FlightControlReplay 6: Microsoft already gave you one, for free

Tucked away on FlightControlTools' own news page, between a trade show announcement and a product update, is a sentence that ought to govern any decision to buy this software: "FlightControlReplay Embedded is included for free in MSFS 2024."

Microsoft ships a version of FlightControlReplay inside Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Fabio Merlo wrote it. He maintains it — it was patched through Sim Update 2 in May 2025, with fixes for ghost aircraft alignment and a pop-out window bug. Every MSFS 2024 owner on earth already has a FlightControlReplay, and it cost them nothing.

So the question this review has to answer is not whether FCR6 is a good replay tool. It is whether €24.00 buys enough on top of the free FlightControlReplay you already own.

The honest answer, nineteen days after release, is: probably yes if you make videos, probably not if you just want to watch your landing back — and hold on for a patch either way, because the first fortnight's bug reports are all in the one area this product is supposed to be beyond reproach. Helicopters lose rotor RPM during replay. The PMDG 737 comes back at the wrong airspeed and, in one user's words, plunges to earth. FSRealistic+ reads every replayed landing as a crash. All three aircraft classes are named in FCR6's own compatibility list, and no patch has shipped.

We read seventeen sources for this review, and we should say plainly that the record is thin: FlightControlReplay 6 was released on 31 July 2026, it has one customer review anywhere (three stars), nine user replies on AVSIM, zero replies on the official MSFS forums thread, and — this is the important gap — not one independent hands-on review or video review exists yet. Everything published by the trade press so far is a release announcement. Treat this as a first look at a moving target, and treat the score as provisional.

What you are actually buying

FlightControlReplay 6 is a Windows application that records and replays flights in MSFS 2024, MSFS 2020, Prepar3D v5 and v6. Version V6.0.2607.27, 36 MB, sold through simMarket; the developer does not sell direct, and Marketplace availability was promised "to follow".

New customers	€24.00 at simMarket
Upgrade from FCR5	€12.00 (50% off)
Bought FCR5 after 30 June 2026	Free upgrade
Bundle with FlightControlSpotter	€29.99 for both, VAT excluded
Released	31 July 2026
Simulators	MSFS 2024, MSFS 2020, P3D v5, P3D v6

The genuinely useful comparison is not FCR6 against FCR5 — it is FCR6 against the free Embedded build in your simulator. Merlo published that list himself for version 5, and it still describes the shape of the deal. Not in FCR Embedded: Cinematic Replay with automatic camera cycling, Auto Camera Change with movie-style timing, VR support with the interface floating in the 3D cockpit, the MP4 video recorder, and recordable custom camera movements.

Version 6 adds to that list. Cinematic Mode builds camera choreography from named moves — Wing Reveal, Wing Sweep, Orbit, UpDown360 — either automatically or in sequences you compose. Live Fly-By Camera is the headline change, and it is the one that answers a question people actually ask: it now works during the flight, not only in replay, so you can step outside and watch your own takeoff or a passing AI aircraft with adjustable distance and angle. Flight Highlights finds takeoff, rotation, touchdown and sharp manoeuvres so you can skip the cruise. Path Track draws the flown route. Data Logger produces synchronised telemetry graphs — altitude, IAS, vertical speed, heading, pitch, bank, engine parameters, G-force — with zoom, comparison, pop-out panels and printing. LVAR recording captures third-party aircraft variables so custom systems and animations replay correctly.

Carried over: Instant Replay, Cut & Edit, Camera Manager, Resume and Take-Control, glider tow recording, Ghost and PlayAI formation flying, AI traffic tracking, MP4 rendering, VR, FlightAware import and Google Earth export.

Two practical notes before you buy. The user manual is a free public download — 38 pages, no purchase required — and reading it first is the single best thing you can do, for reasons the next section makes clear. And there is no trial.

What the community consistently praises

The feature list, first, because nothing else in this category is close. Whatever else is arguable, no free tool gives you camera choreography, an MP4 recorder, G-force telemetry and multi-aircraft AI formation replay in one application. MSFS Addons, covering the release on 5 August 2026, framed it exactly right: replay is no longer the missing feature in MSFS 2024, so FCR6 has to justify its price through the data logger and the cinematic tools — and on that specific test it clears the bar comfortably.

