GSX Pro: the most-blamed add-on in flight simulation, and usually innocent

In March 2026 a simmer on AVSIM posted that GSX Pro was destabilising his MSFS 2024 install. The Fenix EFB would not load. The toolbar vanished. Odd things kept happening. He had bought GSX a few days earlier, he liked it, and he wanted to know whether anyone else was seeing this.

Five people replied that they were not. Then Umberto Colapicchioni, who has written GSX for nineteen years, turned up and explained at some length that GSX never alters the state of an aircraft — not fuel, not payload, not doors — that the fuel truck is an animation playing next to an aeroplane refuelling itself, and that the communication with the Fenix runs one way, from the Fenix to GSX. The original poster reinstalled and got on with it.

That thread is GSX Pro in miniature, and it is the reason this review exists. This is the most-blamed add-on in flight simulation, and a striking share of the time it did not do it. The developer's own MSFS 2024 FAQ opens by begging people to stop reporting jetway problems, because GSX has nothing to do with jetways. The PMDG 777's door bug, which cost users the official GSX profile for a year, was traced by the people who use both products to PMDG's code, not FSDT's.

None of which makes GSX innocent. It stutters. It is a project to set up. At the MSFS 2024 launch it quietly switched off two of its own headline features and left them off for months. But you cannot review this product honestly without separating the three piles: what GSX does badly, what other people's software does badly through GSX, and what Windows does badly to everyone.

We read around twenty sources for this: FSDT's product page and its full Couatl update log, the MSFS 2024 support FAQ on FSDT's own forum, three long AVSIM threads running from 2023 to May 2026, two PMDG forum threads, store listings, video reviews, and the release coverage for every major version since 2022. Everything is listed at the bottom.

What you are actually buying

One licence, one installer, both simulators, no expiry.

Price	$32.99 direct from FSDT; €29.39 / about $34 at simMarket
Simulators	MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024 from a single purchase
Platform	PC only. No Xbox, and it is not on the in-sim Marketplace
Current version	4.0.16, 18 August 2026
Installed via	The FSDT Universal Installer, onto an NTFS drive, with online activation

GSX Pro landed on 18 August 2022 at around €31 and has never been charged for again. Everything since — four years of updates, including the 4.0.0 overhaul in May 2026 — went out free to everyone who bought it in 2022. So did MSFS 2024 support. That is not the industry norm and it should be said before anything else.

What you get for the money is genuinely enormous. Pushback with six modelled tractors and a choice of towbar or towbarless. Boarding and deboarding with animated passengers who walk to the aircraft and, on unencrypted aircraft, sit down in the cabin. Baggage and cargo with ULD containers. Refuelling, including hydrant and underground. Catering. GPU, water, lavatory, crew bus. Marshalling and follow-me. De-icing with Type I and Type IV fluid. Global jetway replacement carrying 317 airport-specific logos, 654 handling operator liveries and 233 catering brands. VDGS docking systems including Safedock and APIS++. Eighteen regional accents for the ground crew.

Since 4.0.0 there is also an economy: every paid service generates an itemised HTML invoice on operator letterhead, with tax computed per jurisdiction. American receipts add federal fuel tax at $0.218 a gallon plus the relevant state sales tax; European ones add destination VAT and an environmental surcharge, with a 228-country fallback table underneath. Catering scales off your SimBrief plan — drinks only under ninety minutes, hot meals from three hours, doubles past twelve.

You can reasonably ask whether a flight simulator needed a tax engine. It did not. It has one anyway, and there is something to be said for a developer who is still finding new places to go four years in.

What the community consistently praises

There is nothing else

Start with the fact that shapes everything.

GSX has no competitor. MSFS 2024's own ground handling is a pale thing next to it and nobody in the threads we read argues otherwise. Free pushback utilities exist and do one job. Self Loading Cargo overlaps at the cabin end. But for the full ramp — the trucks, the crew, the sequencing, the de-icing rig, the jetway that actually matches the airline whose gate you are parked at — there is one product, and this is it.

That produces a very particular tone in the discussions. People complain about GSX the way they complain about their commute. The 2023 AVSIM thread asking simply "GSX Pro yes or no?" ran to eleven pages and 151 replies over two years, and the answer was almost always yes with a list attached.

The turnaround holds together

The praise that repeats most is not about any single vehicle. It is that the sequence works: the tug arrives, the bags go in, the caterer comes up the side, the fuel goes on progressively rather than teleporting into the tanks, the door closes, the pushback clears you and the marshaller waves you off. On an airliner with real integration — the Fenix A320 is the one everybody names — the aircraft's own EFB tracks the boarding state and the whole turnaround runs as one process rather than a menu of separate toys.

