Later, I’m sitting in a function room in a hotel a few miles from the Grand Canyon and I’m playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, which features a digital representation of the entire Earth – 1:1 in scale.

When the reboot of Microsoft Flight Simulator launched in the summer of 2020, I called it the most remarkable new game in a generation. By combining data from Bing Maps with a next-generation physics-based flight model,