Second, the Live Fly-By camera, and specifically that it removes the need to plan ahead. This was the thing people wanted. On AVSIM on 2 August 2026, JYW described the only feature he had ever looked for in a replay tool: the ability to watch his landing back without having remembered to press record on final. Merlo answered the same day — Instant Relive is on by default from the moment FCR starts, set the option once and it stays on. Two weeks later he devoted a feature post to the same idea: "No prior recording. No replay required."

Third, the developer's own conduct. Merlo posts under his own name on both AVSIM and the official MSFS forums, answers compatibility questions within hours, and is straight about limits rather than vague. Asked on 2 August whether FCR6 works with ChasePlane and FSRealistic, he said yes to ChasePlane with a caveat — you can only run one cinematic at a time, which he attributed to a platform limitation — and, for FSRealistic, simply "I'm working on". A user who reported a PMDG problem on 3 August had an email address to write to by the next day.

Fourth, and quietly the most persuasive endorsement in the record: the wing footage in flightdeck2sim's triple-screen Zurich departure short was captured with an early-access build of FCR6. A serving airline pilot's channel used it to make something, which is what the product is for.

And fifth, it is genuinely trusted by the wider ecosystem. Parallel 42's own ChasePlane documentation, listing what breaks when their camera system replaces the sim's, recommends FlightControlReplay and Sky Dolly as the alternatives to the default replay engine. That is a competitor's manual pointing at this product.

What keeps coming up as a problem

For a nineteen-day-old product these are early signals rather than settled patterns — but all three are specific, dated, and sit squarely in the feature that carries the product's name.

Helicopters lose rotor RPM in replay — still open

The only customer review this product has anywhere, Matthew on simMarket on 12 August 2026, is three stars and says this: some of the automated views look promising, but FCR6 does not work with helicopters, because during replay the helicopter loses engine and rotor RPM. He adds that Fabio has said he will try to fix it, and that he will revise his rating if so.

FCR6's own features page lists the Asobo Cabri G2, the Asobo Bell 407 and the HypePerformanceGroup H145 among supported aircraft, and the H145 got a dedicated support update back in the September 2023 release of FCR5, with pedals, cyclic and collective animation.

The PMDG 737 restores the wrong airspeed — still open

cannow, AVSIM, 3 August 2026, three days after release: the indicated airspeed is not applied correctly on restore. The display shows the right figure after the flight is restored, but on taking control the aircraft is at low speed and, in his words, the 737 plunges to earth. "Not great for reliving those approaches." He notes he had no such problem with version 5, and confirmed the next day that he had emailed the developer.

The PMDG 737 is the first aircraft named in FCR6's supported-add-on list.

FSRealistic+ misreads every replayed landing as a crash — still open, developer acknowledged

edu2703, AVSIM, 4 August 2026, describes the cleanest interoperability failure in the record: something in FCR's recording causes FSRealistic+ to fire very exaggerated touchdown effects, as though every landing in the replay were extremely hard. He does not get this with other replay tools, was, in his words, forced to use them instead, and wants to come back to FCR when it is fixed. Merlo had already conceded the point two days earlier with "For fsrealistic I m working on".

Complexity — a long-standing complaint, unresolved by the rebuild

Overload, AVSIM, 2 August 2026, is the returning customer this product keeps losing: he bought previous versions of FCR and "always gave up on it, just too complicated for me", looked at the new manual, saw 38 pages of instructions, and decided against. Within the same thread he recommended a free landing-analysis tool, TouchdownFX, which he says replays the last couple of minutes at one button press and works with ChasePlane and in VR — and JYW, who had asked the original question, replied that it sounded perfect.

That exchange happened underneath the official release announcement, hours after it was posted. A rebuilt interface is the headline of version 6; it did not, in this instance, change the outcome.

A price that changed by four euros in four days

On 28 July 2026 Merlo posted new-customer pricing of EUR 24.00 plus VAT. On 1 August, in the release post on the same forum, the figure reads "Base price: EUR 28.00 (+ applicable taxes)". simMarket sells it at €24.00. FSElite reported €28.80. It is almost certainly a slip rather than anything worse, but a buyer comparing the developer's announcement against the shop finds two different numbers, and the developer's own page carries no price at all.

