Every time I fly over a certain part of Washington DC, my sim freezes up (graphics and sound are frozen, and the program will no longer respond, but no CTD).  The location in question is just north of the Chain Bridge and Sibley Memorial Hospital, near the GTN NDB.  The River Visual RWY 19 at DCA requires flying over this area at 1800', so this is very frustrating!  I have never had this problem anywhere else in the world so far.

When the sim freezes like this, the only way I can exit the program is to end the process in Task Manager.  Task Manager shows the application as "Not Responding", with CPU usage around 9% overall (although two of the cores are fluctuating between 80-100%), and memory usage about 7435 MB.

I can't seem to figure out what is causing this issue.  Like most people, I have a large number of addons, because I don't like most of the default scenery and aircraft.  For testing purposes, I deactivated Drzewiecki Designs Washington Landmarks scenery, as well as all of the "I Love VFR" sceneries, power lines, and similar sceneries.

After reading posts involving similar issues, I have also tried the following solutions, but none of them have helped:

1) Turned photogrammetry off
2) Reduced Buildings setting to Medium and Low
3) Uninstalled and reinstalled City Update IX

4) Deleted scenery .DAT files and scenery caches

I get the same freeze in VR or flatscreen, and it happens every single time I fly into that area.  The only time it did not happen was when I started MSFS in Safe Mode (option offered next time I start MSFS after ending the process).  

Has anyone else experienced this issue?  If so, how were you able to solve it?

 

Thanks!

Try renaming your community folder and creating an empty one.  

Addons are funny sometimes and it could be the most illogical add on from 1/2 way around the world causing the issue.  Try with no addon but the aircraft you fly. If that crashes try with another plane.  If that works start adding your add ons back in groups of 5 or 10.  One of the groups you add "should" replicate the issue.  Then you can remove the last group of add ons and move them back one at a time.  

Tedious but the best way to rule out add on conflicts.

 

Thank you - I considered doing that, but was hoping for a less time-consuming solution.  I have over 100 addons in my Community folder alone, plus whatever Marketplace addons are in the Official folder...the process of testing/elimination will take a long, long time, considering that MSFS takes more than 5 minutes to start up every time!

I wish there was some kind of a log file that could show which addon was being loaded at the time of the freeze...

51 minutes ago, RobP1 said:

Thank you - I considered doing that, but was hoping for a less time-consuming solution.  I have over 100 addons in my Community folder alone, plus whatever Marketplace addons are in the Official folder...the process of testing/elimination will take a long, long time, considering that MSFS takes more than 5 minutes to start up every time!

I wish there was some kind of a log file that could show which addon was being loaded at the time of the freeze...

One thing you could do is a binary search for the problem addon. Rename your Community folder to back it up and then create a new community folder. Put half (50) of your addons in the new folder and see what happens. If the problem goes away then you can next try just half (25) of the "other" 50 of your addons. If the problem does not go away then divide the 50 addons in your community folder in half again (25) and retest, and so on. Each test divides the remaining possible "problem" addon group in half (or close to half). Five tests should get you down to just a couple of possible "problem" addons assuming only one addon (out of 100) is the problem. 

Al

Edited June 6, 20251 yr by ark

Well, I still had the same issue with an empty Community folder, so that eliminated those 100+ items immediately.  It had to be something in the "Official" folder that I purchased through the Marketplace.  I moved every folder out of there that didn't start with "asobo-" or "microsoft-", which was only about a dozen items.  Looks like the culprit was Enhanced Photogrammetry (Project Coastline) - as soon as I added it back in and attempted to start a flight from the helipad at Sibley Memorial, MSFS froze up before I could even click on the "Ready to Fly" tab!

Thanks for responding!

Must be the NO FLY zone over the White House 😝.

Dave Hinson

6 hours ago, RobP1 said:

Well, I still had the same issue with an empty Community folder, so that eliminated those 100+ items immediately.  It had to be something in the "Official" folder that I purchased through the Marketplace.  I moved every folder out of there that didn't start with "asobo-" or "microsoft-", which was only about a dozen items.  Looks like the culprit was Enhanced Photogrammetry (Project Coastline) - as soon as I added it back in and attempted to start a flight from the helipad at Sibley Memorial, MSFS froze up before I could even click on the "Ready to Fly" tab!

Thanks for responding!

Rob,

I'm wondering if you could repeat this test with a longer flight from somewhere like Pennsylvania that terminates in the KDCA or KIAD area and flies over DCA and DC proper. I ask because I removed Project Coastline a while ago (it interfered with the appearance of some airports that were directly next to water, like KMDT) and I am still getting the freezing and crashing issue when seemingly over National/DCA after a few minutes. It does seem to be west or south of the airport for the most part, but doesn't immediately kick in, so I'm wondering if there is a memory leak somewhere. 

To OP system specs could be a little more helpful with solving your problem.

I have the same issue, whether I have an empty community folder or not. And I also get the same issue in 2024 as well. The issue isn't the airport itself because I can approach from a different direction and make it to the airport. I noticed this when flying from KBWI to KDCA, both sims freeze just short of the EYESS intersection. I've been trying to narrow it down more before I report it to Asobo. I can fly from KBWI to KIAD to KDCA and actually make it all the way to KDCA without freezing up.

Update your BIOS.  I had same issue (crash every time at same location approaching major city).  Sim would stutter hard for 1-2 seconds then crash.  Updating BIOS fixed it for me and several other people with same issue.

I had a similar problem. Repeated stutters - not a freeze - as I overflew a specific area immediately south west of Northolt Airport, London. Finally stopped getting this minor irritation after a recent update to MSFS 24. Cant recall which one. 

 

i was having this problem.
And the solution shown in the video solved.

I did several test (MSFS2020) flying KIAD KDCA River Visual.

Test1 completed but I noticed some slightly displaced roads and an elevation problem otherwise ok.

 

 

Edited June 21, 2025Jun 21 by vonmar

Test2 I got a full sim freeze with a memory error message.

 

 

 

 

 

Test3 I did the full River Visual without a problem.