Navigraph’s FlightSim Community Survey is the most insightful look into the flight simulation community and has become a crucial dataset for all the members of the industry to better understand what’s going on in this field. The results of this year’s edition are now out and offer us plenty of interesting data, gathered from a comprehensive set of questions that were answered by more than 25,000 simmers!
There are plenty of details about the whole industry in the results, but there are definitely some highlights. For example, Microsoft Flight Simulator remains well established as the most popular platform by far, with more than half of the whole audience saying it’s the simulator they use the most.
It’s also curious to see what types of aircraft are favored by simmers. Here, the preferences are somewhat equally split between GA aircraft and commercial airliners. Interestingly, warbirds don’t seem to be particularly popular, despite a number of excellent releases in MSFS over the last couple of years.
Most simmers continue to fly at home out of curiosity and interest in aviation, with pure entertainment coming in second. With that in mind, it’s understandable when we see that VFR and IFR flying are also the preferred rules followed by users, instead of flying casually without rules.
The use of VR headsets also appears to keep increasing, albeit at a slower pace. 26.8% of the responders claim to own a VR headset, although only 16,7% say they use it for flight simulation. Still, this is an impressive number, considering the cost of acquisition of this technology.
Finally, a word about flightsim media websites, where we are included. We’re proud to see that MSFSAddons.com is now the 4th most popular media site! About 30% of the responders regularly visit our site, which means the world to us. Thank you for your support!
The full results of the survey can be found here. The results of this survey are extremely useful to everyone involved, and we will also take them into consideration to better serve you with the best news and content for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Have any suggestions? Email us at [email protected]!
