How do I fly over my house in Microsoft Flight Simulator?

To fly over your house in Microsoft Flight Simulator, find its latitude and longitude, enter those coordinates on the World Map, and use the resulting pin as a destination or waypoint. Depart from a nearby airport in a slow aircraft, then follow the route and local landmarks until you reach the pin.

What is the easiest way to find your house in MSFS?

Decimal latitude and longitude provide the most reliable way to locate a specific house because Microsoft Flight Simulator does not consistently recognise residential addresses.

1. Find your coordinates: Drop a pin on your house in a mapping app and copy the decimal coordinates. They should appear as latitude, longitude. Latitude comes first; west and south use negative numbers.
2. Open the flight map: Use the World Map in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 or the Free Flight map in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. The precise labels can differ between versions and updates.
3. Search for the coordinates: Paste the two decimal numbers into the map search box. If they are not recognised, remove degree symbols and other text, or zoom into the area and place a custom pin manually.
4. Build a short route: Choose an airport roughly 5–15 nautical miles away as your departure, then set the house pin as the arrival point or a custom waypoint. Our guide to planning a short VFR flight on the built-in map explains the route setup in more detail.
5. Fly towards the pin: Follow the route line or cockpit GPS, then identify the neighbourhood using major roads, railway lines, rivers, parks and junctions.

A mistake we see constantly is entering a full street address and assuming the location is unavailable when the search returns nothing. The simulator's database is geared towards airports, coordinates and recognised points of interest, so coordinates are the better choice.

Can I start directly over my house?

You can usually select the custom map point as your departure, but this creates an airborne start and may place the aircraft directly above or just beyond the property.

Using the house as the destination is easier because it gives you time to establish your heading, compare landmarks and descend to a useful viewing altitude. If you only want an immediate look, set the custom point as departure and be ready to pause or turn back after the flight loads.

Which aircraft and settings work best?

A slow, high-wing aircraft such as a Cessna 152 or 172 makes residential areas much easier to identify than a fast jet.

• Altitude: Try approximately 1,000–2,000 feet above ground level. Too low makes the street pattern difficult to read; too high makes individual buildings hard to distinguish.
• Weather: Select daylight, good visibility, limited cloud and light winds for the first attempt.
• Navigation: Keep the route or waypoint marker enabled, and use the in-sim VFR map to track your aircraft. The map will not provide house numbers, so visual landmarks still matter.
• World data: Enable online world data or scenery streaming. Turn on photogrammetry where it is available and appropriate for the area.
• Speed: Reduce power before reaching the neighbourhood so that you have time to compare roads and buildings without making repeated steep turns.

Why does my house look wrong or appear to be missing?

Your coordinates can be correct even when the displayed building does not resemble the real house.

Microsoft Flight Simulator represents the globe at approximately real-world scale, but it does not contain a hand-modelled copy of every property. MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024 combine streamed aerial imagery, generated buildings and photogrammetry, with coverage and image dates varying by location.

• Wrong neighbourhood: Check that latitude and longitude were not reversed. Also confirm the negative sign for locations west of Greenwich or south of the equator.
• Correct roads but generic buildings: The area probably uses procedurally generated structures. No graphics setting can turn those into exact models of the real houses.
• Everything is blurry: Check the internet connection, online scenery options and any in-sim data limit. If the edition uses a rolling cache and the problem persists across a broad area, refreshing that cache may help.
• Distorted photogrammetry: Give the scenery time to stream and render, or circle the area once. Higher terrain and object detail settings can improve presentation, but they cannot repair missing source data.
• Outdated property: Aerial imagery may pre-date renovations, demolition or newer construction.

How can I confirm that I found the correct building?

Match the coordinate pin with several large, stable features rather than relying on the appearance of one roof.

Look for the shape of the road, nearby intersections, sports fields, waterways, railway lines and groups of larger buildings. PC users who need a more precise moving map can also use Little Navmap for route planning and live position tracking; console users can make the same flight with the in-sim map and waypoint marker.