I bought MSFS from Steam after cancelling my MS Store preorder. The installation yesterday morning ran perfectly. On a 69Mbps connection, it took about 3-4 hours to download. Once finished, it ran without issue.

My PC is a mATX, with a Gigabyte mATX motherboard, i7-8700 CPU, 16GB DDR4 2666, and Zotac Mini GTX 1070 8GB. I have the sim installed on a new 1TB M.2 SSD with over 500GB free.

My settings are ultra, with resolution at 1080p on a 4K TV, FXAA and V-Sync enabled, FPS locked at 30, 32GB rolling cache (no manual cache set up yet), and rendering scale at 150 (because it improves picture quality better than higher anti-aliaising settings, on my TV). Live weather, but no live air traffic.

Being entirely new to simming, I've left all assists on and started with flight training. It runs smoothly in the flight training sessions. No noticeable FPS drops or stutters. Looks gorgeous, and I find the handling and response with my Thrustmaster T Flight HOTAS X great without adjustments (one odd thing there is the software has taken care of the controller setup, as it's a compatible peripheral, but it's assigned buttons 14 and 15 to a couple of options - but there are no buttons 14 and 15 on the controller. It doesn't appear to let me assign keyboard keys as alternatives.)

Then I abandoned flight training after learning to land (seems important) and decided to visit New York, taking off from Brooklyn. It starts with some external shots around the aeroplane, and this is where I saw stuttering. But I clicked to start flying and, inside the aircraft ready to go, everything appeared fine. In fact, I took off and flew towards the Statue of Liberty, turning the camera to glance over at the Manhattan skyline (nice!) All running smoothly in the air and looking great.

Then I approached the Statue of Liberty, although it was out of view under the plane, started to descend to hopefully see it up close, and the sim crashed to desktop. I couldn't even close the sim from task manager, even though it appeared to still be running on the taskbar. So I restarted the PC, loaded back up. This time I clicked to fly, appeared in cockpit view, and it immediately crashed to desktop. Call me stubborn, but as I managed to get off the ground and fly a while the first time round, I reloaded the sim again. Same thing: clicked to fly, appeared in cockpit view, and it crashed out again the same way.

That's when I called it a night, only because it was late. When I finish work today, I have a few ideas to try. But has anyone else found this anywhere in the world?

Perhaps the GPU suddenly became overloaded as I reached the more detailed parts of the city, but it's odd that I couldn't even start up the engine the other two times. You'd think I'd be able to at least get as far as the first flight attempt before crashing, so maybe it isn't to do with overloading...

Update re crashes, I came across this list of potential fixes: https://flightsimulator.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015893879?input_string=crash+after+leveling+off+plane+in+takeoff+and+level+flight+tutorial+mission