FlightControlSpotter V2: MSFS 2024 already has a tower camera nobody wired up

On 1 December 2024, three weeks after MSFS 2024 shipped, a forum user called zimtzimt7989 pasted the contents of the simulator's Cameras.CFG into a thread about the missing tower view. Sitting there in the default install, between the facilities cameras, was this:

[CameraDefinition.007] — Title = Nearest Tower — Origin = Tower — Category = Tower.

The simulator knows where every control tower is. It carries a camera definition pointed at it. Asobo simply never wired the thing to a button. That thread — "Tower view in new MSFS 2024" — ran from July 2023 to 2025, 43 posts, 4.3k views, and the wishlist item behind it was pushing 1,100 votes by early 2026. People wanted a tower view badly enough to argue about it for two years.

Nine months after that post, Fabio Merlo sold them the button. FlightControlSpotter released at simMarket on 30 August 2025 at an introductory €12.50, and its headline feature is called, without irony, Nearest Tower View. The developer says it reached #2 in simMarket's weekly chart within a fortnight. That is the whole product in one sentence: a fast, tidy in-sim panel over camera positions the simulator already defines and refuses to expose.

What makes it worth a review now rather than then is what happened in between. In September 2025 a customer asked the developer for a fly-by view and was told it could not be done — "FlyBy view should imply too long transition period with this system". Eight months later, on 14 May 2026, fly-by arrived, free, for everyone who already owned it. What changed was not the developer. What changed was that Sim Update 5 (build 1.7.27.0) landed at the end of April 2026 with a new Camera API for SimConnect and WASM, and every camera tool in the hobby got a new floor to build on — including, three months later, a freeware one.

We read thirty-three public sources for this: the developer's own pages and changelogs, four AVSIM threads, two Microsoft forum threads, four store listings and their rating spreads, ten outlet write-ups including an interview with the developer, and six videos. Reddit is blocked in this environment and could not be read, which matters more than usual here — sentiment-at-a-glance is exactly what a product this quiet lacks.

What you are actually buying

One SKU, one licence, both simulators. There is no separate MSFS 2020 build and no separate MSFS 2024 build; the difference is what the same installer switches on.

Current version	V2.1.2, 15 May 2026
simMarket	€8.67 (VAT excl.), 8.94 MB, PID 20352, on sale since 31 August 2025
Aerosoft	€8.67 — identical, so no store arbitrage to hunt
In-sim Marketplace	listed at roughly \$17.49 by FS Addon Compare — the only route that carries Xbox Series X\	S
Simulators	MSFS 2024 and MSFS 2020. PC from simMarket or Aerosoft; PC and Xbox from the Marketplace
Upgrade from V1	Free. Every update since launch has been free
Requires FlightControlReplay?	No. Separate product, separate licence, no dependency either way

Two things about that price. First, it is not a sale. The developer cut it on 28 June 2026 — his own words were "reduced by around half" — and FS Addon Compare's history puts the average at about \$14.99 against a current \$10.10 and an all-time low of \$7.88. The €15.00 standing price still printed on the developer's own features page is stale by nearly two months. Second, the developer has no direct store: the "Buy now" link on flightcontroltools.com points straight at his simMarket vendor page, so simMarket is the developer's store and the VAT comparison that usually muddies these things does not arise.

The bundle situation is a mess and you should check your basket. The product description still offers "Bundle FlightControlSpotter + FlightControlReplay 5 ... at a very Special Price total for both: EUR 29.99 (vat excl)" — but FlightControlReplay 5 was superseded by FCR6 on 31 July 2026 and no longer appears in the vendor's catalogue. What simMarket's automated panel now shows instead is a bundle with FCR6 at "21.32€ ... each", which taken at face value is €42.64 for the pair against €32.67 buying them separately. Read that line before you commit to it.

On the two-product question: FlightControlSpotter is not a FlightControlReplay add-on and does not need it. Merlo told FSElite on 20 January 2026 that he built Spotter after noticing his replay customers were not analysing flights at all — they were just watching aeroplanes. He also said an update would integrate the two for "synchronized recordings". Seven months on, that integration has not shipped. If you own FCR6 for its Cinematic mode and FlyBy cameras, Spotter overlaps it during live flight and adds the ground-based half; if you own neither, they are separate purchases at €24.00 and €8.67.

