This tool generates random flights for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Detailed explanation below.
Clicking on the blue button "Generate New Random Flight" below, your browser will
display a map from OpenStreetMaps.org - make sure you're okay with loading content
from that website.
Distance per Leg (nm)
Minimum per-leg distance is 20 nm when using stopovers.
Cruise Speed (kt)
Stopovers
Stopovers are clamped to 0–50.
Start Country
Estimated Time
Click for detailed info
What this tool does…
It’s a simple way to generate random flights anywhere in the world. Pilots often prefer certain regions or locations, so there’s always some kind of bias in their choices. That’s no issue at all unless you really want to explore and find new locations you’ve never flown over before. The RFG can help with that.
To give you a little bit of control over the outcome (without compromising the randomness) you can choose to either create a single leg flight with a certain distance or create a flight plan with a chosen number of stopovers. You’ll be able to see the roughly estimated time of the entire flight. The tool generates new flights each time after you hit the blue “Generate…” button. If you don’t enter any values, it’ll generate a flight with single leg and a random distance between 20 and 200 nm. The minimum distance for a flight/leg is 20nm.
In case you wonder why some regions or countries are suggested more often than others: The reason is the amount of airports/airfields a region has. There’s just a higher probability a country gets picked if it has more airfields. USA will show up a lot more often than Antarctica.
And how it works…
RFG is using the LittleNavmap database as well as publicly available data from OurAirports.com to assemble information about airports (e.g. coordinates, identifiers, runway lengths, municipalities, countries…). Since LNM pulls the airport information from FS2024, RFG will generate flights which should work for everybody. Addon airports are excluded intentionally, because not everybody has them. It’s also pretty easy to update the airport info e.g. after a World Update: I just refresh the LNM database and upload the file from my PC. Done.
In case you find errors with the airport data, blame it on Microsoft. Because that’s where the data comes from.
In some cases the country/city of an airports isn’t correct because of data redundancy or ambiguity when trying to match information from LNM with data from OurAirports.com. I already have created fallbacks to catch issues within reasonable effort, but I can’t catch them all – I do apologize. If in doubt, simply look at the map.
When you generate a multi-leg flight, the system makes sure the route stays sensible. Without safeguards, the randomizer could sometimes produce a zig-zag path, where two stopovers a few legs apart end up almost on top of each other. To prevent that, the generator checks the angle of each turn: the route will never swing back more than 90°, so your path keeps moving forward instead of looping back on itself.
In case you find problems or if you have any kind of feedback, please leave a comment below.
DefragDad
In all seriousness I’ve gotten the question why I am not blocking countries like Russia, North Korea, China, Iran or whatever from the generator; probably because I am living in a country or speaking languages which are considered to be part of the “western hemisphere”. The answer is pretty simple: Planet Earth is not interested in petty political struggles and will not take sides besides its own. I do have my own view on things I will gladly discuss personally with anyone who asks. But In the context of flight simming we’re here to explore the PLANET, and ANY country or people on this wonderful Earth have places and culture to discover which we don’t want to miss, no matter if the political or religious leaders have lost it.
tabletop ANDROID
This tool is pretty cool. I love the fact that you have a downloadable flight plan as well. Great work!
DefragDad
hey thanks! if you have any suggestions, feel free. i was thinking about including another option to filter away the countries which have the most airports in the world, to increase the chance to get results from lesser known places. i was researching a little to find out those countries with the most airfields. i was expecting the US to be the top contender in this category, but what i did not expect is brazil to be no.2 on the list…
https://www.worldatlas.com/places/countries-with-the-most-airports-in-the-world.html
Bob
I was looking for the idea to “randomly” fly around the world and found your site on google. This is probably the best way to discover the world. Thank you for it !
DefragDad
Hello Bob, you’re very welcome. If you find any issues or if you have suggestions, please do tell me.
Best, Matt
Juan
A great tool, thank you very much! Just a suggestion: it would be great if you could set the departure airport so we could make connecting flights.
DefragDad
That’s a great idea, thanks! I’ll see what I can do. 🙂
DefragDad
Thought about it for a while. I think selecting the airport where to start from is simple to implement, but really kind of beside the whole point of this “random” flight generator.
I assume that you’re interested in flying a route that consists of several waypoints. I’d rather implement an option to put in the amount of waypoints/stopovers your random route should contain, as well as the approximate distance each of the legs should have, and then let fate decide where the route goes to. Make sense?
DefragDad
I hope it does. I have modified the RFG a bit so you can freely choose the number of legs/stopovers, and a max distance for the legs. I’ll also update the description.
Django
Any option to select a particular country?
DefragDad
Hey Django,
not yet, and it’s difficult to do currently due to ambiguous/inconsistent data. But I’ll look into it and try to find a viable solution.
Sps
could i ask for an option to generate flights for helicopters 🙂
thank you so much !
DefragDad
Interesting thought. I’m not a helo guy, so the question I’d ask is: What is it that you need, an option to filter for heliports? Currently they are excluded on purpose from the database.
John
Greetings from Australia. Great web site, I am using it before every flight now. I also vote for this “Any option to select a particular country?”.
Many thanks for making this for the flight sim community.
DefragDad
Thanks a lot for your kind words, John, much appreciated – it’s awesome that the tool works out for you!
As I said – I’ll look into the country stuff. Unfortunately I haven’t yet found a solution to make sure that the airport-country-mappings are actually reliable. The LittleNavMap database which I use to extract the airport info does not seem to give me all the data I need, so I have to rely on additional sources like OurAirports.com to find the correct country for each airfield. But even this doesn’t work out in every possible scenario as you can see in the generator: sometimes the relation just isn’t correct. For me the country selection isn’t important, but since several people have asked for this feature now, so I’ll look harder for the best sources. 🙂
John
Would this help?
https://www.iban.com/country-codes
DefragDad
It’s a good thought, but unfortunately the problem runs deeper – there are many airports which have not been consistently associated with the necessary data. I wrote Alex from LittleNavMap who confirmed that the data quality has deteriorated from FS2020 to FS2024 – 2020 was incomplete and apparently it’s gotten worse with 2024. I’ll probably have to find a different approach, partly based on coordinates or something. There will be a solution, promise.
DefragDad
Just pushed a new version. Not perfect yet, but a starting point. You can select countries now for the departure airfield.
John
Thanks for the update DefragDad, working great so far. Much appreciated.
DefragDad
you’re very welcome – please report issues you might find!
karl
I am trying to do a random Map starting from Malta (Europe), but seems it is sending me to towns by the name of Malta 🙂 probably a small glitch 🙂
DefragDad
That is indeed odd 🙂 Wasn’t able to replicate the problem, but I’ll look into it – thanks for your feedback!
DefragDad
I have to admit I am at a loss here – I cannot reproduce for the life of me the issue with Malta “city”. It’s always the country, when I’m generating a flight. Can you try to describe which values exactly you entered?