What the 2026 FlightSim Community Survey reveals about who we really are.
The numbers confirm what you'd expect, and reveal a few things the sim industry should sit with.
42,332 respondents. 58 questions. 92 partner organizations. Navigraph has been running its FlightSim Community Survey annually since 2018, but this year's edition is the most comprehensive yet. The numbers confirm what you'd expect, and reveal a few things the sim industry should sit with.
1/ One in five simmers holds a real pilot license
The number most people miss: 20.9% of survey respondents hold a pilot license — nearly one in five, actively engaged in real-world aviation alongside their sim habit.
More telling: 62.9% of licensed pilots say they became interested in flight simulation before starting their training. The simulator is the gateway, and the community already knows it. That has real implications for how hardware makers, developers, and publishers talk to this audience. The sim-to-real pipeline runs in one direction, and it starts here.
2/ Traditional media is losing a third of its audience
FSElite — the most-read flightsim publication — dropped from 41.8% to 31.1% in a single year. FlightSim.com and Avsim fell by similar margins. The most striking number: 33.3% of respondents now select "none of the above" when asked about their media consumption, up from 25.1% last year.
One in three simmers has no regular publication — and given that engagement and session habits remain stable, the gap has nothing to do with declining interest. The audience exists; the media serving it has thinned out.
3/ The oldest users spend the most
The 55+ cohort is the highest-spending segment by a clear margin — most likely to be in the US$1,000–$5,000+ range for both software and hardware, and writing the largest checks despite being the quietest presence on social media.
This is the grey dollar — a well-documented pattern in hobbyist markets. Time-rich, income-established, deeply invested. Sim hardware makers who optimize for the 25-year-old are optimizing for the wrong buyer.
4/ Mastery, not community
A new section this year measured motivations. The results are unambiguous: simmers are driven by mastery and realism, not social interaction or competition. Leaderboards rank last. Group flights are low priority. What matters is doing things correctly, understanding systems, and improving.
Active Discord users dropped from 66% to 51% over two years; Twitch fell from 27% to 20%. The data tells you why — most simmers would rather learn at their own pace than perform for an audience.
What it says about the community
The flight sim community is older, more capable, and more serious than the industry's marketing typically assumes. These are people studying aircraft systems, tracking their skill development, and investing serious money in hardware that narrows the gap to the real thing — and 20.9% of them have crossed that gap already.
That proportion of real-world pilots embedded in the sim community is the visible tip of something bigger: a user base where the line between simulation and reality is genuinely blurry for a lot of people. Worth understanding, whether you're building hardware, writing for these people, or flying alongside them.
Source: Navigraph FlightSim Community Survey 2026 — 15,600 clean respondents, published April 2026