Paris Charles de Gaulle is one of the most requested airports in flight sim, and one of the most conspicuously missing. Despite being one of Europe’s largest hubs and Air France’s home base, LFPG still has no high-fidelity payware version for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. iniBuilds has now put its hand up to change that, formally announcing Paris Charles de Gaulle (LFPG) as an upcoming scenery project for the sim.
The announcement came as part of the same iniBuilds scenery update that saw Malta go live and detailed a full rework of Dubai. Paris is by far the earliest-stage of the three. There is no release date, no pricing and no extensive previews yet. What iniBuilds has shared is that it has already done a fair amount of research on the airport’s layout, terminal architecture and airside infrastructure, and that it now wants to work with people who know CDG first-hand.
iniBuilds wants references from people who know CDG
iniBuilds says it wants to hear from people who currently work at the airport, have worked there before, or regularly operate through it, from flight crew and ground handling teams to operations staff and engineers. It has set up a dedicated Paris research Discord and an email line for contributors, and it points to Manchester as the template, where it worked with the airport group and community sources for reference material. The one caveat is that people should share only what they are permitted to, with nothing restricted or security-sensitive.
That call for help is not just a nicety. Charles de Gaulle is notoriously hard to reference. It is huge, spread across multiple terminals and satellites, and under near-constant real-world construction, which is a big part of why it has stayed off the payware map for so long.
A turbulent race that just narrowed again
iniBuilds is not the first to take CDG on, and the field has been unusually eventful. When we mapped out the battle for Paris back in January, three developers were on it at once. Since then, Aerosoft, once the presumed frontrunner, suspended its project in June and cited the same access and reference problems. PESIM has been at it the longest, previewing monthly since late 2024 and relying on its French base for the kind of on-site access it says rivals cannot match, though the team has been candid that the work has run well past its own estimates.
Then there was azrsim, which had LFPG on its 2026 roadmap after releases like Baku and Riyadh. Almost immediately after iniBuilds’ announcement, the developer said on its Discord that it has cancelled its own CDG and thrown its full support behind iniBuilds, which it expects to deliver the definitive version for the sim. azrsim says it will now focus on a different, unnamed project instead. With Aerosoft suspended and azrsim out, the contest comes down to two: iniBuilds and PESIM.
It is a study in contrasts. PESIM is the local specialist betting on deep access, while iniBuilds is the high-volume studio betting on scale and a fresh push to crowdsource the references it needs. There is a certain logic to iniBuilds being the one to try, too, since it already builds the A350 and has the A380 on the way, and CDG is a natural home for both. Which approach yields the definitive CDG is the open question, and only finished products will answer it.
