FS Traffic: the best AI airliners in MSFS, and a coin-flip chance of seeing them

In June 2026 a user called kerosene31 posted on AVSIM about a piece of software he had paid for, could not get working, had spent weeks in support tickets over, and had been offered a refund on. He turned the refund down. "I kept the program, hoping it gets updated some day," he wrote. "For now I'm using FSLTL or BATC."

That is FS Traffic in one paragraph. It is a product people keep on their drives after they have stopped using it, because the thing it does well it does better than anything else, and the thing it does badly it has done badly for fourteen months.

The in-sim Marketplace rating tells the same story in numbers. FS Traffic sits at 3.3 out of 5 from 85 ratings — but that average is a lie about the distribution. Forty-eight per cent of raters gave it five stars. Thirty-two per cent gave it one. Between them, 20 per cent split across four, three and two. That is not a product people disagree about on taste. That is a product that either works on your machine or doesn't, and the middle of the bell curve is empty because there is no middle experience to have.

Just Flight has been shipping AI traffic packages for more than twenty years by its own count, and the models in this one are the best-looking AI airliners you can put in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Nobody argues about that. What the record argues about is whether they turn up.

This review draws on 29 sources: Just Flight's own product page, changelog and news posts, eleven forum threads across AVSIM, the official MSFS forums and Just Flight's own community — including threads still active in August 2026 — three store listings with their rating breakdowns, four written reviews and news pieces, and three video reviews.

What you are actually buying

One purchase, two builds, one licence. FS Traffic is sold as a single product covering both simulators, and you download whichever installer you need.

	Detail
Price (Just Flight direct)	US$39.99, no sale as of 18 August 2026
Price (simMarket)	€27.46
Price (in-sim Marketplace)	US$34.99
Latest version	v1.0.8 — MSFS 2024 build 24 June 2025, MSFS 2020 build 16 July 2025
Download	10.7GB (2024) / 10.3GB (2020), 30GB free space required
Fleet	66 aircraft models and variants
Liveries	"over 850" per the marketing; 959 counted on a June 2026 install
Schedules	Summer 2022 and winter 2022/23
Platforms	PC and Steam. Not Xbox

Two of those rows deserve a second look before you reach for a card.

The schedules are from 2022. That is not hidden — the product page states it plainly, in the same sentence that describes the data as "sourced from the same suppliers that power a number of popular flight tracking websites and apps." But four years is four years. Airlines have folded, routes have moved, and an AVSIM poster in October 2023 was already spotting an El Al 747 at Tel Aviv that had left the fleet in 2019. When another poster, fluffyflops, worked out how old the data was in May 2025, his summary was blunt: "very old then... you guys have been duped again."

Just Flight's answer, from staff member Derek on 22 May 2026, is worth quoting because it is honest and it is also the whole problem: "unlike some freeware competitors, we are a commercial business" that has to pay for database licences, and live data "simply isn't reliable enough." Fair. But the free competition ships current schedules, and the buyer pays the difference either way.

The second row is Xbox. FS Traffic has been promised on Xbox since July 2023. In June 2024 Derek wrote that "we 'got there' two years ago — it's the MSFS-XBoxS relationship that we are trying to work around." As of August 2026 the build is reportedly submitted and awaiting Microsoft's approval. Three years. Do not buy a PC copy on the strength of an Xbox promise.

What the community consistently praises

The models. This is the finding that repeats everywhere, in threads where nothing else is agreed. On AVSIM in April 2025, a poster wrote off FS Traffic for its "pointed fuselages" — and was immediately corrected by two separate people, because he had confused it with Aerosoft's product, which repaints Asobo's default AI. "Just Flight's FS Traffic models are excellent," wrote Amon1973, in the most-upvoted post in a six-page thread. Fourteen months later, in the same thread, users who had given up on the product entirely were still saying the same thing. When the people who can't run your software defend its artwork, the artwork is good.

Performance. The second universally-confirmed finding. FS Traffic's models are cheap to draw. A poster running them through PSXT in April 2025 measured 7–10 more FPS than the AIG/FSLTL combination at Heathrow and JFK. The 2024 build added extra levels of detail specifically to help here. Dave_YVR's counter-argument is legitimate and worth stating — "less traffic is always going to get you better FPS," and FS Traffic does inject less — but the per-aircraft cost is genuinely low, and it is the one marketing claim the record confirms without qualification.

Determinism. Schedule-driven traffic behaves the same way every time you load a flight. That sounds like a downgrade from live traffic until you have watched a live injector do what kerosene31 describes: "planes buzzing the airport at 100 feet or cruising at ground level like a fighter jet." He put it well — schedules "aren't real time, but seem to just work more consistently." For anyone building a repeatable scenario, or filming, that is the feature.

