The Assistance menu in Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the most useful tools in your piloting arsenal. This is where you’re going to want to head if you need help navigating the cluttered UI or handling the plane. This game is very complex and can be confusing even to experienced flyers, so the devs included plenty of customization options to tailor your experience with the flight sim.
Start by pressing Esc and select “Options” in the main menu. From there, you can open the sub-tab for Assistance.
From this menu, you will find a great many useful settings to change. The Assistance menu in Microsoft Flight Simulator is where you can turn Autopilot on or off, for example. To save time, you can also press CTRL + ALT + X to toggle Autopilot on or off. Aside from that, there are a bunch of other things you can mess with. Find the ATC too hard to manage. Here’s the menu you need to open to delegate the ATC to the AI. Manage Radio Comms does the same thing for your radio and ATC comms. So if you want to turn off ATC effectively, toggle on Manage Radio Comms.
For gameplay options, there’s plenty here. Head to the Piloting sub-menu within the Assistance menu in Microsoft Flight Simulator to toggle on various piloting assists that make planes easier to control.
You can even turn on options for Unlimited Fuel, turn off Crash Damage, and more. One of the more helpful options for brand new players is Checklist Assist. This will handle all of the Preflight Checklist. Although it’s a good option to leave off if you really want to learn the ins and outs of the game.
This menu can be found within the options menu. From the basic menu select “General” and then scroll down and select Accessibility. From there, you can also tweak the UI size and color. You may also toggle on text-to-speech if you need that.
Another thing you might want to do, especially if your rig is a bit old, is to disable the AI data feeds. The developers pipe in real-world flight data and location information to control in-game weather and many other systems. This will help reduce the amount of information you have to track, as well as what your CPU has to process.