Fuel loading over time is called out repeatedly as the thing you cannot go back from. So is the audio: the bumps and thumps of doors, the cabin announcements, the vehicles moving around outside while you set up the FMS.

It got a great deal better in 2026

Version 4.0.0, on 18 May 2026, replaced the numbered menu stack that had defined GSX since 2012 with a grid of icons, service thumbnails and colour-coded state indicators — grey idle, yellow waiting, green active. It is the single biggest usability change in the product's life and the reception was uniformly warm.

The releases since have kept coming at a pace that is honestly slightly alarming. Between 18 May and 18 August 2026 there were sixteen builds — roughly one every two or three days. Among them: ground traffic awareness in 4.0.8, so vehicles recognise each other's work areas and yield instead of driving through one another, which was a standing complaint in 2023; the GSX interface as a native in-sim EFB tablet app in 4.0.6; a vehicle camera system; an option in 4.0.13 to keep seated passengers permanently visible.

The community around it

2,643 user-made GSX profiles are on flightsim.to, and the list was updated the day we wrote this. That is airport parking layouts, aircraft door positions and service points for scenery and aircraft FSDT never touched, given away free. There is also a published API, an active third-party utility scene — Any2GSX on GitHub grew out of a Fenix-only tool into one that automates GSX service calls for any aircraft — and a support forum where the developer answers personally, at length, most days.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The stutters

The most substantive complaint, and the one that has never fully gone away.

The pattern is consistent across three years of threads: GSX itself runs fine, and then the animated objects — the tug during pushback, ground crew, passengers walking — produce a jerkiness that stands out precisely because the rest of the sim is smooth. One AVSIM regular measured a roughly 20% frame drop with animated passengers loading, and noted it made no difference whether they were hidden inside a jetway. Another reported that GSX's level-of-detail switching is too aggressive and too visible.

The confounders are real, and worth naming: some users cured it by dropping from DX12 to DX11, others by turning off frame generation. Plenty of people report no stutter at all — several said so in the same threads, on comparable hardware. What is not disputed is that when it happens, it happens at the ramp, on the ground, in the exact phase of flight GSX exists to improve.

The support answer has historically been to cap the frame rate at 30, which one user in April 2025 found no help whatever. In May 2026 another poster said a Discord moderator told him his PC could not handle it and concluded that FSDT support "usually has no accountability". Set against Umberto's forum output, which is extraordinarily detailed and technically generous, that is a harsh reading — but it is a reading several people share, and the abrasiveness is part of the product's reputation for a reason.

Status: mitigated over time, still open, still hardware-dependent.

The MSFS 2024 launch was thinner than it looked

MSFS 2024 shipped on 19 November 2024. FSDT posted its 2024 FAQ on the 21st and compatibility was announced on the 22nd. Three days. It was widely and rightly reported as one of the fastest turnarounds of any major add-on.

The detail underneath is less flattering. Point four of that FAQ tells users to disable all GSX replacement jetways in MSFS 2024 — and the installer did it for you, automatically, along with GSX Airport Services, because the 2024 navdata differed. If you had both simulators installed, disabling in 2024 disabled it in 2020 too, so buying the new sim cost you jetways in the old one. Separately, because MSFS 2024 streams its aircraft rather than installing them, GSX could not identify the sim's own new aeroplanes at all; for a period the only aircraft you could build a profile for were the ones in your Community folder.

Most of this has since been resolved — by March 2025 users were posting working profiles for streamed 2024 aircraft and pointing out that the FAQ itself had gone stale. But "fully compatible" was doing a great deal of work in November 2024, and the people who bought on the strength of it found out the hard way.

Status: fixed, slowly, and undersold as a problem at the time.

It is a project, not a purchase

This comes up in every thread and it is not a bug.

At a third-party airport with its own jetways, GSX's global replacements can double up — you get two jetways, or GSX's spawning inside the scenery's. The fix is to disable them there. Aircraft without an official profile need one from flightsim.to or hand-editing. Parking positions and service points can be repositioned, which is powerful and is also an afternoon. Passenger density is a single global slider, so a bus arrives packed to the roof and then unloads one passenger at a time.

And then there is the install itself. GSX lives in its own folder with symbolic links into Community, which is a sound design and completely invisible until it goes wrong. If a backup tool restores those links as real folders — very common, because exFAT external drives cannot hold symlinks — GSX silently freezes at whatever version it was, the menu hangs on loading, and nothing in the interface tells you why. Umberto has documented this at least six times on his own forum, and pre-empts the obvious accusation himself: before anyone says he always blames the user, he does not — and in that same post he conceded the installer should have caught it and said he would test it again.

