Post-SU6 Update - Flight "blue progress bar" loads to 100% but flight won't start

I wish all the confusing information about this issue wouldn’t be scattered across 5 different threads, sigh.

Hi guys, I’m investigating my own case of this and the other reports for weeks now and it’s moving out a different piece of add-on and turning a different option off and back on for all of us. The problem comes up when trying to spawn at a different airport of a different maker (doesn’t even have to be 3rd-party) in a different region for all of us, and that alone indicates that usually none of those airports and things are the actual culprit.

You just shift around random little unrelated things in memory and that makes all the difference, it either improves or deteriorates the situation, so trying to identify “the culprit” turns out to be an endless series of red herrings because it doesn’t matter what you add or remove, it’s the plain adding and removing making all the difference and that’s also why so strange things like liveries and textures have an influence on this.

I have confirmed that some of the really weird workarounds floating around relieve the problem, usually temporarily, which is another indication that the add-ons are not the cause of this issue:

  • Deleting Content.XML worked once until the next sim restart

  • Turning off Online Functionality and back on after loading works, I noticed that it’s already sufficient to turn off multiplayer, but not always.

  • Turning down graphics detail level from Ultra to something lower, for me I boiled this down to just setting the new “Off-screen terrain precaching” doodah one notch down, which many of us have happily set to “ultra” after it came in WU6. This permanently fixes the problem at my one airport triggering this issue, but I can then trigger the problem again by simply installing some recent small freeware airstrip 300 km to the south of the affected airport, and then and a formerly 100% unaffected airport in the same general area starts showing the same behavior.

In other words, the overall number and possibly location of Community folder contents and and payware airports seems to aggravate the problem, which is another red herring that seems to point at add-ons in general. But this all used to work before SU6, I personally have very few add-ons (4 paid airports and GAIST and WeLoveVFR in the Community folder) and since I log any changes to my dedicated FS system I can say with some certainty that nothing was changed except installing SU6.

This kind of issue is a nightmare to understand, to troubleshoot and extremely hard to reproduce due to the randomness, which in turn can make it very hard to fix. That’s why it might not be likely that we get this fixed anytime soon but if all of you guys don’t file a Zendesk bug report about it, we may have to live with this forever because Asobo may not even be aware that they messed this up.