THE BEST FLIGHT SIMULATOR FOR BEGINNERS

I almost quit flight simulators forever on my first night with them. I had watched some YouTube video about DCS World, bought an F/A-18 module because the thumbnail looked cool, and spent three hours trying to figure out how to start the engines. I never got the engines started. I threw my keyboard, uninstalled the game, and told myself flight sims were for people with too much time and too many opinions about hydraulic schematics. It took me another two years to circle back, and when I did, I started with a completely different sim and had the opposite experience. I was flying a Cessna around my hometown within twenty minutes, and I've been hooked ever since.

The lesson I wish someone had grabbed me by the collar and yelled in my face back then is that picking the wrong first flight sim will ruin the hobby for you. The genre has a weirdly wide range, from casual "fly a plane on a touchscreen" stuff all the way to "print out the actual Boeing 737 checklist and follow it line by line." Picking something from the wrong end of that spectrum as your introduction is how most people bounce. So let's do this right. Here's what actually works if you're new.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

This is the answer for most people and it's not even close. MSFS 2024 is the successor to the 2020 reboot, and it leans harder into accessibility without dumbing down the underlying simulation. You can start the game, pick a Cessna, pick a random airport, and be in the air in under a minute. The weather is real. The world is literally the entire planet rendered from satellite data and enhanced with AI. You can fly over your house.

What makes MSFS 2024 the beginner champion is the sheer depth of assist options. There's a whole screen of toggles for things like auto-rudder, auto-trim, stability augmentation, crash damage, and even a full AI co-pilot that will handle radios and navigation if you just want to sightsee. You can turn every single assist off one at a time as you get comfortable, which means the sim grows with you. Day one you might have everything assisted and just be flying around on a joystick with two fingers. A month in you've turned off auto-rudder and are starting to deal with crosswind landings. A year in you're flying a study-level 737 through weather into Innsbruck. Same sim. Same install. Just slowly peeled-back assists.

The tutorial situation got a lot better in 2024. The new career mode and the flight school missions walk you through real skills in a real order. Straight and level first. Then climbs and descents. Then turns. Then pattern work. Then crosswind stuff. Then navigation. It's not condescending, it's not rushed, and it uses the actual game world so you're not stuck in some abstract training bubble. The career mode is maybe the single best beginner onboarding ever built into a flight sim.

The default Cessna 172 is also the correct first aircraft, which sounds obvious but matters a lot. It's forgiving. It's slow. You have time to think. It won't out-accelerate your reflexes or demand complicated systems knowledge. You can fly the 172 for a hundred hours and still be learning useful things.

If someone asks me, "what flight sim should I buy first," and they don't have any other context clues, I tell them MSFS 2024. It's the right answer nine times out of ten.

Ace Combat 7

Here's my controversial pick. Ace Combat 7 is not a flight simulator. It's an arcade combat game where you dodge missiles with cinematic barrel rolls and fire a special weapon called the EML at giant airborne motherships. It has a story about a rogue nation and a kid who cleans planes. It is gloriously unrealistic.

But hear me out. Ace Combat 7 is one of the best gateway drugs into flight sims that exists, and I think every beginner should at least consider it before going full simulator. The reason is that it teaches you to think about airplanes in three dimensions without overwhelming you with systems. You learn energy management the fun way. You learn why diving for speed and climbing to bleed it matters. You learn how to read a radar. You learn how to use trim even though the game doesn't call it trim. You learn to not fly into the ground during a dogfight, which is a shockingly hard skill that most real sim pilots don't get to practice.

And it's just fun. The missions are tight, the aircraft roster covers most of the cool post-war jets, and the flight model, while arcadey, is not stupid. Planes feel like planes. Heavy jets turn like heavy jets. Light fighters dance. You come out of Ace Combat 7 with instincts that carry into DCS or MSFS, and critically, you come out of it still liking aviation games.

