The 2-page handout

The reading

The Microsoft airplane game Flight Simulator has been upgraded to include every airport in the world. This means gamers will have a choice of over 37,000 airports to take off from and land at. The upgrade has added over 13,000 new airports to the previous version of the game, which included 24,000 airports. The game includes international hubs like New York's JFK and London Heathrow. It also includes tiny airports like rural, grassy landing strips and runways that are in the middle of deserts or on the top of mountains. The 37,000 airports in Flight Simulator have been manually designed to look like the real airports. Designers used satellite images and Bing Maps to do this.



Make sure you try all of the online activities for this reading and listening - There are dictations, multiple choice, drag and drop activities, crosswords, hangman, flash cards, matching activities and a whole lot more. Please enjoy :-)



The graphics are also much better in the latest release of Flight Simulator. The designers put a lot of work and effort into increasing the level of detail you see. Gamers will see windsocks blowing in the wind and service vehicles driving around the roads next to the runways. The markings on the runways in the game are the same as those on the real runways. Lead game designer Sven Mestas said: "To reach a new level, we needed a new approach. We decided to innovate by editing airports from real satellite pictures. This technique involves editing each airport manually. This means we paid particular attention to detail to bring every airport a step closer to reality."

Sources:

  • https://www.pcgamer.com/microsoft-flight-simulator-contains-every-airport-in-the-world/
  • https://www.ladbible.com/technology/gaming-microsoft-flight-simulator-2020-will-feature-every-airport-on-earth-20200221
  • https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/02/21/asobo-studio-manually-edited-37000-airports-for-microsoft-flight-simulator/

More Activities