Bush trips are finally coming back to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Announced at FlightSimExpo 2026 and playable right now in the Sim Update 6 public beta, they close one of the biggest gaps left over from the 2024 launch — a sim that shipped without one of the most beloved features of its predecessor. If you spent evenings in MSFS 2020 flying a Cub across the Nevada desert with nothing but a stopwatch and a compass, this is the mode you have been waiting for.
This guide covers what bush trips are, how they work, how to get into the beta on every platform, and how to actually fly one without getting hopelessly lost halfway through a leg. A quick word of warning up front: this is beta software as of July 2026, so some specifics will shift before the public release. I have flagged every beta-dependent claim so you know what to double-check at launch.
What are bush trips in MSFS 2024?
Bush trips are curated, multi-leg VFR adventures where you fly a set route between remote airfields using visual navigation instead of a magenta GPS line. Each trip assigns you one aircraft and a series of legs, and you navigate by heading, time, and landmarks — reading the actual landscape out the window rather than following a moving-map autopilot. They are about the journey, not systems mastery or the career-mode grind.
Think of a bush trip as a road trip with wings. You get a rough route, a set of interesting places to fly over, and a description of what to look for on the way — a bend in a river, a lake shaped like a boot, a town at the foot of a ridge. It is you, the terrain, and a plan on a piece of paper. That is the whole appeal: it strips flying back to the fundamentals that GPS made easy to forget.
In the Sim Update 6 beta (as of July 2026), bush trips are being ported over from MSFS 2020, and they arrive free with the update. Asobo added a large batch in the July 16 beta build (1.8.8.0) and has said more will follow through the beta period. So if your favourite 2020 trip is not there yet, it is very likely on the way.
Why did MSFS 2024 launch without bush trips?
MSFS 2024 shipped in November 2024 without bush trips, and their absence became one of the longest-running community requests for the sim. The 2024 rebuild reworked activities and the mission framework, and bush trips simply were not part of the initial package — despite being a headline feature of the 2020 sim.
For nearly two years, the only way to fly the classic trips was to stay in MSFS 2020 or rebuild routes by hand in 2024 using custom flight plans. Neither was a great substitute for the polished, guided experience the original mode offered. Sim Update 6 is the fix: it brings the official trips back into 2024 natively, inside the Activities menu, rather than asking you to recreate them yourself.
Photo: Diego Delso, delso.photo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
How did bush trips work in MSFS 2020 versus SU6?
In MSFS 2020, a bush trip was a self-contained activity: pick a trip, get an assigned aircraft, and fly a chain of legs using an in-sim navlog and VFR map, landing at each airfield to progress. Sim Update 6 brings that same core experience to MSFS 2024 through the Activities menu. What SU6 changes most is availability and the underlying 2024 engine — better terrain, lighting, and weather under the same trip structure.
The established bush-trip toolkit works like this, and this is the behaviour the mode has always used:
- One aircraft per trip. You fly the entire route in the plane the trip assigns you, from a Cessna 172 to a bush-ready taildragger, depending on the trip.
- The Navigation panel (the in-sim navlog, opened from the toolbar) lists the upcoming points of interest, each with a heading, an estimated time en route, and a written description of the landmarks you should see on the way.
- The VFR map is an in-sim mini-map showing terrain, airports, and an approximate suggested route. Following that exact line is not required — it is a hint, not a rail. An elevation slider toggles the terrain shading.
- Fuel carries over between legs, and damage persists unless you use the repair-and-refuel function. That means a sloppy landing on leg three can haunt you on leg four.
- A "Back on Track" helper exists on the VFR map for when you get lost — but historically, using it disables the achievements tied to the activity.
One honest caveat: the SU6 beta release notes confirm the trips are back and accessible in the Activities menu, but they do not spell out every 2024-specific detail. Things like exact save-and-resume behaviour between legs, whether legs auto-save, and any completion rewards are not documented in the July 2026 beta notes. I am not going to invent them. Treat the mechanics above as the mode's long-standing behaviour and confirm the fine print when SU6 leaves beta.
How do you access bush trips in the SU6 beta?
In the Sim Update 6 beta (as of July 2026), bush trips live in the Activities menu on the main screen. You need to be opted into the public beta first, then the available trips appear there ready to launch. Once SU6 goes to public release, the same Activities menu is where they will live for everyone — no beta enrolment required.
To join the beta, you first sign up for the Microsoft Flight Simulator Insider program, then opt in on your platform:
- Steam: right-click Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 in your library, choose Properties, open the Betas tab, and select the Sim Update 6 beta branch.
- PC (Microsoft Store) and Xbox Series X|S: use the Xbox Insider Hub app, find Flight Simulator under Previews, and join.
- PlayStation 5: download the beta build from the PlayStation Store after registering for the Insider program.
The SU6 beta is available on PC (Windows Store), PC (Steam), Xbox Series X|S, and PS5 — so console players can join the beta too, not just PC users. That is worth calling out, because console beta access is not always a given with these updates.
When will Sim Update 6 fully release?
As of July 2026, there is no confirmed public release date for Sim Update 6. The roadmap points to a July or August 2026 window, but Asobo has not committed to a firm date, and beta timelines routinely slip when testing turns up issues. Until it ships, bush trips are beta-only.
Because it is still in beta, expect the trip list and mechanics to change before release. The July 16 beta build (1.8.8.0) shipped with a large batch of trips and a short list still being tested. As of that build, these ten were still locked while Asobo finalised them:
- Discover Sweden
- North Queensland Coast
- Austria – Land of Mountains and Music
- Germany's Coast and the Rhine
- The Alpine World of Switzerland
- The Baltic Coast of Denmark and Sweden
- Wales
- Upper Northeast Adriatic Countries
- Rijeka to Santorini
- Breckenridge
If one of those is your target, check back on later beta builds or wait for the public release — the list is being filled in as testing progresses. The trips span the globe, from the fjords of Scandinavia to the Australian coast to the American Rockies, so there is plenty available to fly in the meantime.
