The closest you came to interaction was accidentally mincing a migrating goose with your prop or turbofan. In the past, X-Planing offline was a dashed lonely business. After the scenery and graphics progress, this edition's most substantive improvements are its AI traffic and interactive ATC.

Oh well, at least the invisible control towers have invisible air traffic controllers inside them at long last. I know I can pop along to and download decent user-made solutions, but the new autogen code really should have been savvy enough to slap down some generic structures as a stopgap. Weary passengers stepping out of their Jumbos at JFK, Heathrow, or Charles de Gaulle will find tracts of bare concrete where terminals should be. What is a little disappointing is that the sim's representation of major airports and capitals is still far below the FSX benchmark.

That Austin Meyer and chums haven't found the time to add hangars and towers to every tin-pot airfield isn't a great surprise. You won't see your house in X-Plane 10 – you might not even see your village or suburb – but there's a very good chance you will see your road, avenue, close, or lane. While Laminar Research's new autogen scenery system leaves large tracts of the globe balder than a baboon's bum, makes central London look like suburban Los Angeles, and occasionally puts bridges and electricity pylons where bridges and electricity pylons have no business to be, its utilisation of detailed highway data and fine elevation mesh means low-level 'VFR' navigation is actually a far more practical prospect than it is in an unaugmented install of FSX.

An hour later I land back where I started with a quite different opinion of the sim's scenic strength. As the Stinson bumps along the undulating turf and hauls itself into a breezy summer sky, I spot something I've never seen in any iteration of Flight Simulator – the little B-road that runs along the northern perimeter of the field.

X-plane vs fsx