The race for Paris Charles de Gaulle just lost its presumed frontrunner. Aerosoft announced that development of its Mega Airport Paris CDG for Microsoft Flight Simulator has been suspended indefinitely, ending, at least for now, what many in the community considered the safe bet among the three competing renditions of LFPG.
If you’ve been following our coverage, this won’t come as a complete shock. Back in Aerosoft’s end-of-year update last December, the team admitted progress had slowed due to missing airport access, going as far as publicly asking for contacts at the airport who could provide reference material. When we mapped out the three-way battle for Paris in January, Aerosoft had already placed certain sections on hold. Today’s announcement is the logical, if disappointing, conclusion to that trajectory.
Why Aerosoft is stepping back
According to the developer’s statement, the decision wasn’t driven by a single problem but by a combination of factors. Aerosoft points to limitations in access, difficulties gathering references, and the overall conditions needed to accurately and sustainably develop an airport of this complexity. Charles de Gaulle is not just enormous, it’s also continuously evolving in real life, which means a faithful rendition demands reliable references and, in some cases, direct access to the airport itself.
The team is also honest about being a smaller studio that needs to focus its resources where it can deliver the best results. In their own words, continuing under the current constraints would not meet the standards they set for themselves.
Aerosoft’s Stuttgart Airport, released in March, raised the bar considerably for the studio’s scenery output, with walkable terminal interiors, animated passengers, and a level of detail that drew widespread praise. Aerosoft says it intends to maintain that quality level across all future MSFS 2024 releases, and by its own assessment, Paris under the current conditions simply couldn’t get there.
A premature announcement
One of the more interesting parts of the statement is Aerosoft addressing the elephant in the room: why announce Paris at all if the conditions weren’t secured? The project was first revealed in the studio’s 2025 scenery roadmap back in May 2025, headed by Jo Erlend Sund and Lukas Vezyroglou, the duo behind Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, and other highly regarded European airports.
Aerosoft says that at the time of the announcement, it was in promising discussions and was confident the necessary conditions would be met. That confidence, unfortunately, did not materialize. Credit where it’s due, the team is being transparent about how this unfolded rather than letting the project quietly fade into vaporware territory, a fate we’ve seen befall plenty of ambitious flight sim projects over the years.
The door isn’t fully closed either. Aerosoft says it would love to return to Paris in the future and will keep exploring opportunities to move the project forward, reassessing if the situation changes.
What this means LFPG in MSFS
With Aerosoft out, the contest for the definitive LFPG narrows to two contenders, and Aerosoft itself is pointing simmers in their direction. Pilot Experience Sim announced its Charles de Gaulle project back in late 2024, making it the longest-running of the three efforts, while azrsim added LFPG to its 2026 roadmap earlier this year, fresh off releases like Baku and Riyadh.
There’s a certain irony in how this has played out. The community has been asking for many years why nobody was making Charles de Gaulle. Then suddenly three developers were on it at once, and now the field is thinning again before a single payware version has shipped. It’s a reminder that CDG’s absence from the high-fidelity scenery map was never an oversight. The airport’s sheer scale and difficulty of securing access and references make it one of the toughest scenery projects in the sim.
In the meantime, if you’re flying into Paris in MSFS 2024 today, Xavier Ossedat’s freeware LFPG scenery on Flightsim.to remains the best way to improve on the default rendition while we wait for the payware projects to mature.