The Traffic Control Centre's openness. You can edit any flight plan, import from simBrief, assign specific liveries to specific airline-aircraft pairs, and — unusually for a payware tool — load third-party models from other traffic programs. Several users buy FS Traffic purely for the fleet and drive it with PSXT or BeyondATC instead. Just Flight explicitly patched v1.0.7b on 30 April 2025 to make that work better.

The support. Worth saying, because the outcome was bad and the effort wasn't. Just Flight's staff answer threads under their own names, and when kerosene31's problem proved unsolvable they offered him his money back. "Their support spent a few weeks trying, I give them credit," he wrote. That is not nothing.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Traffic doesn't spawn in MSFS 2024 — still open

This is the one. It is not a niche configuration issue; it is the single most-reported complaint about FS Traffic, and it has been reported continuously for fourteen months.

The first thread opened on Just Flight's forum on 25 June 2025, the day after the 2024 build shipped. A second ran from 8 July to 12 September 2025 with at least nine distinct posters. A third ran from 10 December 2025 to 10 March 2026, opened by a user reporting "9/10 times no traffic." On 23 June 2026 the complaint surfaced again on AVSIM, where kerosene31 reported the product "works for me maybe 50% of the time" and that Just Flight's support "could never figure it out." A fresh thread appeared on Just Flight's own forum on 11 August 2026 — a week before this was written — titled "No traffic generated on first launch."

The workarounds users pass round are: press ESC and reload the flight, restart the PC, uninstall and reinstall FS Traffic, purge old SimConnect clients left behind by other add-ons, or empty the Community folder and bisect. None of them stick.

One concrete cause did surface. In the July 2025 thread, a user isolated GSX Pro: "with GSX Pro uninstalled, FS Traffic AI traffic will spawn alright but with GSX Pro installed, FS Traffic AI traffic doesn't spawn." Given how many serious MSFS users run GSX, that is a significant finding. It has never been officially addressed, and the thread closed unresolved.

Status: still open, as of 18 August 2026.

Ground and runway behaviour — still open, and not really Just Flight's fault

AI aircraft take the wrong runway. PilotPete99, 23 June 2026: landing on 28L while FS Traffic aircraft used 10R. Gate assignments come out wrong. Aircraft go around for no reason and vanish at stands.

Dave_YVR's diagnosis is correct and should be stated plainly, because it is the fairest thing in this review: "It's 100% because it's using the AI engine of the sim which has no idea what it's supposed to be doing." FS Traffic injects aircraft and hands them to Asobo's AI and ATC. So do FSLTL and AIG. The only product that escapes this is BeyondATC, which replaced the sim's traffic brain wholesale — which is exactly why the MSFS 2024 traffic conversation has moved to BeyondATC and largely left FS Traffic out of it.

Just Flight's position, from Derek on 22 May 2026, is that gate assignment is "a scenery issue" unrelated to FS Traffic. Technically defensible. Not much comfort to a buyer.

Status: still open, inherent to the platform.

The setup workflow — partially addressed, promise outstanding

On 21 May 2026 a user named artkatz opened a thread asking why, in 2026, "the end-user still have to manage a manual 'Layout Rebuilder' and dozens of external settings" — calling it "outdated software design from the FSX era," and noting that free FSLTL offered "a more 'plug-and-play' experience with better visual results."

Derek's reply the next day conceded the point: the Layout Rebuilder "will be incorporated into the TCC and will be released in the next update." That was three months ago. There has been no update.

Status: acknowledged, fix promised, not shipped.

The multiplayer conflict — fixed

Credit where due. In MSFS 2024 the single "Air Traffic" graphics setting governed both AI aircraft and visible multiplayer players, and FS Traffic wanted it off. Reported 3 July 2025; by 12 September 2025 staff member Mark confirmed that after Sim Update 3 you can run both, with the FS Traffic module enabled, Aircraft Traffic Quantity set to LOW or above, and LIVE or ALL PLAYERS selected.

Status: fixed.

Fleet coverage — still open

Dave_YVR installed the current build in June 2026 and counted 959 liveries. That is more than the marketing claims, and a small fraction of what free AIG offers. There are no cargo models — a repeated request in the forum's 61-post livery thread — and no general aviation at all. Mark confirmed on 27 July 2026 that "FS Traffic is solely focused on airliners," with a GA expansion "being worked on behind the scenes."

Status: still open, by design.

The update cadence — still open

The changelog is the most damning document in this review, because Just Flight publishes it themselves. Nine entries. v1.0.6 landed 31 July 2023. v1.0.7 landed 24 April 2025 — a gap of twenty-one months. v1.0.8 for MSFS 2024 landed 24 June 2025, and the 2020 build on 16 July 2025. Nothing since.