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How do you fly a bush trip leg successfully?
The core skill is dead reckoning: hold the assigned heading for the assigned time, then look outside for the landmark that confirms you are where you should be. Start your stopwatch at each waypoint, fly the heading the navlog gives you, and cross-check the terrain — rivers, coastlines, and lakes are drawn accurately enough to navigate by. When the description says "follow the river north to the town at the base of the ridge," that is a literal instruction, not flavour text.
Here is the rhythm of a single leg:
- Read the next point before you take off. Open the Navigation panel and note the heading, the estimated time en route, and the landmark description. Get a mental picture of the leg before you are airborne and busy.
- Fly heading and time first, terrain second. Set the assigned heading, start a timer, and trust it. Dead reckoning works because a known heading held for a known time puts you in a known place. The landmarks are there to confirm the plan, not replace it.
- Use pilotage to fix your position. As features come into view, match them to the description and the VFR map. A coastline, a large lake, or a mountain pass is a reliable checkpoint. Smaller roads and streams often are not drawn, so anchor on the big stuff.
- Manage fuel deliberately. Fuel carries over between legs, so lean the mixture at cruise and do not firewall the throttle the whole way. Running a tank dry over remote terrain ends the leg badly, and there is no gas station on a gravel strip.
- Land and come to a full stop. This is the part people miss — see the next section.
If you are newer to visual flying, our MSFS 2024 beginner's guide covers the fundamentals of pitch, power, and holding a heading, and the visual approach guide walks through landing at a field with no ILS to guide you in — which is exactly what most bush strips demand.
What is the most common way to fail a leg?
The single most common failure is not a crash — it is overflying the destination airfield without landing and stopping. A leg completes when you land at the next airport and bring the aircraft to a full stop on the airfield. Buzzing the runway or touching down and immediately taking off again will not register the leg as complete, and players lose a lot of time confused about why the trip will not advance.
So on short final, commit to the landing, get all the wheels down, and roll to a genuine full stop somewhere on the field before you do anything else. Only then will the trip tick over to the next leg.
The other classic failure is getting lost, and it usually comes from abandoning the plan too early. Pilots see an interesting feature, chase it off-heading, and lose the thread. Discipline fixes this: fly the heading and the clock, and only correct once a confirmed landmark tells you to. If you are genuinely, hopelessly lost, the VFR map has a "Back on Track" helper — but be aware it has historically disabled the activity's achievements, so treat it as a last resort rather than a crutch.
A few smaller gotchas worth knowing:
- Damage sticks around. Bend the aircraft on one leg and you carry that into the next unless you repair. A rough bush landing can quietly wreck the rest of your trip.
- Weather makes navigation harder. For your first few trips, set clear skies. Real bush pilots pick their days, and low cloud or haze makes landmark spotting genuinely difficult.
- Do not over-trust the suggested route line. It is an approximation. The written landmark descriptions in the navlog are the more precise guide.
Which bush trip should you fly first?
Start with a short, GPS-equipped trip in gentle terrain rather than a long alpine epic. Trips that assign a glass-cockpit aircraft like the Cessna 172 give you a backup moving map to build confidence, and flat or coastal routes make landmark navigation far more forgiving than threading mountain passes in a taildragger. Save the marathon 20-plus-leg trips for once you trust your dead-reckoning skills.
A good progression looks like this. First, fly a short coastal or lowland trip to learn the loop of read-the-navlog, fly-the-heading, spot-the-landmark, land-and-stop. Then step up to a trip with more legs and trickier terrain once that rhythm is automatic. By the time you tackle something long and mountainous, missing a leg trigger or losing your position will be rare, because the fundamentals will be muscle memory.
If bush trips give you the flying itch and you want more structure afterwards, career mode turns these same VFR skills into paid contracts — bush-flying jobs in career mode reward exactly the low-level navigation you practise here.
Do you need any add-ons or hardware for bush trips?
No — bush trips run entirely on the base sim plus the SU6 update, using the default aircraft each trip assigns, so you need nothing extra to fly them. That is part of the charm: they were designed as accessible, self-contained adventures. A controller or keyboard will get you through any trip in the game.
That said, bush flying rewards fine control more than almost any other kind of flying. You are making precise, low-speed inputs near terrain, feeling for a soft touchdown on a short strip. A joystick or yoke with a good throttle makes that noticeably easier than a gamepad, and rudder pedals help enormously on gusty crosswind strips where you are dancing on the pedals to stay straight. None of it is required — but if you find yourself flying trip after trip, it is where hardware pays off.
For planning longer trips, an in-sim tablet is handy for weather and quick reference; our EFB guide covers what the tablet does and does not do. And if you want to think through fuel before a long remote leg, the fuel planning guide explains how to work out endurance so you are not gliding into a gravel strip on fumes.
The bottom line
Bush trips are one of the best things about flight simming, and getting them back into MSFS 2024 fills a hole that has been there since launch. In the Sim Update 6 beta as of July 2026, they are in the Activities menu, free, and playable across PC, Xbox, and PS5 — with more of the classic routes being added as testing continues.
Fly the heading, watch the clock, read the land, and remember to land and come to a full stop at each field. Do that and you will rediscover why so many pilots consider a quiet afternoon bush trip the purest flying the sim has to offer. Just remember this is beta software — the trip list and finer mechanics will keep changing right up until SU6 goes public, so treat anything mechanic-specific here as a July 2026 snapshot and confirm it at release.
