Microsoft Flight Simulator: Taxiing up my driveway

I’ve looked and looked and can’t find out where Microsoft ever officially said that you would be able to find your house in its world-spanning flight simulator, but it sure as heck looks like every other review of the game mentions that.

First, I have always loved flight simulators. I think I bought every edition of the original Flight Simulator; I even tried that F2P version where you flew a bushwhacker in Hawai’i, though I never felt connected enough to actually pay for better planes or other expansions. I don’t think many other people did, either.

My dad, the omnicompetent godlike being he was, flew private planes. He had part ownership of a little Cessna. He joked that his part was “the engine and the wheels”, but I didn’t know he was joking when I bragged about it to the kids at school. They thought I was hilarious. My one moment of standup comedy fame…

He always thought us kids should learn to fly, but I never could afford it. We did belong to the EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association) when we lived in Marina, California, as they had great educational programs for kids, and the airport was within walking distance. Through that, the kids and I got a bunch of rides in planes over the years.

This new one, though, is the first one that contains the Marina Airport — and the Monterey Airport that I worked next to, and Concord Airport which was just up in the Heights. Being able to see those old places again would be worth it.

I pulled the trigger throttle Friday, and was done downloading the 91GB patch bright and early Sunday morning. I plugged in my headphone and my XBox controller and got flying. I played through a couple of the tutorials to get an idea for the controls, then went off on my own.

I started with a quick flight from the Marina airport to the Monterey airport. I could see the neighborhood where my house would be, but the layout was entirely different. Flying to Monterey, Route 1 looked familiar and I could pick out the old Fort Ord artillery grounds easy enough, but nothing quite looked right. The buildings where I used to work were missing.

I reset and flew from Bradley to Brainard in the Hartford, Connecticut area. The building where I work is its own separate black tower, impossible to miss, but it wasn’t there. Hartford is filled with iconic buildings, but while some were there, most weren’t.

Concord, New Hampshire seemed detailed, but I could not find the state capital. It’s right off Main Street; it’s literally impossible not to see, even from across the Merrimack. I reset and flew from Manchester, NH to Portsmouth. None of those beautiful bridges were represented accurately, and Portsmouth itself seemed stamped on a blurry photograph of a different town.

When I complained about this on Twitter, Lum the Mad pointed out that only some 300 or so cities actually were modeled:

Only a small subset of cities (well, 341 so not *small*) got the photogrammetry treatment; the rest is AI-extruded Bing Maps satellite photography.https://t.co/2kYV4n9ONA

— Scott Jennings (@Lum_) August 30, 2020

I looked through the list in the link, and saw that Concord, New Hampshire was one of those cities, the only one in New Hampshire to get the treatment. I went in game to take another look — and I STILL didn’t see the state capitol. But I persevered, followed Pleasant Street out of the downtown area, found the high school, found the hospital, turned right past the hospital on Fisk — and there was a bare hill with a line of houses on it.

Down the hill was Long Pond…

I was pretty excited; I botched the approach a couple of times but did manage to land on the street, though the street didn’t match the house positions, which was weird.

This is Little Pond, where we used to go ice skating. There’s actually some sort of airplane beacon on the hill to the left there, but it isn’t represented in the game, which is weird. Seems like the kind of thing you’d put in a flight simulator.

And finally…

I can now say I taxied to my house in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. 9 Via Tranquilla, Concord, NH, 03301. Come by and say hello!

… to the people who live there now, I guess, since I haven’t lived there since 1979… Also, the house from the ground doesn’t actually look anything like that, but from the air it does.

How is the game? It’s great, I love it. They have some gamelike challenges to do, like landing precisely on a really tricky and short runway, which I did finally manage to do, but I didn’t score highly. It’s fun to try and work out the controls to some of the more complicated planes — I flew a Beechcraft twin engine from Monterey to San Francisco and couldn’t quite get the autopilot to work like I wanted. I guess I need to do some research.

What’s next is to find some other cities on that list and begin exploring. There’s also a subreddit with people adding more cities… and other things… there’s apparently a Star Destroyer threatening Manhattan in some versions 🙂