IFR Flight Plan Reverts to VFR After Entering Aircraft Selection Screen

Bug Reporting Hub Miscellaneous
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1

ISSUE DESCRIPTION

When setting up a free flight in the World Map, if you first create and send an IFR flight plan to ATC, then navigate to the aircraft selection screen, the flight plan type automatically reverts to VFR upon exiting the aircraft selection screen. This forces the user to re-select IFR and re-send the plan to ATC every time they change aircraft after setting up the route.

FREQUENCY OF ISSUE

Every time, 100% reproducible.

REPRODUCTION STEPS

  1. Open World Map and import IFR plan.
  2. Send the flight plan to ATC.
  3. Click on the aircraft selection panel to choose or change your aircraft.
  4. Select any aircraft (or simply exit the aircraft selection screen without changing).
  5. Observe that the flight plan type has automatically reverted from IFR back to VFR.

YOUR SETTINGS

Issue occurs with no mods/add-ons — tested in safe mode with the same result.

What peripherals are you using: N/A (issue occurs during World Map setup, no peripherals involved)

[PC Only] Are you using Developer Mode or have you made any changes to it? On Dev mode, no changes
[PC Only] What GPU (Graphics Card) do you use: N/A (not a graphics-related issue)

[PC Only] What other relevant PC specs can you share: N/A

MEDIA
Onedrive: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 2026-05-22 18-44-37.mp4

2

Can replicate.
Flight plan is deleted, just departure/arrival are kept and IFR switched to VFR.
Not sure if really a bug or the design when clicking on aircraft selection, default setup is then loaded back.

3

Thanks for confirming!

I believe this is a regression introduced in SU5.
Here’s the context of how I discovered it: I sometimes import a flight plan first, then browse the aircraft selection screen to pick a suitable livery. That’s when I noticed the flight plan type silently reverting to VFR.
I’ve done the similar workflows in SU4 and prior updates without running into this issue, so it’s very likely something that came in with SU5.

Could you let me know what the will next steps look like?

4

Interesting that the flow was different prior SU5, so most probably a regression as you said. The next step are to wait for more votes and users replication so that it can be logged.
You can also report it directly to Asobo by creating a zendesk ticket: https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

5

Personal Comments and Observations

Part of the reason is that the Flight Planning logic has to read the selected aircraft’s Performance Configuration File to validate if the Flight Plan cruising altitude is possible, and/or total trip distance is achievable. Changing the plane needs to regenerate the estimates and resets the plan.

Changing any of the following factors also forces a reset of the plan: aircraft, time/date/weather, Ready for Takeoff vs Cold & Dark start positions.

The flow should be - establish or import your plan dead last. The only step after that is to Send to ATC/Avionics as needed and then click Fly Now.

This also mirrors the Flight Planning flow at World Map in FS2020.

6

@CasualClick comments make sense and could explain the change in the logic to avoid unflyable flight plan if switching of aircraft. Maybe not a bug at the end.

7

Thanks for the detailed explanation
I understand the logic behind recalculating estimates when the aircraft changes, since different performance profiles affect cruise altitude and range. That makes total sense.

However, I’d like to point out two things that don’t quite line up with that reasoning:

  1. The flight plan type reverts from IFR to VFR even when I don’t actually change the aircraft. Simply entering and exiting the aircraft selection screen without selecting a different plane also triggers the reset. If this were purely about recalculating against the performance config, a no-change exit shouldn’t reset anything.

  2. This same workflow (import plan → browse aircraft → exit) worked fine in SU4 and earlier updates without reverting the plan type. If SU5 intentionally changed this behavior, I’d expect it to be documented in the release notes. Since it wasn’t, this feels more like a regression than a deliberate design choice.

To confirm my idea, I went through the SU5 release notes and found a couple of things worth noting:

  1. There’s an EFB fix in SU5 that reads:

    Planner App – Fixed an issue where filing the plan with ATC could erroneously get the wrong IFR/VFR flight type if the Flight Rules dropdown was not toggled at least one time.

    This confirms SU5 touched the IFR/VFR flight type logic in this update, and my issue may be a side effect of that change.

  2. There’s also this fix which:

    Fixed aircraft fuel resetting to its default quantity when selecting a fuel amount then exiting and going back in the aircraft configuration screen.

    This is essentially the same data reset pattern for fuel instead of flight plan type. Since the fuel data was treated as a bug, the IFR/VFR type likely is too.