Open Road

Remember when Charlotte was a confident up-and-comer, a peacock among mid-sized cities, flashing our banking headquarters and our gaudy growth and not caring what anyone thought of us? Yeah, we don’t either.

Underneath Charlotte’s intense civic pride has always been an equally intense worry that we’re not appreciated for all that we are. That insecurity is not an altogether bad thing, but it’s sometimes a less-than-endearing thing. So it is with that in mind that we’d like to calmly ask today:

WTH, Microsoft?

This week, the new Microsoft Flight Simulator was released to some fanfare in the gaming and flying communities. The latest iteration of the popular software allows users to travel the world - including 37,000 airports and 2 million cities - “in amazing detail,” Microsoft says. One of those cities is Charlotte, and the detail the simulator offers of North Carolina’s largest metropolitan area is in fact amazing, but not in the way you might think.

When MFS users fly over the Queen City, they see a Charlotte that appears to be at least a quarter-century old. Among the photos in a Reddit post titled “The New Microsoft Flight Simulator really did Charlotte dirty”:

What happened? According to PC gaming publication “Rock, Paper, Shotgun,” Charlotte was not among the 341 cities that Microsoft Flight Simulator recreated using photogrammetric data from Bing Maps. Included in those 341 cities - which the publication said are “a cut above the rest in terms of photorealistic detail”- are Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and Durham. Also, Summerville, SC.

That means when MFS users look down upon our uptown, they see an odd hybrid building/football field instead of the stadium that hosts Charlotte’s National Football League team. They don’t see the corporate headquarters of Bank of America, the second largest bank in the country, or the arena that welcomed the world in 2012 to the Democratic National Conven-

OK, deep breath everyone. No need to let old insecurities bubble up. After all, Charlotte is among the 20 largest cities in the U.S. now. It’s pretty rare these days that we get confused with Charlottesville, Va., and we don’t get lumped in very often with the Richmonds and Knoxvilles, which are very nice smaller cities, from what we hear.

Sure, we didn’t make the first cut for Amazon’s second North American headquarters a couple years back. And it’s true that the Associated Press still puts an “N.C.” after Charlotte on datelines, as if people don’t already know. But that’s OK. We know who we are, and we don’t unironically use the phrase “world-class city” nearly as much anymore. That’s what happens when you’re in the top 20. Two-zero.
Surely, the Flight Simulator rendering of Charlotte, circa 1990, is an honest oversight. We asked Microsoft on Wednesday what happened.

“Microsoft Flight Simulator is a live service and we will continue to update the world over time,” a spokesperson replied.

There you go. A fix is on the way. At some point. No rush. We’re busy hosting another national convention this week, anyway, right? We’ll be here, next in line for our “photorealistic detail.” City No. 342. Or something.

We hear you snickering over there, Raleigh.