How Microsoft Flight Simulator (and the Volume) helped bring Masters of the Air to life

15.02.2024 - 19:41 / polygon.com

When the A-list cast of Masters of the Air showed up in England in 2021 to begin filming the epic Apple TV Plus miniseries, military consultant Taigh Ramey thought they’d at least know a little something about flying airplanes. But the actors, including stars like Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan, were pretty much clueless about how the iconic B-17 Flying Fortress actually worked.

“None of them had any concept of flying,” Ramey wrote earlier this month on his personal Facebook page, “which was perfectly okay. I had to sit them down in a chair and teach them the very basics of the flight controls and how they are used. Grabbing an imaginary control wheel and had their feet on imaginary rudder pedals. Making sure they used the rudders first and then aileron as you would in a heavy tail wheel aircraft.”

Those first few training sessions, Ramey said, were conducted inside a partial replica of an original B-17 flight deck, delivered to the set by its builder, Dave Littleton. Cobbled together over more than two decades, it included original WWII-era parts and instrumentation. Nate Mann, who plays Maj. Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, remembers it well.

“We had a brilliant military advisor in Taigh, who has flown these planes,” Mann told Polygon in a recent interview. “He was with us from start to finish, at first sitting with us in the cockpit, telling us how these gauges worked, how the switches worked.”

The magic of MSFS

After speaking with the cast of Masters of the Air , Polygon reached out to Jorg Neumann, head of the modern incarnation of the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise. The latest version was released in 2020 to rave reviews, including here at Polygon . He wasn’t at all surprised to find out the actors had cut their teeth on an older, more mature version of the venerable video game series — which, incidentally, predates both the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office.

“When we first started working on [the latest version of] Microsoft Flight Simulator back in 2016, we sent the entire code base from Flight Simulator X to the dev team at Asobo,” Neumann said. “The FSX code did not just appear out of nowhere… it had a huge amount of code from Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 , which had inherited code from Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000 . That is why around launch in 2020 we often said we felt that we stood on the shoulders of giants — or in other words, we benefited from the learnings of 35 years of flight simulation development going all the way back to Bruce Artwick.”

Today there are more than 200 teams creating additional third-party content for Microsoft Flight Simulator . That includes FlyingIron Simulations , which announced it was working on a B-17 module in