Microsoft Flight Simulator review in progress – slow climb

I could go anywhere. Within Microsoft Flight Simulator’s astonishing 1:1 scale simulation of, y’know, the actual planet Earth, the entire world is open to me. Soaring over the pyramids on the Giza Plateau is not outside the realms of possibility, nor watching the sunlight glint off my ailerons while cruising above the lowland rainforests of Borneo. I could even risk legal repercussions with a particularly gutsy low pass of the Golden Gate Bridge. But no. Instead, I’m sat on the drizzle-slicked runway of Bristol Airport, next to the A38, just south of the city I call home.

I couldn’t be more content with this situation. I often drive past BRS (or EGGD, for any ICAO adherrents out there) in real life, on my way to blat along the roads around the Mendips and Cheddar Gorge. It’s rare for me to encounter a game which takes in my immediate surroundings, and there’s something uniformly, believably underwhelming about the domestic nature of this particular virtual outing which I can’t help but find irresistible. My flat’s only a few miles away (later, this reporter will crash mere streets away while trying to pinpoint it) and the landscape - desaturated as it is by the dull light penetrating an overcast sky - is comfortingly familiar.

That I can cruise above the city in which I live - itself the destination, fact fans, of Concorde’s last ever flight - somehow serves to underscore the dizzying scale of what’s on offer here. If I’m able to buzz my son’s primary school, just imagine what else is out there waiting to be discovered - and what other potential breaches of aviation law await. The mind boggles.

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