For a lot of Microsoft Flight Simulator fans, bush runs will be their first attempt at a long trip. The beauty of this mode is flights are broken up into shorter segments with few reaching over an hour in length. This means you can complete a leg or two and then come back to continue the trip later. One thing that will become clear, however, is the game doesn’t refuel your plane automatically. Since we’re flying a small propeller plane, you’ll certainly need to refuel before the expedition is over. But how do you do this? We break it down in this Microsoft Flight Simulator guide.
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How to Refuel A Plane
So there are a few different ways to refuel your plane. If you’re at a big enough airport you can contact the control tower and request refueling. You can also press SHIFT + F to ask the fuel truck to come over to you. Keep in mind that the truck won’t drive onto the runway.
We have had no success with this method, but the truck does come by and wait before heading back. This may be an issue related to the fact that you can’t view the fuel window pop up in bush runs. We imagine you’d simply be able to load up on fuel otherwise.
Some airports also have a stationary fuel tank or fuel truck that you can head over to, but you would likely run into a similar problem. Thankfully we’ve found a workaround.
If That Doesn’t Work, Check Your Keybindings
The good news is there are some keybindings which work despite the game locking your difficulty settings. Hit ESCAPE to bring up the pause menu and navigate over to controls. From there, glance at the left side of the screen. By default the game only shows commands that have a keybinding. The filter should say “Assigned.” You want to switch it over to “All.” At that point you can either navigate down or use the search box to find “Repair and Refuel.”
Once you’ve assigned that command to a key, you can head back into the game, hit that button, and your fuel will magically fill back up.
We haven’t tried doing this command directly on the runway, we were off by the hangers attempting to refuel, so if it doesn’t work you may have to taxi on over off of the runway.
If you’d prefer to do it in a more realistic manner, you’ll need to do the same thing but instead map “Add Fuel Quantity” which will let you fill up the plane by hand. Then you can request the truck and add the fuel yourself when it comes by.
And that’s it! Happy flying and good luck on the rest of your bush run! As a reminder, if you see a location you like and it’s not super close to any airports, you can start there using the World Map and GPS coordinates. We have a guide set up to help you do so.