Performance and stability

There is not yet enough evidence to judge this properly, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

What we can say: nobody has reported a crash, a hang, a frame-rate cost or an installation failure. For a rebuilt core engine that is a real and slightly surprising absence, and it is worth more than it sounds — a from-scratch rewrite of a recording tool that hooks the simulator this deeply could easily have shipped worse.

What we cannot say: whether it holds up over long flights, across sim updates, or under the workloads content creators put it through. Nineteen days and roughly a dozen public user reports is not a stability record.

The one hard fact is the update cadence, and it currently reads as a blank. The shipping build is V6.0.2607.27 — a 27 July 2026 build — and it is still the build on sale. No hotfix has appeared on the developer's site, on simMarket, or in either forum thread, while three specific replay-fidelity faults sit open with acknowledgements attached. Merlo has been visibly present in the threads throughout, posting weekly feature spotlights on 11 and 16 August. The attention has gone to marketing the release rather than patching it, which is a normal thing for a one-person studio to do in launch fortnight and still the thing a prospective buyer most wants to see change.

Who should buy it

If you already own FlightControlReplay 5: buy the upgrade at €12.00, or take it free if you bought FCR5 after 30 June 2026. Cinematic Mode, the live Fly-By camera and the Data Logger are real additions, and at half price the open bugs are a waiting game rather than a risk.

If you make flight simulator videos: buy it. This is the profile the product is now built for, and the case is straightforward — automated camera choreography, an MP4 recorder, AI traffic tracking and multi-aircraft formation replay in one place, with no free equivalent in MSFS 2024. A real airline pilot's channel already shot with it.

If you want flight analysis — instructors, students, anyone debriefing approaches: buy it. The Data Logger's synchronised graphs with G-force and engine parameters, plus Path Track, plus printable reports, is a debriefing tool, and nothing free in MSFS 2024 does it.

If you fly helicopters: do not buy this yet. The only public reviewer of this product found rotor RPM dropping in replay twelve days ago and the developer has acknowledged it without shipping a fix. Wait for the patch, then buy.

If you fly the PMDG 737 and want to replay approaches: wait. The same applies, from a report three days after launch, from a customer who says version 5 handled it correctly.

If you own FSRealistic+: wait. Until Merlo's fix lands, FCR recordings will make every replayed landing sound and feel like an arrival on the numbers at 900 feet per minute.

If you just want to watch your last landing back: do not buy this. You already have FlightControlReplay Embedded in MSFS 2024 for nothing, and a free landing-analysis tool covers the rest. Spending €24.00 on cinematic camera choreography you will never open is how good software gets a bad reputation.

Where it stands today

Nineteen days is not long enough to judge a product, so here is what can fairly be said on 19 August 2026.

FlightControlReplay 6 is the deepest replay and flight-analysis tool available for Microsoft Flight Simulator, by a wide margin, and it has been rebuilt from the engine up by a developer who answers his own forum posts within hours and whose previous work Microsoft thought good enough to ship inside the simulator. That last fact is the highest compliment in this review and also the central commercial problem: Merlo now competes with a free version of himself, and version 6's answer — cinematic production and telemetry rather than plain replay — is a coherent and probably correct answer.

Set against that: three dated, specific, still-open failures in replay fidelity, in aircraft the product's own feature page names; a complexity complaint that a full interface rebuild did not fix, evidenced in the release thread itself; a price that moved by four euros in four days; and no trial to let you find out for yourself. The store record — one review, three stars — is too small to mean anything statistically, but it is not nothing that the single person who bought it and wrote about it hit a bug in the first fortnight.

Our 3.5 is provisional and it is a mean of a very wide spread: 4.6 for feature depth against 3.0 for value and 3.2 for core function accuracy today. If Merlo ships a patch that closes the helicopter, PMDG and FSRealistic+ reports, this becomes a straightforwardly recommendable 4.0-plus for anyone who makes videos or debriefs flights, and we will say so. Until then: upgraders yes, video makers yes, everyone else wait a fortnight and check the changelog.