What the community consistently praises

The tower view works and nothing else does it in one click. This is the finding that repeats everywhere, from the simMarket reviews ("Finally Tower View for Flight sim 2024", 23 September 2025) to the outlet coverage to the two hours Practically Geek spent spotting at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson with PSXT and RealTraffic feeding live traffic. You can slew a drone into a tower cab yourself — several people in the Microsoft thread said exactly that — but you cannot do it in one click, from a list, by ICAO, with the position saved for next time.

The custom-spot database is the part people actually keep using. Capturing latitude, longitude and altitude from the avatar rather than the aircraft — walking to the fence line and pressing save — comes up repeatedly and is the feature two of the six simMarket reviewers single out. The POI system added in v1.1 (15 January 2026) extended it to auto-detected landmarks.

No profiles, no per-aircraft setup, no external application. It is an in-sim toolbar panel and it behaves the same across every aircraft in the hangar. For a camera tool, that is not nothing: the alternative in this space has historically meant a second executable and a profile for every airframe.

Updates have been free and frequent, and the developer moves fast on specifics. A detailed complaint about oversized fonts on 16 September 2025 was in a shipped build on 19 September. V2 — four substantial new features — was free to everyone who had already paid, exactly as promised at FSWeekend on 5 April 2026.

Xbox support is real. Console owners have almost nothing in this category, and the Italian reviewer Flight Horizon built an entire video around that being the point.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The tower view was in the wrong place. Status: mitigated, not proven fixed. On 16 September 2025 a purchaser reported on AVSIM that "at all the airports I've tested FCS, the tower view is very far away from the actual tower location in all three coordinates, making this view really unusable". The developer shipped altitude-calculation adjustments in v1.02 on 20 September 2025 and again in v1.1 on 15 January 2026. Nobody has repeated the complaint publicly since — but with a record this quiet, silence is weak evidence.

"Take Plane Control" is not in the product. Status: still open. The same customer found the advertised shortcut undocumented and absent from the panel. The developer's answer, on 17 September 2025, is that it is a stock MSFS binding you assign yourself on the simulator's own assignments page. That is a fair answer and it should have been in the manual, which is a free public download and still the first thing a new buyer reads.

The pause came back. v1.02 removed the aircraft pause when switching to Tower or Spot View, which was the fix people asked for. v1.1 then reintroduced it for any spot beyond 30 NM. Defensible engineering; not what a buyer reading "Instant Return to Cockpit" expects.

Exterior views with interior sound. Status: still open. From the simMarket listing, 28 June 2026 — the most recent independent account of the product anywhere and the only one written after V2: "when you do, it uses the sounds from the inside of the plane, not the external sounds". This is inherited from the drone camera the tool is built on, which is precisely the trade-off in building on it.

One hard freeze, unresolved. The same reviewer: "I have had it completely freeze up my camera system, forcing me to restart the game." One report is not a pattern, and we found no second. It is also the only stability report of any kind in twelve months, which cuts both ways.

An aircraft-state conflict that was never answered. In September 2025 a user reported the FlightFX Citation X failing its Ready to Taxi EFB procedure and sitting frozen when FCS's camera system was in use. The developer replied to the other four points in that post and not to this one.

The record itself is the problem

The Microsoft forum announcement thread has twenty posts. All twenty are the developer. In fourteen months and 1.3k views, not one member of the public replied. On AVSIM, on 22 January 2026, a prospective Xbox buyer asked plainly: "Has anyone here got to use this add-on to comment from first-hand experience, over what we already have…?" Nobody answered him. On the same day another asked whether a spotting tool could do the one thing a real spotter does — stand by the runway for a fly-by. Nobody answered that either; the product answered it four months later. On 19 May 2026, three days after V2, a user asked whether fly-by could be bound to a joystick button. Three months on, no reply.

One more item, offered as an allegation rather than a fact. The customer who wrote the detailed September 2025 critique says he also posted a two-star review on simMarket and that it "was removed a day after its initial publication". We cannot verify that. What we can say is that the listing today shows six reviews with a visible spread of four fives, one three and one two — an honest 4.17 average that simMarket rounds down to 4 — so whatever happened, low ratings are not being scrubbed wholesale now.

