As real as it gets: Pilots lend their expertise to the most authentic flight sim on the market
The pilot had been missing for about a week, last seen taking off from an airport in Covington, Washington, heading home in his Piper Dakota to Puyallup, about 36 miles south of Seattle. Though he had gone down in the heavily developed and densely populated suburbs, no one had been able to find him or his small aircraft.
This was 2007 and Khoi Duong was on an air mission as part of a search and rescue team. He’d already gone up once that day looking for the missing pilot, eyes continually scanning the landscape below, looking for something, anything, that could lead them to him and his aircraft.
On that second flight, despite overcast skies, Duong saw a flash of light out of the corner of his eye and told the pilot sitting next to him to turn around. And there was the missing aircraft, in a heavily forested area a thousand feet below. The pilot had not survived.
“It was a lucky break,” Duong says. “On one hand, there was a sense of pride [in finding the aircraft]. At the same time, you realize what you’re seeing is a deceased person. This was right before the holidays, so it was a somber moment. But I’m glad I was able to bring closure to the family.”
He caught the flying bug from a lifelong fascination with World War II history and joined CAP after he’d gotten his private pilot certification, thinking it would be a great way to build up his hours of experience in the air.
“I thought this would be a great way to take my passion for flying and give back to the community,” says Duong, who started out looking out the back of the plane as a mission scanner before moving up to the front of the plane as a mission observer.
He focuses on looking outside, trying to find whoever is missing or their downed aircraft. While it’s often a sad outcome, he feels a sense of accomplishment in fulfilling his duty to families suffering until their loved ones are found.
Most ambitious Flight Simulator ever
Duong, who was raised in Seattle, was a high school intern at Microsoft. After he graduated from the University of Washington, he returned to Microsoft and is now a full-time quality engineer within Xbox Game Studios.
His professional and volunteer worlds intertwine constantly. As a tester, he lent his search and rescue expertise to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, which launched Nov. 19 on PCs (Win 10/11 and Steam) and consoles (Xbox Series X|S).
MSFS 2024 is a key player in the hobby of flight simulation and has enjoyed 11 releases prior to this one, with the last major launch in 2020. About 15 million people have played MSFS 2020 the past four years, by far the largest audience the franchise has ever had. During the previous 38 years in the “sim” – a genre of video games that emulates the real-world – there was a total of 30 million simmers.
Fans of the sim have asked repeatedly for search and rescue situations, and they’ve gotten their wish with this release. MSFS 2024 is as close as someone can get on a computer or console to flying all kinds of aircraft, from gliders to Cessnas to vintage fighter planes and commercial airliners.
In this newest version, flying search and rescue missions is a career option, complete with step-by-step guides that allow players to take what they’ve learned and apply it to each stage of becoming a first responder.
In MSFS 2024, you can stroll around outside the plane, examine every detail and even see how the light changes inside the cockpit once you’re inside. All those controls, pedals, throttle levers and displays can be intimidating, but in-sim certifications and training that emulate what you’d do in real life will leave you feeling a lot more comfortable with wheels-up. When you land, you can see the blades of grass move, the indentations in the ground the wheels leave behind and take in all the outdoors around you.
To show this painstaking attention to detail and accuracy, Xbox hosted a preview event in September in Arizona with helicopter and plane tours of the Grand Canyon. Content creators could then compare the sim version of that great wonder of the world at demo stations back at their hotel. For some, it was their first time in the U.S.
Simmers have the opportunity to hover over swirling seas and rise above picturesque peaks as they hear and see all the sights and sounds of an emergency situation: sirens, wind, communications with dispatch, people calling for help. This world is a digital twin of the real world, with details and variables such as light, weather, currents and time of day all changing in real-time.
The sim tapped into Microsoft for several key components to make all this possible. Bing Maps provides the infrastructure to make this world as accurate as possible, while Azure is key for machine learning, storage and streaming. Cognitive Services contributes machine learning for speech.
In addition to simulating the training needed to become a commercial airline pilot, there are other career options in the sim: air ambulance pilot, aerial advertising, helicopter cargo transport and aerial firefighting among them.
People want to do good
Anybody who wants to make a living in the air knows that it comes with great risk, but pilots both in the real world and the sim believe the rewards are worth it.
“I think people want to do good,” says Jorg Neumann, head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, who explains that in search and rescue missions, simmers get to pilot their planes “to serve a purpose – to help people.”
Neumann often connects with the active community tied to Microsoft’s longest running franchise, which is now 42 years old and still growing. He says that he constantly asks what they’re looking forward to most and one answer he’s heard over and over from them is to add search and rescue missions and medical evacuations to the sim.
“It’s very relatable. These situations are in the news all the time,” Neumann says. “In Seattle, you’ve got people hurt in the mountains, but in Germany, where I come from, you’re going to see more auto accidents. And the fastest way to get somebody to a hospital is to fly a helicopter.”
