Microsoft Flight Simulator players have been using the game's live weather mode to explore Hurricane Laura, the devastating tropical storm currently ravaging Louisiana and Texas. This catastrophe has caused untold damage and left thousands of people without power. It is considered the strongest storm to hit the region in over a century.
This isn't the first time players have used Microsoft Flight Simulator to explore sights that would be illegal or dangerous to visit in the real world. Almost immediately after the game launched, fans were already chartering flights to Area 51 and the Bermuda Triangle. While government secrets and supernatural phenomena weren't to be found in Microsoft's robust simulation of Earth, the game remains impressive in its dedication to detail. With a few bizarre exceptions, like the perplexingly massive monolith piercing the sky in Microsoft Flight Simulator's rendition of Australia, the game's realism is quite remarkable, especially when one considers the live weather setting, which takes real life meteorological data and uses it to simulate weather in real time.
Real-time weather data is certainly something worth paying a lot of attention to these days, as Hurricane Laura continues its path of destruction across the US. Twitter user Petri Levälahti took advantage of this fact to jump into a plane and get up close and personal with the terrifying storm. The results are quite breathtaking; the titanic storm clouds, which absolutely dwarf Levälahti's plane, are gorgeous, in a monstrous and horrifying sort of way. Levälahti is clearly using a very advanced PC to capture these shots at a very high graphical setting, which adds to their beauty. Check them out in the Twitter post below.
Obviously, this isn't a perfect representation of Hurricane Laura and these photos aren't likely to serve any realistic meteorological value. The mere presence of Levälahti's airplane proves how much of a fabrication this all is; in real life, any plane that got that close to the hurricane would surely be destroyed. Microsoft Flight Simulator is an impressive, and huge, piece of software but ultimately it has its limitations, like not modeling the effects of actual weather conditions beyond their appearance. Still, it makes for some gorgeous screenshots.
The way gamers like Petri Levälahti have been interacting with Hurricane Laura should in no way undercut its severity. This storm is an unmitigated catastrophe that will have long-lasting effects for hundreds of thousands of people across the country, and it's hard to understate just how much tragedy has been caused since it made landfall. People are welcome to take the time to admire the majesty and power of nature evident in Microsoft Flight Simulator screenshots like Levälahti's, but it's important to remember that real people have been hurt and killed by Hurricane Laura, and that's a truly horrifying thing. Exploring it in a video game is the only way that anyone should risk getting close to it.
Microsoft Flight Simulator is available now on PC.
Source: Petri Levälahti/Twitter