I tell people who think they want to fly combat jets to play Ace Combat 7 first. If they love it, great, now they know combat flight interests them, and they can step up to something heavier. If they hate it, also great, they just saved themselves hundreds of dollars on a DCS module.

X-Plane 12

X-Plane 12 is a real flight simulator in the same category as MSFS, and in some technical respects it's more accurate. The flight model uses something called blade element theory, which means the sim calculates lift on each section of the wing individually based on airflow, rather than using pre-baked aerodynamic tables. Real pilots tend to say X-Plane feels more authentic, especially in edge cases like stalls, crosswinds, and low-speed handling.

The reason I'm listing X-Plane 12 after MSFS 2024 and not before is that it's steeper. The UI is functional but not pretty. The default scenery is fine but doesn't have the "fly over my house" wow factor. The assist options exist but aren't as hand-holdy. You have to want to learn, a little, right from the start.

But if you're the kind of person who likes the idea of really understanding how airplanes work, X-Plane 12 rewards you more the deeper you go. The default aircraft include some really nicely modeled general aviation planes, and the addon ecosystem is full of study-level airliners and military jets that are some of the best in any sim. The shared cockpit feature, where two people fly the same plane together, is unmatched. The customization is deep. Laminar Research, the small team that makes it, treats flight modeling as a craft.

I recommend X-Plane 12 to beginners who have a mechanical bent. If you're the person who wants to know why the plane does what it does, not just that it does it, X-Plane will scratch that itch better than MSFS. If you just want to fly and see pretty things, MSFS 2024 wins.

Tiny Combat Arena

This one's for the people who want combat flight but aren't ready to commit to DCS-level study. Tiny Combat Arena is an early access indie game that sits somewhere between Ace Combat and a proper sim. It has low-poly visuals that look like a cross between Ace Combat 2 and a modern art project, but underneath it has a surprisingly legit flight model, real air-to-ground weapons systems, and missions that make you think tactically.

What I love about Tiny Combat Arena is that it treats you like an adult while still being accessible. You use real procedures for finding targets, dropping bombs, and staying alive, but you don't have to memorize a startup checklist. The aircraft have realistic handling without a billion systems to manage. It's like if DCS and Ace Combat had a kid, and the kid grew up to be a cool indie game.

For someone who watched a DCS trailer and got excited but then watched a DCS tutorial and got scared, this is the middle path. You learn real skills in a forgiving environment, and if you eventually decide to go harder, you're way more prepared for it. The game is actively being developed, the dev is communicative and puts out regular updates, and the community is small but passionate.

Fair warning: it's in early access and missing some features you might expect. Aircraft roster is limited. Mission variety is growing but not huge. If you want a polished finished product, wait a bit. If you want to grow with a sim, this is a great time to jump in.

SimplePlanes

Here's the curveball. SimplePlanes is not really a flight simulator, it's a build-your-own-plane sandbox. You open the game, you get a voxel-style construction toolkit, and you build an airplane out of fuselage blocks, wings, engines, control surfaces, and whatever else you want. Then you fly what you built.

The reason I'm listing it here is that SimplePlanes teaches flight in a way no traditional sim does. When your plane crashes, you learn something specific. Maybe your center of mass is too far back. Maybe your wings aren't providing enough lift at low speeds. Maybe you need more vertical stabilizer. You go back, you tweak, you try again. Every failed flight teaches you a principle of aerodynamics by making you feel it.

It's also just playful. You can build a pizza delivery drone. You can build a flying bus. You can build something that was technically a submarine but also flies if you angle it right. The workshop is full of community creations, some of them incredible, some of them hilarious. You can download someone else's F-14 Tomcat replica and go dogfight their friend's F-15.

I recommend SimplePlanes to younger beginners and to anyone with a creative bent who learns by doing. It's also ridiculously cheap compared to a full sim, and it runs on basically any computer. If you're a parent trying to get a kid into aviation, this is where to start. They'll learn more about how planes work from an afternoon with SimplePlanes than from a week of reading textbooks.