Status: open, and largely inherent to what the product is.

Third-party aircraft, and who is actually at fault

The PMDG 777 is the case study. Since roughly the 2.0.60 update, boarding through door 2L causes the aircraft to keep reopening 1L, and cargo doors stay open until the whole boarding sequence completes. PMDG withdrew the official GSX profile in May 2025 because of it; a user uploaded a replacement to flightsim.to within days, and it did not fix the door.

The people posting in that thread — who own both products and had spent hours on it — concluded it was PMDG's logic, not FSDT's, since nothing had changed in how GSX talks to aircraft and every other integration kept working. Owners were still asking PMDG for a fix five months later. Meanwhile the strongest integrations, Fenix above all, work exactly as advertised.

Buy GSX and you inherit the quality of your aircraft developer's implementation. That is worth knowing, and it is not something GSX can fix for you.

Status: open, and not FSDT's to close.

Performance and stability

Two different things, and GSX scores very differently on each.

Stability is good and has improved markedly. The MSFS 2024 launch window was genuinely rough — menus hanging at 100%, Couatl needing restarts, GSX losing track of the flight and offering you engine-start confirmation after you had landed. Those reports thin out sharply through 2025 and are close to absent in the 2026 threads. The Couatl update log is public, dated to the day, and specific enough to audit, which is more than most of this industry manages.

Performance is the standing cost. The consensus across three years is that GSX is not free, that the price is paid on the ground at busy airports with animations running, and that it lands unevenly across hardware for reasons nobody has fully pinned down. The advice that actually works, from a 2026 poster who had stopped chasing settings, is the sensible one: if a flight is otherwise smooth and GSX is what tips it over, skip GSX for that flight.

One structural note. The update cadence is a genuine strength and a genuine irritation. Sixteen builds in three months means fixes arrive fast; it also means, as an AVSIM user put it, you end up running the Live Update before every session or risk being on a version the rest of the ecosystem has moved past. There is no in-sim update notification.

Who should buy it

Flying airliners with a study-level jet, on either simulator. Buy it. If you own a Fenix, an iniBuilds airframe or anything with real GSX hooks, this is the difference between starting a flight and running a turnaround, and there is no alternative product to weigh it against. At $33 covering both sims with four years of free updates behind it, the value case is not close.

You only want pushback. Do not buy this. It is the profile the product is worst for: you are paying for a ramp simulator and taking a frame-rate hit on the ground to get a tug. MSFS 2024's own pushback works, several free utilities do it well, and Self Loading Cargo includes pushback using the sim's native ground crew. One long-time GSX owner switched to exactly that in 2025 and was happier.

VFR, GA and bush flying. Skip it. Almost everything here happens at a gate you will never park at.

You already own it from the MSFS 2020 days. You already own it on 2024 — open the FSDT installer, pick the 2024 target, hit RELINK. If you have not looked at GSX since 2024, look again; 4.0.0 is a different product to use.

Chasing every frame at Heathrow in the rain. Be honest about the trade. GSX will cost you something at exactly the moment you have the least headroom. It is worth budgeting for rather than being surprised by.

Where it stands today

Four years on, GSX Pro is in the strange position of being both essential and unloved. Essential because there is no second option and the gap between a GSX ramp and a bare one is enormous. Unloved because the relationship is transactional: it stutters, it needs configuring, it updates constantly, and almost nobody describes it with the affection they reserve for a good aeroplane.

The store numbers are no help here, and we would rather say so than dress them up. The simMarket listing for the MSFS24/20 SKU shows five stars — from three reviews. Three ratings is a rounding error, not a verdict. The real record is in the forums, and the forums are consistent: overwhelming agreement that it is worth owning, universal agreement that it costs you frames, and a long tail of people troubleshooting an install that turned out to be a symbolic-link problem, a backup tool, or another developer's door logic.

What changed in 2026 is that FSDT stopped defending the status quo. Version 4.0.0 threw out a menu system older than most of the aircraft it services, and the sixteen builds since have gone after the specific, long-standing complaints — vehicles clipping through each other, positioning at remote pads, seated passengers, hotkeys, a native tablet app. That is a developer reading his own forum.

The unfinished business is performance, and it may be structural: GSX drives dozens of animated objects into the simulator from an external process over SimConnect, and that has cost frames on the ground since 2022. Until that changes, the recommendation carries a caveat that four years of excellent work has not removed. Buy it if you fly airliners. Expect to spend an evening on it. And when something breaks the week after you install it, check the other three things first — on the record so far, it is usually one of them.