Microsoft said July 4. The update showed up on July 2 instead, and nobody is going to complain about that. World Update 22: US National Parks is now available as a free download for all Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 owners, arriving two days ahead of the date announced at the Xbox Games Showcase back in early June and just in time for the 250th anniversary of the United States. If you were planning a Fourth of July flight over the Grand Tetons, you now have the whole weekend to prepare.
The numbers are substantial: 31 areas of interest rebuilt with updated photogrammetry, terrain surface texturing, and digital elevation modeling, plus 46 points of interest, nine discovery flights, and three guided tours. That last item deserves a closer look, because guided tours are a brand new mission type making their first appearance in this release. As we learned during Microsoft’s FSExpo keynote last month, this was a feature originally planned for the MSFS 2024 launch that didn’t make it. Nearly two years later, it’s finally here.
A thematic update
Most world updates take a country or region and improve it across the board. This one works differently. Instead of covering the United States at large, something World Update 10 already did back in 2022, the team picked a theme, the national parks and forests, and went deep on natural landscapes. As usual, the Microsoft Flight Simulator team partnered with Bing Places, Vexcel, Gaya, and Asobo on the update.
The list of 31 areas of interest is like a checklist for anyone who enjoys low and slow VFR flying. The Utah corridor alone gets Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and Zion. California receives Death Valley, Joshua Tree, Kings Canyon, Lassen Volcanic, Pinnacles, Redwood, and Sequoia. The mountain states are well represented too, with Grand Teton, Rocky Mountain, Great Basin, Great Sand Dunes, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and Mesa Verde among them, while the Pacific Northwest gets Olympic, North Cascades, Crater Lake, and Mount Hood National Forest. Texas simmers get Big Bend and the Guadalupe Mountains, and the Dakotas round things out with Badlands, Theodore Roosevelt, and Wind Cave.
There’s some genuinely interesting terrain work behind these. At FSExpo, the team explained that Asobo developed new technology that mixes materials between terrain and 3D objects, which allowed Gaya to handcraft natural arches that photogrammetry typically struggles to reconstruct. Anyone who has flown over Arches in the sim before knows exactly why that was needed. Sandstone arches have always been a weak point of aerial imagery reconstruction, usually appearing as melted lumps rather than the delicate formations they are in reality.
Guided tours, explained
The three guided tours cover Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon, and Grand Teton, each with a designated aircraft. Bryce Canyon is flown in the Airbus Helicopters H125, the Grand Canyon in the Draco X, and Grand Teton in the Diamond DA62. The concept is straightforward: a narrator guides you to the highlights of each park while providing commentary on the natural and human history of the area as you fly.
The Grand Teton tour comes with an extra treat. It includes a handcrafted rendition of Jackson Hole Airport (KJAC) by Gaya, which is the only airport located inside a national park in the United States. Starting a scenic flight from a properly modeled KJAC, with the Tetons rising directly off the departure end, is about as good as it gets for this kind of content.
Beyond the tours, nine discovery flights cover Acadia, Arches, Crater Lake, Dry Tortugas, Everglades, Great Smoky Mountains, Olympic, and Zion, among others. Dry Tortugas is a fun inclusion, a tiny park 70 miles west of Key West that most people have never heard of, let alone visited.
The points of interest and the Blimp
The 46 new points of interest include visitor centers, lodges, lookouts, and standalone natural landmarks like Shiprock in New Mexico, the Totem Pole in Arizona, and Delicate Arch in Utah. These are the kinds of small handcrafted touches that make low altitude sightseeing worthwhile, and Gaya handled this batch.
The Goodyear Blimp, built by iniBuilds as part of a renewed partnership between Goodyear and Microsoft for the 250th anniversary, is also included.
Free for all
World Update 22 is free for all owners of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Make sure your sim is updated to the latest version, then grab the update from the usual place. Worth noting: unlike World Update 21: Australia, which shipped for both versions of the sim, Microsoft’s announcement for this one only references MSFS 2024. We’ve seen no confirmation either way regarding MSFS 2020, so 2020 holdouts may want to temper expectations for now.