This Is Your Captain

For people who want the airline experience without the airline commitment, This Is Your Captain is a casual cockpit game where you play the captain of a passenger flight and the simulation is more about the routine of the job than the physics of flight. You do the pre-flight briefing, you taxi, you take off, you cruise, you handle small issues, you land. The systems are simplified but present, and the atmosphere captures what it actually feels like to be an airline pilot on a regular day.

It's not the game for someone who wants to know how the FMS works on a 737NG. It's the game for someone who wants to know what it feels like to be the captain on a flight to Barcelona on a sunny afternoon. The pacing is meditative. The decisions are interesting without being stressful. The whole thing is like a cozy aviation game, and the genre needs more of those.

If you've watched videos of real airline pilots on YouTube and thought "that looks relaxing and cool," This Is Your Captain will give you that feeling faster than any real sim will. It won't teach you to fly in any meaningful way, but it will give you the shape of the job, and for some people that's enough.

What to actually look for in a beginner sim

A few things that matter more than you'd think.

Tutorial quality is huge. A lot of sims bury their tutorials in PDFs or assume you know what they're talking about. Look for sims that teach you to fly the way a real instructor teaches you to fly, in a sensible order, inside the actual game world, with clear goals. MSFS 2024's flight school is the current gold standard.

Assist settings you can peel back one at a time is the second thing. The worst flight sim for a beginner is one where you're either on full training wheels or full cold-start airliner, with no in-between. You want dials, not switches. You want to turn off auto-rudder without also turning off flight model realism.

Gentle difficulty curve matters more than total depth. A sim that dumps you into a complicated aircraft on day one is a bad beginner sim even if it's technically the most accurate simulator ever made. A sim that gives you a Cessna, a nice airport, and good weather on day one is a great beginner sim even if its ceiling is lower.

Good default aircraft matter. Some sims give you the good planes for free and paywall the premium stuff. Some sims give you nothing interesting unless you pay. The default roster is what you'll actually fly for your first fifty hours, so it matters.

Community is underrated. A healthy community means active tutorials on YouTube, subreddits where people answer questions without being condescending, and mod support that extends the life of the sim. MSFS, X-Plane, and DCS all have this. Smaller sims have it in proportion to their size. Avoid sims where the community is mostly people arguing about realism on a forum that hasn't been updated since 2017.

How to avoid the DCS trap

DCS World is the most hardcore flight sim you can buy. It's free to download, but the good aircraft modules cost $40 to $80 each and take dozens of hours to learn. The flight models are exceptional. The systems are modeled to an absurd degree. Professional military pilots use it for training.

It is the worst possible first flight sim for almost everyone.

The DCS trap works like this. You watch a cinematic trailer or a highlight reel of some clan doing a coordinated strike mission. You get excited. You buy an F-16 or an F/A-18 module because those are the cool modern jets. You boot the game, sit in the cockpit, look at eight thousand switches, try to start the engines, can't find the right switch, look up a tutorial, realize the tutorial is forty-five minutes long and assumes you already know what INS alignment means, give up, and conclude that flight sims are not for you.

Here's the thing. Flight sims are probably for you. DCS is just not the way in. If you eventually want to fly hardcore combat jets, the path is to start somewhere else, build your instincts, and then step into DCS when you're ready to actually study the systems. Ace Combat 7 is a great first step. MSFS 2024 with a light combat mod is another. Tiny Combat Arena is right there. IL-2 Sturmovik is a good middle step if you like warbirds.

DCS is the mountain. It's fine to want to climb it. Just don't try to walk straight up the north face on your first hike. Start lower, build the legs, and the mountain will still be there when you're ready.

For more ideas once you've got the basics down, I keep an updated list of the best plane simulator games that covers the whole spectrum from casual to hardcore. Pick a starting point, fly badly for a week, fly less badly for a month, and you'll be shocked at how fast this hobby gets under your skin.