Microsoft Flight Simulator guide: How to find your house

 

One of the most fascinating aspects of Microsoft Flight Simulator is the ability to fly anywhere in the world from famous landmarks to natural wonders and even our apartment.

While we’re sure that most of you will be eager to take to the skies over some of the tallest buildings in the world or the homes of conspiracy theories like Area 51, there’s a good chance that you’re like us, and the first thing you’ll want to do is find your house.

Unlike well-known landmarks, tourist attractions, or historical sites, you can’t fast travel to the skies above where you live. To find your home in Microsoft Flight Simulator, you’ll need to do a little research and planning. In this guide, we’ll show you how.

How to find your house

First, load up an interactive map like Google Maps or Microsoft Flight Simulator’s map of choice, Bing Maps.

If you know the closest airport to your home, you can input that as your departure destination in the World Map / Free Flight mode.

The airport near my home town

Image: Asobo Studio/Microsoft Corporation via Polygon

If you don’t know which airport is closest to your home, here’s how to find it:

• Input your address in your map service.
• Search for airports within that area.
• If you can’t find something easily, try zooming out in your map software and search again.
• You can fly from most airports from large international locations to smaller commuter spots.

Once you’ve found where you intend to take off from, use your map service to find driving directions from that airport to your destination. The point of getting driving directions is to see the relative direction you’ll need to fly from the airport to your house. After you’ve figured that out, search for your airport in Free Flight mode, and set it as your departure location.

From here, I can’t accurately set a way point

Image: Asobo Studio/Microsoft Corporation via Polygon

Since the Free Flight mode map screen in Microsoft Flight Simulator doesn’t show any topographical information when you’re more zoomed in, you can’t accurately set a waypoint to any place that’s not a landmark or another airport. To find your house, you’ll need to do some manual navigating after you take off.

Flying to your house

To confidently fly from the closest airport to your house, you’ll need to make use of two maps: the map you loaded on your web browser or a mobile device plus Microsoft Flight Simulator’s in-game map, the Visual Flight Rules map (VFR). You can access this by hitting the V key on your keyboard on PC or highlighting the toolbar menu on the top of the screen and selecting it.

Together with your real-life map and the VFR, you’ll have to compare both to look for identifiable landmarks. Your personal map will likely be able to show you major highways, bodies of water, topographical information, and more. The VFR will show similar information, although it will be much less detailed. Regardless, you’ll have to use both to find your home.

Once you have both loaded, compare how each represents major highways and bodies of water.

Look at the highways in both images and compare

Image: Asobo Studio/Microsoft Corporation and Google via Polygon

In the example above, we opened up Microsoft Flight Simulator’s VFR map and compared that to Google Maps on another screen. We used both to figure out the right way to fly to visit our childhood home. (Highways are yellow on Google Maps or Bing and gray in Microsoft Flight Simulator).

The VFR didn’t give us an identifiable information, but we could see that two highways flank the airport. On Google Maps, we figured out which highway was which and, since we grew up next to this airport, we just used the highways to navigate all the way back to where we grew up.

If you’re not familiar with the highways or bodies of water around the airports closest to your home, then you’ll have to do some manual navigation. Looking at your map in real life, you can see the general direction between the airport and your home, if you’ve already mapped the driving directions. Since your real-world map and the simulator’s VFR map are both orientated the same, you will know which direction you need to fly after you take off from the airport.

Unfortunately, the VFR will not identify regular streets or show you street names as you fly over, so it can be easy to get lost while flying. At the same time, Microsoft Flight Simulator’s recreation of lesser known areas isn’t completely accurate, so local landmarks that you might use to find your way around won’t necessarily look the same. When in doubt, refer to your real-life map to get your bearings and compare it to what the VFR shows you.