Flight simulators like Microsoft Flight Simulator and X-Plane let us visit the world in ways that would likely be impossible if we were to pay the tickets for every flight, but a flight simulation enthusiast decided to push the concept several steps further.
Reddit user probablyisntavirus reported on their travels that took them to every country and territory in the world in 6 years.
They started in 2019 on X-Plane 11 when they were a senior in high school, and ended a year after their graduation from university in 2025 on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, passing by MSFS 2020 while tracking their impressive progress via the Volanta flight simulation tracking app.
This took approximately 3,000 hours in the flight simulators and approximately 750 separate flights, ending last night by reproducing flight UAL80 from Newark to Nuuk in Greenland.
Below, you can see a map of their travels from the Volanta flight tracing app.
While the achievement of visiting every country in the world is already impressive enough, probablyisntavirus gave themselves some impressively realistic rules to follow, almost as if they were doing it in the real world.
First of all, they did their best to maintain continuity in their flights, departing each time from the airport they last landed at. According to the report, there are only 5-6 discontinuities among the hundreds of flights performed during the past 6 years, due to either simulator performance issues or lost records.
The only reasonable exception to this rule was the ability to transfer between airports within the same metropolitan area. For instance, they were allowed to land in Houston at George Bush Intercontinental and depart out of William P. Hobby Airport.
The second and perhaps even more impressive route is that almost every route was flown following real ones that one could book in the real world. Our hero went to great lengths using dedicated websites like flightaware and flightradar24, on top of airline booking websites, to find aircraft types, flight numbers, and departure times to reproduce. Â
As a small concession was the ability to use routes that weren’t current, but had to have existed in the last few years. For example, to reach North Korea, probablyisntavirus reproduced an Air China flight from Beijing to Pyongyang that existed before the COVID pandemic, but had not been reinstated just yet.
There are also places on Earth that can’t be directly reached with a scheduled airline flight. To reach these, probablyisntavirus temporarily left the hat of the airline captain behind after flying to the nearest useful airport, and then flew the last few miles on a helicopter or small general aviation aircraft. They also flew VIP transport aircraft for the US Air Force to reach bases like Wake Island and Diego Garcia.
To make the challenge more fun, they actually did not follow the most efficient routes, trying to visit every country as quickly as possible. They opted for scenic routes, pursued side goals, and pretty much did whatever they wanted while respecting the rules described above.
Thanks to Volanta’s data, they provided some interesting stats about their travels.
The most flight hours accrued on a single aircraft were 75 on an American Airlines Boeing 737-800, mostly flying out of Miami to visit almost every Central American and Caribbean Country. FlyDubai’s 737 fleet was also very helpful in visiting many countries, thanks to the diversity of the Emirati airline’s destinations.
The least flight hours on a single aircraft were on a DrukAir Airbus A319, which was flown for only 40 minutes from the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu to Paro, Bhutan, one of the most challenging airports in the world, surrounded by mountains.
The longest flight was performed on an Air India Boeing 777-200LR from San Francisco to Delhi, and lasted 15 hours and 11 minutes.
The shortest was a 5-minute helicopter trip from Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, to Balzers Heliport, the only landable surface in the Grand Duchy of Liechtenstein.
The average flight distance was 1500 nautical miles, taking approximately 3 hours in the air.
According to Volanta’s stats, probablyisntavirus flew 1.5 million miles and burned 11.1 million kilograms of virtual fuel, never flying the same route more than 3 times.
As someone who did something comparatively much smaller by flying around the world in less than a month when MSFS 2020 launched (and Simulation Daily did not yet exist), I have to say I’m incredibly impressed by the consistency and dedication that was put into completing this massive quest over six years. It’s certainly inspiring.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is available for PC and Xbox Series X|S.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is also available for the same platforms. If you want to see the massive visual difference against Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, you can enjoy our video and screenshot comparison.
X-Plane 11, available for PC and mobile, it’s an independent flight simulator by Laminar Research. It was succeeded by X-Plane 12 in 2022.
Volanta is a platform-agnostic flight tracking app compatible with all major flight simulators developed by Orbx. It’s currently available for PC, iOS, and Android, on top of a handy web browser version, which you can check out without an account to see who’s flying at any given time.
If you’d like to read more flight simulation news, you can find plenty in our latest roundup article from yesterday.
If you want to go further back, we have a handy overview video of the major flight simulation news in the past week. You can watch it below. As usual, leaving a like and a comment and subscribing to our growing YouTube channel is extremely helpful.
