interest, and 6 new hand crafted airports. There are new activities too like 3 discovery flights, 4 precision landings/landing challenges, low altitude challenges, bushtrip (on 2020), and 2 rally races. That comes May 5th!

Local Legend 24 is also coming as part of the same update. The CAC Boomerang, a warbird, has been developed by iniBuilds. Cool!

Working Title’s Matt Nischan joined in to give a detailed update on the Praetor 600. The features for the aircraft includes a full Electrical Power Generation and Distribution system simulation, detailed physics based hydraulics simulation, fully custom physics based turbine simulation for the engines. Full IRS with inertial capable AHRS computing gyros and accelerometers. The level of simulation sounds like something you might expect from Black Square or A2A which sounds great.

Raul from FSReborn made a bit of a surprise appearance and is bringing his expertise to some first party aircraft releases. Expert Series 2 is confirmed as the Piper M600! The aircraft comes with detailed engine simulation as well as visual models to show off items like oil levels. The aircraft has G3000 avionics, detailed electrical systems and the like. It sounds like a great new Expert Aircraft Series release!

Jorg and team talked about a significantly updated Marketplace UI that should improve the experience. They are looking into some better rating systems too which I’m hopeful will provide for better ratings.

Another interesting item that came up was news of the Caravelle airliner. Originally announced to follow the Boeing 707, Jorg said somewhat diplomatically that the project has been restarted from scratch. My own impression is that the issues with the 707 from Aeroplane Heaven caused them to switch to another developer. We’ll see if that’s borne out when the Caravelle arrives.

Finally, Jorg confirms that the team will be there at FSExpo 2026 this year! Great to hear!

For the rest of the questions and answers you can of course listen in to the developer stream yourself. Either way, its great to have them back!