One word on the reason why we ask users to load a default aircraft first. There's a number of events that are fired during startup. Flight loading, aircraft loading, simulation start etc., stuff like this. Unfortunately, the order and number of these events is not consistent between loading a flight from the free flight window or file versus just switching between aircraft. For example, if you load a flight from the free flight window, the SimStart event ("Simulation has started and is ready") o