Microsoft Flight Simulator - TV Tropes (2025)

Following

• Accidentally Correct Writing: One commercial included a joke involving a plane crashing into the Empire State Building. Truth is, a plane did actually crash into the building once time in 1945.
• Best Level Ever: Some airports are fan-favorites for many FSX players:
  • The Princess Juliana Airport in St. Maarten (ICAO code TNCM) is maybe the favorite one, being one of the most difficult airports to land, just like the one in Real Life.
  • The Edwards Air Force Base in California (ICAO code KEDW) is another favorite one, having the largest runway of the world, perfect for testing new aircraft — again, just like in the real world.
    • The Edwards runway is three statute miles long: in a small enough plane, you can take off and then land without going around. The first tutorial in Flight Simulator X is to do just this in a small ultralight, making this as beginner friendly as possible.
  • Arguably, the airport closest to your real home could count. Especially if you can locate your home from the air among the randomly generated scenery in what is essentially finding a Needle in a Stack of Needles.
• Fan Nickname:
  • A disturbing non-fandom-based one; as the 2020 game's trailer played at the Xbox Press Briefing at E3 2019, once the live chat on Mixer realized what game was being shown before the airplanes and logo showed up, messages saying "9/11 Simulator" or "Terrorist Simulator" and the like began to pop up. Yikes.
  • The 2020 entry is simply known as Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.
• Friendly Fandoms: Managed this with Animal Crossing of all things, thanks to their respective 2020 releases being conveniently timed escapsism at a time when people weren't leaving their houses during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Judging by the amount of mods, addons and additional planes you can buy or download for free, the franchise seems to be very popular in Germany.
• Good Bad Bugs: The Melbourne Monolith. Thanks to a typo made in OpenStreetMap by an architectural student, the 2020 Microsoft Flight Simulator rendered a 212-story behemoth of a skyscraper in the northern suburb of Fawkner. (The typo had already been corrected before the 2020 title's release, but not in time for when the data was imported.)
• Harsher in Hindsight: At least two magazine ads for Flight Simulator 95 encouraged the player to swerve their plane in between the World Trade Center towers. Ouch. Doesn't exactly help either that, as mentioned below, the terrorists responsible for 9/11 partly trained using this game.
  • In fact, pretty much anything related to the Twin Towers in this game will come off as this, considering the subject matter. One commercial even had a joke about crashing into the Empire State Building.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • This exchange courtesy of this instructional video for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000 by King Flight School, where John is flying over New York.

    Martha: John, you just about crashed into the Empire State Building!
    John: *Aside Glance* Hey, that would be cool!

  • Many of them are abound thanks to Airforceproud95 in Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition and the resultant Newbie Boom it brought such as "Blog about it" and "Write a book" ^note, "You can proceed to ALT+F4" ^note and "Welcome to FSX: Steam Edition" ^note.
  • The 2020 game was on its way towards Fountain of Memes territory within a couple weeks of launch. It brought an assortment of amusing glitches like the Melbourne skyscraper, people flying to specific locations like Epstein's Island or Area 51, the potential for being a 9/11 Simulator, the unreal visuals with Crysis levels of hardware torture, and being the closest thing most people will get to air travel during a global health crisis. All memeable enough on their own, but receiving significantly more mainstream attention compared to older versions thanks to Microsoft featuring it prominently in their Xbox Game Studios marketing and Game Pass making it accessible to people who may not have ever thought about playing it.
• Mis-blamed: Somewhat, as the September 11, 2001 terrorists trained with this program for carrying out the attacks, even if they also trained with real planes. This is possibly one of the reasons, along with lower sales and Microsoft shifting from PC games to Xbox consoles, why Microsoft decided to kill the series until late into the Xbox One's lifespan.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Installing planes in the simulator, especially freeware ones, can be a massive pain in the ass for anyone who wants to do so, since, unlike other simulators such as XPlane, every part of every aircraft installed, such as gauges, sound files and effects, must be installed in separate folders from the aircraft model, instead of putting all the necessary files in a single folder. One of the most egregious examples of this, besides the already mentioned freeware Concorde model, is the one based in the Eurofighter Typhoon: Not only you have to do the above mentioned steps, but you also have to modify the files included in the model to work in FSX and Prepar3d, and to do this you need the manual included in the zip file, which includes three complete pages just to explain how to install the plane in the simulator. The 2020 reboot hopes to remedy this with a built-in marketplace similar to the one used by Minecraft.
  • It also made installing 3rd party addons significantly easier, by having each addon being inside its own folder, removing the chance of any default files being inadvertedly overwritten.
  • For the 2024 version, developers decided to stream data to the client, instead of having the files on users harddrive. However, even with very fast high speed connection, users could occasionally experience poor quality download speeds, in some cases leading to entire landmasses missing.
• That One Level: Just like in Real Life, some airports are notorious for being a pain to land on them:^note
  • The Benito Juarez Airport in Mexico City (ICAO code MMMX) is notorious for being a pain to land, both in the game and Real Life, since you have to avoid the mountains surrounding Mexico City. If that wasn't enough, if you're using real weather it's hot and high, meaning that the air is thin enough to complicate take-off and landing.
  • The Toncontin Airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras (ICAO code MHTG) has a similar case like the Mexico City one, except the difficulty to land is raised up to eleven, since the airport is located in the middle of the city as well.
  • The Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong (ICAO code VHHX, a fictitious ICAO code since it's now closed. The actual one, Chep Lap Kok, uses the VHHH one, which was its previous one), despite being closed in 1998, still appears in all versions of the game, and both the real one and the video game version of it are the most difficult airports to land over there, since you have fly over Hong Kong City and sometimes over their buildings. No wonder why it was closed.
  • Trying to land on an aircraft carrier. For an extra challenge, try to land into one with an airliner.
  • The Sunan Airport in Pyongyang, North Korea (ICAO code ZKPY) is an inversion of this trope: The most annoying part of this airport is taking off, since the runway is too far from the boarding gate and you need a lot of time for taxiing just to be able to take off. On the other hand, landing on this airport is very easy.
  • Landing at SABA, which has the shortest commercial (asphalt) runway in the world. Though note how one player manages land with a 747 (granted even at full realism settings, the stopping distance of jets, particularly the 747, is much shorter than real life. Regardless, that's still a major achievement).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The 2020 reboot features a stunning photorealistic map of the entire world in 1:1 scale.