Teen Devs Built a Full Airliner for Microsoft Flight Simulator

From Freeware Discord to the Marketplace

Most game studios have a founding myth. Synaptic Simulations has a pretty good one. According to a post on Xbox Wire written by Jorg Neumann, Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator, the studio began as a loose collection of aviation enthusiasts who stumbled into the same freeware project on Discord and Reddit sometime around 2020 or 2021. They were there to build a free A220 for the sim community. Nobody was getting paid. Nobody had a title. They just really liked airplanes.

Fast forward to this week, and Synaptic Simulations has launched its first commercial product on the Microsoft Flight Simulator Marketplace: a full, professionally built recreation of the Airbus A220, one of the newest jet airliners currently in commercial service. The release was made in partnership with iniBuilds and, by Neumann’s account, has been hotly anticipated by the flight simulation community.

The team behind it? Eight developers. Most of them were 16 or 17 when the project first took shape. As lead systems programmer Shaye Garg told Xbox Wire, career plans at that point were not exactly set in stone.

Eight People, One Very Complex Airplane

Building a modern airliner for a simulator like Microsoft Flight Simulator is not a small task. The A220 is a highly sophisticated aircraft in real life, and serious sim players expect the virtual version to match. Synaptic’s team worked across systems and avionics programming, 3D art, and creative production to bring the aircraft together.

The project is led by CEO and art manager Harsh Duba. Lead systems programmer Shaye Garg and lead avionics programmer Michael Romashov round out the core leadership. According to Romashov, what started as a broad community initiative gradually narrowed as the people with real commitment and complementary expertise stuck around. That smaller group became the studio.

Neumann described the result as an “astonishingly complex airliner” and called it a Cinderella story of developers coming up from the freeware scene to deliver a first professional release. That framing is not hyperbole. Moving from volunteer contributor to shipping a commercial product is a meaningful leap, and doing it with a type-rated airliner as your debut is a specific kind of ambitious.

What the Freeware Scene Actually Produces

It is worth pausing on where Synaptic came from. The freeware flight simulation community has been quietly producing serious, detailed aircraft modifications for decades. Platforms like Discord and Reddit gave that tradition a faster, more connected infrastructure. Talented teenagers could find each other across time zones and start building things that rivaled commercial releases.

Synaptic’s story is a clean example of that pipeline producing a real studio. The A220 project attracted contributors broadly at first, then self-selected down to a core of people serious enough to see it through. No formal hiring process. No venture capital. Just a shared project and the slow discovery of who was actually going to show up every week.

For Microsoft Flight Simulator, third-party add-on developers are a significant part of what keeps the platform alive and interesting between first-party updates. A well-built airliner from a credible team is meaningful news for that ecosystem, regardless of how young the people who built it happen to be.

Neumann extended congratulations to both Synaptic Simulations and iniBuilds on the launch. The A220 is available now on the Microsoft Flight Simulator Marketplace.