Flight Simulation developers shared news today, focusing on aircraft and a free airport for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, MSFS 2020, and X-Plane.
Yet, before we move on to the news, below you can find another story that received its own individual coverage.
Without further ado, you can check out the news below.
F-22 Raptor Gets Repurposed into “a True Enthusiast-level Simulation.”
Iris Simulations provided a development update about its F-22 Raptor, and there have been some changes. Initially, the developer pitched this as a casual-level simulation, but surprising absolutely no one, people did not really welcome the idea with open arms.
As such, the folks at Iris decided to scrap that idea and repurpose the project as a “true enthusiast-level simulation,” as you can read below.
“It’s been a little quiet on our social channels lately — the team’s been deep in development across several projects, including our upcoming F-22 Raptor for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
The Raptor has now entered its alpha phase, and we’re excited to share an early look at the cockpit coming to life.
During the early stages of development, we uncovered a number of legacy coding and functional issues from our previous Raptor Driver product for Prepar3D.
After a careful review, we decided that taking the entire Raptor codebase back to scratch was a better investment of time and effort than trying to patch code that’s now over a decade old. This fresh start allows us to deliver the level of fidelity and reliability our customers deserve.
While we originally planned this as a casual-level release, our community made it clear they wanted something deeper — a true enthusiast-level simulation. We’ve listened, and we’re bringing our A-game to make that happen.
The new avionics suite is being rebuilt from the ground up, with every display, sensor, and interaction carefully crafted to meet the same high standards set by our other advanced aircraft.
You may notice a few unpainted areas in these early screenshots — they’re simply awaiting the art team’s brush as development continues.
And as the real F-22 remains heavily classified, we’ve done our best to capture the depth and complexity of its systems, balanced with a touch of imagination to ensure we stay on the right side of various export laws.
It’s still early days, but the Raptor is shaping up beautifully — rebuilt, refined, and ready to soar in MSFS.
Built from the ground up. Built for MSFS. Built for enthusiasts.”
MD-11 for Microsoft Flight Simulator Shows Upcoming Major Update in Video
TFDi Design shared a video showing the major update coming for its McDonnell Douglas MD-11 for MSFS 2020.
The video can’t be embedded here, so you’ll have to watch it on their Facebook page.
While this is for MSFS 2020, the developer also mentioned that the wait for an MSFS 2024 version is “not long” now.
Kariba Airport Released for Free for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and MSFS 2020
Vortex Scenery Design is continuing the quest to populate Africa with tons of free and high-quality airports. This time around, it’s the turn of Kariba Airport (FKVB) in Zimbabwe.
It’s available for both MSFS 2024 and MSFS 2020 on Flightsim.to, and you can check out a few screenshots above.
If you’d like to read more flight simulation news, you can find plenty in our previous 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.
