Best Free Flight Simulators to Download in 2026
Flight simulation stopped being a payware-only hobby years ago. Between community-driven airliner projects, open flight-dynamics engines and lightweight ATC simulators, you can build a serious desktop cockpit without paying a licence fee.
Top picks
- aircraft — The A32NX & A380X Project are community driven open source projects to create free Airbus aircraft in Microsoft Flight Simulator that are as close… (★ 5,415, GPL-3.0)
- jsbsim — An open source flight dynamics & control software library (★ 2,297, LGPL-2.1)
- orbiter — Open-source repository of Orbiter Space Flight Simulator (★ 1,999, MIT)
- littlenavmap — Little Navmap is a free flight planner, navigation tool, moving map, airport search and airport information system for Flight Simulator X, Microsoft… (★ 1,622, GPL-3.0)
- flightmare — An Open Flexible Quadrotor Simulator (★ 1,433, see repo)
- openscope — openScope Air Traffic Control Simulator (★ 839, see repo)
- flightgear — Mirror: FlightGear - Open source flight sim (★ 815, GPL-2.0)
- FSHistory — Play and Enjoy the History of Microsoft Flight Simulator (★ 787, MIT)
- MouseFlight — War Thunder style mouse flight controls for aircraft (★ 703, MIT)
- MARSIM — MARSIM: A light-weight point-realistic simulator for LiDAR-based UAVs (★ 588, GPL-2.0)
- bluesky — The open source air traffic simulator (★ 571, MIT)
- msfs2020-go — connect to microsoft flight simulator 2020 using golang (★ 402, MIT)
FAQ
- Are these projects really free?
- Yes. Every entry is an open-source repository. Some maintainers accept donations, and licences differ, so check the licence on the project page before commercial use.
- Where do the downloads come from?
- Straight from GitHub: the project's release page for binaries, or a source archive of the default branch.
- How were these projects chosen?
- We search GitHub for aviation and flight keywords, then filter for relevance, activity and star count, and drop anything abandoned or unrelated.