The increased accuracy of MSFS 2024 means that simmers can fly doctors into the Australian outback, help fight fires in Europe and release baskets to rescue boaters in distress in the Mediterranean Sea.
“Ultimately, this product is about reality,” Neumann says. “There is a pursuit of realism, authenticity and accuracy. I specifically called it authentic aviation activities instead of missions because it’s important that it’s authentic.”
That commitment to authenticity is evident all over the sim, but especially when it comes to the career paths section.
“You actually learn the tools to do it right,” Neumann says. “A lot of games don’t really onboard you to something. They highly simplify what it is and then you don’t even really scratch the surface of what’s real. Here, we’re trying to get to real.”
Sebastian Wloch, CEO and founder of French-based Asobo Studio, which leads the more technical aspects of creating the truest simulation possible, adds, “It’s more than just going from A to B, such as charters where you need to bring a plane somewhere. That’s why we picked search and rescue. You’re paying attention to different details and choices. And like real pilots, you aren’t always going to succeed.”
He explains that each person who pursues an aviation career within the sim is going to have an experience unique to them. That’s because each person’s experience is tied to the location they choose and all the variables that entails. It’s going to be very different if you start in New York, for instance, versus anywhere else in the world.
“I live in Southwestern France. Last year, there was a forest fire so big I could see it from my house. And where I live, there’s a river and that’s where planes would fill up with water and I’d see them loaded with water, headed to fight those fires,” says Wloch, relating how real-life experiences like these are incorporated into the possible missions for those who choose the search and rescue path.
David Dedeine, chief creative officer of Asobo Studio, says that would-be aviators will find the sim won’t allow for unrealistic scenarios, such as using a Cessna to land in the wild. They’d want a bush plane for that, he says.
He gets feedback from the Coast Guard, other military branches and law enforcement agencies on how they conduct rescues. It’s also helpful that the Flight Sim team can tap into partners who have experience in SAR.
Brandon Yeager – founder of Got Friends, a small team that creates high-quality add-ons for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 – is a former Naval aircrewman whose assignments included SAR. He’s been a part of teams involved in an array of scenarios such as looking for survivors of capsized boats and searching for Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, which was never recovered.
“Every time I got into the air, I specifically had a mission,” says Yaeger. “What’s awesome to see in [the sim] in 2024 is the incorporation of these mission systems and the pre-briefs and the post-analysis of how you did on that mission. And not only that, but the training aspect to make sure that you’re doing it accurately because in the military, you’re not just going to go to search and rescue unless you’ve read the manuals and done all of the research to know what you’re doing in those scenarios.”
Yaeger and his team of aviation enthusiasts specialize in aircraft development, which means simmers can download their free and paid aircraft and fly them in Flight Simulator. They’ve registered more than 2 million downloads since their formation in 2021.
‘Who doesn’t like saving people?’
Rachael Whiteford has been soaring through the air in Flight Simulator’s virtual worlds since 1998, using the first PC her mother bought when Whiteford was a pre-teen. She’s even the inspiration for the first female “avitar” – a clever blend of aviation and avatar – created by Yaeger’s Got Friends. (Those who play Flight Sim can buy packages of characters who can join them on flights.)
“It was freedom. I’ve always been a curious person, always loved exploring, so to me it was a way to see parts of the world I would never have imagined I’d go,” says Whiteford, who is originally from Manchester in the UK. Through the many iterations of the sim, she’s visited Australia, New Zealand, Central Asia, China and South America.
By the time she was 17, she knew she wanted to fly in real life and started taking lessons. She’s now a licensed pilot who rents Cessna 152 airplanes at her local club. She tries to go up every couple of months to stay current and has a YouTube channel where she reviews aircraft in Flight Sim and shows others in the Flight Sim community where she goes and how she gets there. She, too, feels the appeal of search and rescue, especially among the helicopter simmers.
“It’s positive,” she says. “Who doesn’t like saving people?”
“One of the biggest things when it comes to the community is that they’re always wanting something to do,” she explains, adding that some players have even created their own career modes in the sim.
“People wanted it for decades. This is the first time we’re seeing a native career mode in the sim, which I think is incredibly exciting because it does in fact give people that chance to do what they want. They can take on jobs. They can become their own boss. An aviation career is expensive and difficult, so this way you’re able to have that career that you might not be able to have otherwise.”
Lead photo: Brandon Yaeger looking out the window of a P-3c Orion equipped for extended search and rescue, using high-resolution cameras, radar systems, sonobuoys and other specialized sensors to methodically scan over 230,000 square miles of sea across meticulously assigned grids, while deployed with his crew over the Indian Ocean, supporting the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-370. (Photo courtesy of Brandon Yaeger)
Portrait 1: Khoi Duong, taken at MSFS 2024 Global Preview Event
Portrait 2: Brandon Yaeger, taken at MSFS 2024 Global Preview Event
Screenshots are from MSFS 2024.