There are some bits of flight simulation software that almost every simmer knows about, even if they don’t necessarily use them every day, and MobiFlight is probably one of them.
I’ll be upfront from the start: I don’t use MobiFlight very much these days.
Most of the hardware in my current setup comes with its own software or some form of manufacturer bridge that does the job for me. But go back a few generations of hardware and things were rather different.
One of my first proper A320 MCDUs needed MobiFlight to actually talk to the simulator. I remember getting the hardware, plugging it in and then discovering there was another part of the puzzle required before this new bit of my cockpit was going to do anything. Now, it might surprise you, being a founder of a space like AvGeekHangar and have spent a lot of time and money on my home rig, which has some pretty heavy PC specs, I am in fact a bit of a technophobe, so actually at first thought, MobiFlight was a little scary!
At its simplest, MobiFlight allows physical hardware to communicate with your flight simulator. That could be something you’ve built yourself with a few switches and an Arduino. It could be displays, LEDs, encoders and buttons. It could be a complete home-built panel or a considerably more ambitious cockpit.
Today, MobiFlight Connector supports Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and 2024, X-Plane, FSX and Prepar3D, with support extending across Arduino-based MobiFlight boards, USB HID devices, MIDI controllers and other hardware. And you don’t have to write software to make it happen, and that’s really key for people like me who literally sweat over the thought of understanding the finer details of coding and changing PC settings that I don’t understand.
There is a huge community of people who enjoy building things for their simulators but aren’t necessarily programmers. MobiFlight effectively provides a bridge between those two worlds. Lucky for me, there’s plenty of content out there these days from a range of good creators who will explain everything for you, step-by-step.
A switch on your desk can become a switch in your aircraft. An LED can react to something happening inside the simulator. An encoder can control a cockpit function.
Scale that idea up and you begin to understand why MobiFlight has become so important to the home-cockpit community.
This is perhaps the part of MobiFlight I like most.
It wasn’t originally created because somebody identified a gap in the flight-sim software market and wrote a business plan.
Founder Sebastian Möbius was building his own flight simulator cockpit and needed a way of connecting his custom hardware to the simulator, so he built one; that personal project eventually became MobiFlight.
More than a decade later, Sebastian is still leading it, but what sits around him today is very different. MobiFlight has become a genuinely international open-source project, supported by volunteer developers, moderators and a huge community of people building everything from their first button box to full home cockpits.
There is actually a comment from Sebastian buried in the old MobiFlight forum from 2018 that perhaps sums up the philosophy better than anything we could write:
“Everybody is invited to contribute to MobiFlight!”
At the time, he was encouraging users to contribute code and ideas back into the project and that is still very visible today. The source code is publicly available. People contribute fixes and features. Users share configurations and help other users. MobiFlight’s Discord has become part technical support desk, part workshop and part meeting place for cockpit builders. The community has helped build it, and I absolutely love that! The community is an amazing group of people, all having the same love for flight sim and aviation, whether that’s professionally or personally. The power is in the people, and the skills, commitment and enthusiasm from some of us is truly inspirational.
And….. It’s Still Free
Perhaps even more remarkably, MobiFlight remains free and open source.
There isn’t a ‘basic’ version designed to persuade you into buying the version that does what you wanted.
Keeping something like that alive obviously isn’t free, though. Development takes time, infrastructure costs money and supporting a large community requires people.
MobiFlight therefore has a number of ways people can support the project, including the MobiFlight Club, donations, its community shop and sponsorship.
And this is where AvGeekHangar comes into the story.
AvGeekHangar is a Bronze Sponsor of MobiFlight.
You’ll find our logo amongst the sponsors on the MobiFlight website, but this isn’t one of those sponsorships where we’ve put some money somewhere because we wanted our logo displayed.
We support it because projects like MobiFlight are exactly the sort of thing we want AvGeekHangar to get behind. Flight simulation isn’t built entirely by large hardware manufacturers and software studios.
An enormous amount of what makes this hobby interesting comes from people who build something because they need it, share it with somebody else and eventually discover that thousands of other people needed it too.
MobiFlight is a particularly good example of that, and I can only hope that AvGeekHangar helps fill another need in the community by offering a UK-trusted place for all things flight sim.
Our support has also helped MobiFlight make the journey to FSimUK at Aerospace Bristol, where the UK community will have the opportunity to meet the people behind the project rather than just seeing the software running quietly behind their hardware.
MobiFlight themselves rather kindly thanked AvGeekHangar publicly for helping make that trip possible. For us, that’s what the sponsorship is actually about.
Maybe.
If your current flight-sim setup consists entirely of commercial hardware with its own software and integrations, you may rarely have a reason to open it. That’s pretty much where I find myself at the moment.
But start building something yourself, like many people in the community, due to the ever-increasing accessibility to a range of cockpit building tools, buy a piece of hardware that needs another route into the simulator, or decide that the switch on your desk really ought to control the switch in your aircraft, and suddenly MobiFlight starts making an awful lot of sense.
For some people it solves one small problem. For others it becomes the foundation of an entire home cockpit.
And that’s probably why, more than a decade after Sebastian started trying to solve a problem in his own simulator, MobiFlight is still being developed, still attracting contributors and still being used by cockpit builders around the world.
Sometimes the most important software in a flight simulator isn’t the software you spend the flight looking at. It’s the bit quietly sitting in the background making everything else work.
MobiFlight is free and open source. mobiflight.com
Learn more, download MobiFlight or find out how to support the project at the official MobiFlight website.
Michael – Founder
AvGeekHangar
