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7 ridiculously obscure airports in Microsoft Flight Simulator
If you've flown everywhere you've ever wanted, here is the flight-path less travelled, for adventurous pilots only
Flight Simulator 2020 is the perfect exploration tool. Just spin a digital globe and pick where you want to go – the entire world and some 37,000 airports are all here in Microsoft’s astonishingly realistic new aviation sim. At first, those sights are easy to think of: where are the world’s most iconic landmarks you’ve never had the chance to visit in person? Which cities have you always wanted to visit? Whereabouts were you supposed to holiday this summer? You know, before we stopped with that sort of thing.
After a while though, you’ll want to go further afield. Out of the cities, away from the tourist traps. That’s where the game’s other 36,500 airports come in – all of which have been modelled using satellite data. Some of them represent from of the most distant and remote points on the planet, hundreds if not thousands of miles from anywhere else. Others are simply hard to get to. Here are some of the top picks you should check out once you sit in the pilot’s seat.
McMurdo Station, Antarctica
McMurdo
© Microsoft
Full disclosure: Antarctica doesn’t look that great in Flight Simulator. The game’s mapping and satellite technology is incredible for the most part, but in some of the world’s most remote regions, the access to fully formed data is slim. That means that a lot of Antarctica is just a fuzzy, low resolution mass of white texture. But still, it represents probably the pinnacle of remoteness on Earth, and the ice-strip landing that is McMurdo Station is the best example of it. Desolate, empty and quite awe-inspiring.
Mataveri International Airport, Easter Island
Mataveri
© Microsoft
Easter Island is a popular destination for tourists, and over 100,000 of them come here every year. But to get here means a pretty sizable journey for any pilot (or passenger), and Mataveri International Airport lies more than 2,500km away from the nearest airport, in French Polynesia, but has zero direct connection with it. In fact, the nearest direct connections lies in Chile, 3759 km away, and with the Faa’a International Airport of Papeete in Tahiti, 4254 km away. A pretty long way, basically.
Lydd, England
Lydd
© Microsoft
This one speaks for itself. Just look at it. The arse-end of coastal England. Beautiful, awful, forgettable, and the hometown of at least one Red Bull gaming team staff member, which means it's okay to laugh at it.
Gorge River Airstrip, New Zealand
Gorge Airstrip
© Microsoft
New Zealand is by far one of the most amazing places to visit in Flight Sim. Especially if you’re a Lord of the Rings fan. Seeing the landscape that brought Tolkien’s masterpiece to life is the sort of wonder that can give you goosebumps and I don’t care who knows it. But in the south-east corner of the South Island lies Gorge River Airstrip, which is one of the nation’s most remote airstrips. It’s literally a single track of dirt on the coast which, in our Icon A5, only just proved long enough for take-off.
Lukla, Nepal
Lukla
© Microsoft
Lukla airport is famous for being the go-to stop-off for explorers hoping to scale Everest. The airport is tiny, perched on the side of a mountain, and the runway itself is pitched at such an angle to give you a vital speed boost before the ground literally falls away from you. It’s quite terrifying when you first take off, and it never gets anything less than scary when you’re landing – the approach is difficult to judge and you have a limited amount of time to bring the plane to a stop before you go careering into some Nepalese buildings.
Telluride, Colorado
Telluride
© Microsoft
The range of landscapes and vistas available throughout the United States is breathtaking in Flight Sim. Mountains, deserts, huge lakes, cities, coastline, craters, forests and more are all discoverable from the air. Some of these locations are surprisingly remote for such a built-up country, and Telluride in Colorado is one of these. Set in the heart of the San Juan mountains, the airstrip itself is one of the highest in the United States, some 2,700m above sea level. With a tricky landing approach, it’s a steep entry that’s incredibly tough to perfect. Still, you get some remarkable views of the surrounding peaks.
Aspen, Colorado
Aspen
© Microsoft
Landing in Aspen is entirely different depending on the weather conditions. It’s not as far out of the way as some of the airports on this list, but it’s still an unusual landing challenge and one of Flight Sim’s toughest gauntlets in the activities section. It’s a valley approach that offers a variety of different challenges – up in the mountains where it’s easy to lose control when you’re so close to the ground. If you’re really fancying a challenge, use the weather preset to set the weather to snowy and struggle through some opaque clouds to find the runway.