Performance and stability

There is nothing to report, and that is the finding. The download is 8.94 MB. It runs as an in-sim toolbar panel driving the simulator's own drone camera; it does not simulate anything, poll aircraft systems or render a frame of its own. Across twelve months of forums, store reviews and videos we found no frame-rate complaint, no stutter report and no CTD attributed to it. The two stability items in the record — the camera freeze and the Citation X conflict — are single reports, and both involve the tool putting the simulator's camera and control state somewhere the aircraft did not expect.

The V2 fly-by and AI-tracking cameras are MSFS 2024 only, and that is almost certainly a platform limit rather than a commercial one: they arrived two weeks after Sim Update 5 gave developers a Camera API, and Asobo have flagged that API as a beta feature for several updates yet. Parallel 42 said the same thing about ChasePlane on 7 April 2026 — partial adoption, migration underway. Expect this category to be unsettled for a while.

Who should buy it

The MSFS 2024 AI-traffic spotter and the streamer. Buy it. Live traffic add-ons, a tower list by ICAO, a fly-by camera that locks onto a detected AI aircraft and a saved spot at your own fence line, for €8.67, is a good deal by any reading, and the developer confirmed on 16 May 2026 that the fly-by camera tracks VATSIM traffic too.

The screenshot artist who wants specific, repeatable framing. Buy it. Saving drone coordinates and returning to the identical shot across sessions is the V2 feature nobody markets loudly and the one that changes a workflow.

The Xbox owner. Buy it, through the in-sim Marketplace, and accept that you will pay roughly \$17.49 for what a PC buyer pays about \$10 for. There is no alternative route and almost no competition on console.

The MSFS 2020 holdout. Buy it only with your eyes open. The store calls it "FLIGHTCONTROLSPOTTER V2 MSFS24/20", but the developer's own post of 29 May 2026 concedes that MSFS 2020 gets "most features … except Fly-by Cam, Save drone camera positions". You will pay the V2 price for the v1.1 feature set. At €8.67 for tower, ICAO, POI and custom spots, that may still be worth it — but nothing in V2 is for you.

The person who only wants cinematic fly-by footage on MSFS 2024. Do not buy it. FSDirector arrived on flightsim.to at the end of July 2026 — freeware, Orbit, Chase, Fly-By, Wingman and Cinema modes, aircraft-specific profiles, automatic sequencing. It is three weeks old, has 256 downloads and three reviews, so it is not yet a safe recommendation either. But it is free, it does the half of FlightControlSpotter that V2 was built to sell, and it is the shape of what the Camera API is going to keep producing. Wait a month and look again before you spend money on fly-by alone.

FlightControlReplay 6 owners expecting the two to talk to each other. Not yet. Buy Spotter for the ground half if you want the ground half; do not buy it for an integration that was described in January and has not appeared by August.

Where it stands today

FlightControlSpotter is a small, competent, honestly-priced tool that solves a real irritation the platform holder has left alone for six years, and it is being quietly overtaken from underneath. That is not a contradiction; it is what happens when a simulator finally opens an API. The version that shipped in August 2025 could not do fly-by because the sim would not let it. The version selling today can, because at the end of April 2026 the sim started letting everyone — and the first freeware answer took eleven weeks to appear.

So the value case has narrowed to the part nobody free has copied: one-click tower and spot teleportation by ICAO, a personal database of saved viewpoints including avatar-height ones, POI detection, AI-target lock, and all of it inside the simulator with no second window and no per-aircraft profile. That is a genuinely useful bundle and €8.67 is the right price for it — a price the developer arrived at himself, halving it on 28 June 2026, which reads less like generosity than like an accurate reading of the room.

The thing that should worry a prospective buyer is not the product. It is that after twelve months on sale, on a #15 weekly chart position, the entire public record consists of six store reviews, one independent video, one Italian video, one livestream, three developer-authored forum threads with four non-developer posts between them, and a set of announcement rewrites. Three separate people asked in public whether anyone had actually used it. Nobody answered. For a tool this cheap that is survivable, and the free quick guide and the developer's Discord mean you are not buying blind. But it is the reason this review scores 3.5 rather than 4, and it is the reason the honest instruction is to watch what the Camera API produces over the next few months before you assume the field is settled.