Flight Sim Labs Control Center gets MSFS support. A sign of things to come?
Flight Sim Labs is a well-known company that has been developing highly realistic aircraft for flight simulators for years. They are mostly known for the brilliant A320-X, an incredibly accurate rendition of the iconic Airbus airliner, currently available for P3D. Naturally, many have wondered about Flight Sim Labs’ plans for MSFS, but they haven’t exactly been very vocal about it, other than some vague statements about considering this new platform after some higher-priority ongoing work with existing products is finished.
An interesting turn of events may have happened this week though. Flight Sim Labs (FSL) has just launched Control Center v1.0, a new app that will allow the easy installation and removal of FSL aircraft, liveries, airline packs and utilities, get updates, and more. It’s a standard move that we’ve seen across the industry, as developers attempt to streamline and simplify the customer experience by providing a one-stop solution to all their needs.
What’s most interesting about the FSL Control Center is not the feature set of the utility itself, but a small detail that can signal some exciting future updates from Flight Sim Labs. The Control Center includes the ability to select whichever platform it’s managing, and this initial version enables the option to choose between Prepar3D V5 and… MSFS! It’s a simple dropdown selector that does absolutely nothing, but it most certainly means the developers are at least looking into Microsoft Flight Simulator for some unknown purpose.
Obviously, this may very well mean nothing. A prank, a placeholder, or anything similarly meaningless, but that’s unlikely. It definitely feels like a teaser of some sort, left in place knowingly that it would start speculation, getting people talking, raising the hype for FSL products for MSFS, and so on.
While the A32X family from Flight Sim Labs would be a magnificent addition to the growing list of aircraft for MSFS, it would also mean that we would get another A320 simulation, after the existing FBW version and the upcoming and very promising Fenix A320. Flight Sim Labs’ aircraft, arguably (especially compared to Fenix’s version) would probably settle itself as the best A320 simulation on the market, but nonetheless we would love to see the best developers in the community tackle a wider variety of modern airliners. But you know what, Flight Sim Labs also has a very impressive (albeit old) simulation of the Concorde in their portfolio, and it’s actually being updated now for a future re-release on newer platforms!
In the end, we can only speculate at this point, so let’s hope if Flight Sim Labs will soon provide more definitive evidence of their plans for MSFS.
Marc
As many new people have joined the flight sim community since the release of MFS, someone should mention what FSLabs is actually most famous for, which is, of course, for hiding malware in their product installer and distributing that malware to all their customers, in an attempt to exact revenge on one or more individuals who FSLabs considered to be pirates, by stealing all their passwords. (Google “fslabs malware” for the details.)