Asked for a timeline on 14 January 2026, Mark said: "We don't have any further estimate to share at the moment, but work is continuing on the update behind the scenes." Asked again after Sim Update 5 on 2 May 2026, no staff answer appears in the thread. Asked in July and August 2026, the same phrase — "behind the scenes" — comes back attached to a GA expansion instead.

Status: still open. Fourteen months and counting.

Performance and stability

Split these two, because FS Traffic is excellent at one and poor at the other.

On performance, the marketing claim holds. The product page promises "no noticeable impact on FPS (when compared to default MSFS Offline Traffic)" and that is what users measure — a 7–10 FPS advantage over the AIG/FSLTL fleet at heavy airports in one April 2025 test, and no complaints about frame rate anywhere in the record I read. Some of that advantage is arithmetic rather than engineering: fewer liveries means fewer aircraft drawn. But the models themselves are efficient, the 2024 build added LODs, and users who have abandoned FS Traffic as a traffic system still keep the fleet installed to feed other injectors. That is the strongest possible endorsement of the artwork's cost-to-quality ratio.

On stability, the picture is bad and getting no better. The spawn failure is not a crash — the sim runs fine, the airport is simply empty — and that may be why it has survived so long without being treated as a showstopper. But an AI traffic add-on that produces no AI traffic on a coin flip has failed at its only job, and Just Flight's support has been unable to reproduce or resolve it across at least four threads and more than a year. The MSFS 2020 build, by contrast, is stable. Several users in the June 2026 AVSIM thread describe exactly that split: they run FS Traffic happily in 2020 and FSLTL or BeyondATC in 2024.

One conflict is documented and worth checking before you buy: GSX Pro. If you run it, assume FS Traffic may not spawn, and know that this has been unresolved since July 2025.

Who should buy it

If you fly MSFS 2020 and want a busy airport that behaves the same way every time — buy it. This is the profile FS Traffic serves properly. The 2020 build is stable, the models are the best available, the performance cost is low, and the asking price for a fleet this good is defensible. Fly a Tuesday morning and a Friday afternoon and the difference is real.

If you want a fleet to drive with PSXT, BeyondATC or another injector — buy it, and ignore the schedules. Several people in the record do exactly this, and Just Flight patched v1.0.7b specifically to support it. You are buying 66 models and 959 liveries as an asset library. On that basis it is good value and the 2022 schedule data stops mattering.

If you shoot screenshots or video — buy it. Deterministic traffic you can reload identically is worth money, and these are the aircraft that will look right parked next to your study-level airliner.

If you fly MSFS 2024 and want traffic working tonight — do not buy it. This is the profile that should not. There is roughly a coin-flip chance you spend your evening in support threads instead of in the air, the known-good workarounds don't hold, and if you run GSX Pro the odds get worse. Install FSLTL or buy BeyondATC. Revisit FS Traffic when the update Just Flight has been promising since January 2026 actually ships.

If you want traffic that reflects the airline industry as it is now — do not buy it. The schedules are from 2022 and there is no sign of a refresh in any of the nine changelog entries. Free AIG will give you current schedules for nothing.

If you fly on Xbox — you cannot buy it, and should not wait for it. Three years of "in progress" is enough data.

Where it stands today

Something happened in April 2026 that should have been FS Traffic's moment. On the 30th, the unpaid Flightradar24 API that powered FSLTL's live traffic injection went dark. FSLTL still works, but it is now a schedule-driven product — the same category FS Traffic has always occupied. The single biggest argument against paying Just Flight US$39.99, that the free option gave you real aircraft flying in real time, evaporated overnight.

It didn't help. Go and read the MSFS 2024 traffic threads from the months since and FS Traffic is barely in them. The recommendations run BeyondATC, then FSLTL, then AIG — free or cheaper, and all three actually spawn. FS Traffic's window opened and it was not standing at it, because the thing that keeps it out of those conversations was never the live-versus-schedule argument. It is that a third of the people who bought it could not make it run.

Which leaves a product with genuinely the best assets in its category, priced above competitors it cannot match on reliability, running on four-year-old data, fourteen months without a patch, and with its developer answering timeline questions with "behind the scenes" since January. Just Flight has not abandoned it — they answer threads, they engage, they offer refunds, they say an update is coming, and their track record says a big one eventually arrives, because v1.0.7 turned up twenty-one months late and was substantial when it did.

The honest position in August 2026 is that FS Traffic is a good product in the wrong condition. If you fly the old sim, none of the above applies to you and you should go and enjoy it. If you fly the new one, the 48 per cent who gave this five stars are not wrong and neither are the 32 per cent who gave it one — they are describing the same software on different machines, and until Just Flight works out why, buying it is a bet rather than a purchase.