Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has shipped with LIDO charts from Lufthansa Systems built into the platform since day one. Nearly two years later, most third-party airliners still don’t use them. Fenix added LIDO to its EFB as part of its 2025 roadmap, and a handful of default aircraft picked them up through sim updates, but PMDG’s fleet has remained a Navigraph-only affair. If you fly the 737 or 777 without a Navigraph subscription, the charts pane on that tablet has been little more than decoration.
A community developer has now solved that on PMDG’s behalf. PMDG EFB+, a freeware mod by tomwhoca available on flightsim.to, patches the tablet of the full 737NG family and all four 777 variants to add a chart provider option in the EFB settings. Pick LIDO, and the sim’s own charts appear right where the Navigraph ones would, no subscription required. The Navigraph integration stays untouched, so this is an addition rather than a replacement.
It’s the kind of feature you’d expect to arrive through an official update someday. Whether it ever would have is another question. PMDG has historically been slow about adopting new platform features, and the studio’s attention over the past year has visibly been elsewhere: the massive 777 fly-by-wire overhaul in April, the High Detail Update that wrapped up across the 737NG fleet in May, and the 747 project looming behind all of it. The community, as it so often does, decided not to wait.
An GSX app too
The LIDO integration is what gets people through the door, but version 1.1.1, released on June 11, added something that arguably has even appeal: a GSX app on the tablet homescreen. It matches the full GSX Pro menu inside the EFB and shows a live status board for ground services, covering refueling, catering, boarding with passenger and cargo progress, deboarding, and pushback.
There are smaller touches too. Two extra zoom buttons on the enroute map jump straight to a full taxi view or zoom out to show the whole route. And a dynamic wallpaper system swaps the tablet’s home screen background to match your airline, based on the callsign of your loaded SimBrief flight plan, with a manual picker if you’d rather choose yourself.
What LIDO charts are, and why some simmers prefer them
If the name doesn’t ring a bell, LIDO charts are the navigation charts produced by Lufthansa Systems, used in the real world by carriers like the Lufthansa Group and Air France-KLM. Microsoft licensed them for MSFS 2024 and its companion web flight planner, which means every MSFS 2024 owner already has access to a professional chart library. European simmers in particular often favor them, since LIDO is the standard at many airlines on this side of the Atlantic. This mod simply connects charts you already own to an aircraft you already own.
The fine print
A few caveats before you rush off to download. The mod does not work with aircraft purchased through the Microsoft Marketplace or on Xbox. The author says this comes down to how Marketplace packages are structured on Microsoft’s side, and that there’s currently no way around it, so this one is for PMDG.com customers only. And because the mod patches PMDG’s own tablet files, any PMDG update can temporarily break it. The author says compatibility reviews follow each PMDG release, and the current version is confirmed to work with the June 2026 builds of both the 737 and 777.
PMDG EFB+ is free and available now on flightsim.to. If you fly the 737 or 777 from a PMDG.com purchase, and especially if you’ve been simming without Navigraph, this is about as easy a recommendation as freeware gets.
