Airplane Mode will put you in the passenger seat of someone else's Flight Sim
Right now, a lotta folks are getting their travel fix from Microsoft Flight Simulator. But for most of us, travel isn't about getting behind the controls of an elegant, gravity-defying machine - rather, we're squeezing what little comfort we can from a metal tube packed with noisy strangers and posture-wrecking chairs. Enter Airplane Mode, developer Hosni Auji's upcoming attempt to trap you in economy class for a full six hours.
Hope you brought a good book with you, reader. We're in this for the long haul.
Airplane Mode lumps you in the seat of an economy-class flight from New York, New York to Reykjavik, Iceland - a good six-hour haul on a good day. The entire trip is rendered from take-off to landing, with a "relatively accurate" satellite map to check out if you manage to bag yourself a window seat. There might be turbulence, your battery might run out, the wifi could conk out, or worse, there could be a screaming child two rows over. The truly awful part, however, is that I'm honestly pumped as hell to settle down and fasten my seatbelt - if only to give myself the pretense of getting out of town.
While it's been lurking in development since at least 2018 (with a brief teaser trailer last year), Airplane Mode's official trailer comes at the perfect time. We'll all wrecked with Wanderlust, MS Flight Sim is the talk of the town, and I reckon more than a few people would be up for pretending to be off on their hols without risking infection.
It remains to be seen if Auji will add an endurance mode putting you in the passenger seat of that 16-hour streamed haul from LA to Dubai. On the contrary, even, he's announced plans for a shorter hop between New York and Halifax, Nova Scotia, a comparatively brief two-and-a-half-hour trip. Airplane Mode is set to take off on Steam later this year.