It also made a trek from Berlin to Tokyo in the same year, proving to be one of the most innovative and technologically advanced airliners… for a brief time. World War II would dramatically change this era of aviation, and the Condor was soon repurposed for military service.  

By the end of the war, only a handful of Condors remained outside of Germany and very little engineering documentation survived. It wasn’t long until spare parts were becoming harder to come by, leading to its grounding and eventual scrapping. This left the Condor, one of the most innovative airliners ever built for its time, essentially lost to history.

“The Condor is kind of a missing link in the development of airliners in Germany, or Europe, before the war. In a way it is a connection between the very first wooden airliners from the 1920s and the Airbus of the 1970s,” explains Heiko Triesch, Head of the Aerospace Department at the German Museum of Technology.

Triesch and a group of volunteers wanted to help restore that missing link, and commissioned the salvage operation of a Condor that had been discovered at the bottom of Trondeim Fjord in Norway. The aircraft was basically in shambles, but a group of enthusiasts were determined to bring the Condor back to life. With assistance from Airbus, and Triesch’s museum, they went to work, calling themselves the “Condorians.”

“There was a core team [of volunteers] at the beginning of the restoration project in 2002 that had done their job training in Bremen during World War II at the Focke-Wulf Company, working on FW200 airplanes,” Triesch says. “They would later become railway drivers or technicians — [you were] not allowed to work on aircraft in Germany for a period of 10 years after the war — but their fascination for aviation never stopped. They became the first volunteers working on the Condor; no one knew more about this aircraft than those veterans.” 

The team started with a wreck, significantly destroyed due to saltwater erosion damage. With limited engineering knowledge on how to repair it, it would take some time to begin piecing the Condor back together — but they were determined to figure it out. With a patchwork of parts taken from various other wrecks recovered from around Europe over the years, the restoration of the Condor would take the better part of two decades to complete, finishing recently in 2021. It was around this time that Neumann had reached out with the idea of bringing the Condor to Microsoft Flight Simulator.

“I read the story years ago and knew about the recovery efforts, and that people were reconstructing the Condor,” describes Neumann. “Then it resurfaced all these years later that they had breakthroughs and [had put] the plane back together again. I contacted them and said I have this goal in Microsoft Flight Simulator to preserve aircraft that have sort of been lost in time and they allowed us to come visit and scan the plane.”

But that wasn’t Microsoft Flight Simulator’s only contribution to preserving the memory of this aircraft. The Condorians had the plane, but they didn’t have the cockpit. It turned out, a private collector in Switzerland had put together a Condor cockpit dash but was looking to part with his collection. Microsoft purchased this collection and gave it to the museum, thus giving them an even more complete version of the Condor, which in turn helped bring an even more detailed model into Microsoft Flight Simulator. Neumann highlights the cockpit as the element he’s most proud of being able to reproduce for this Local Legend. – and isn’t coy about implying that this might be the best work the team has done to date.

“We brought two different groups together [for the Condor in Microsoft Flight Simulator],” Neumann tells me. “First, we have a company called iniBuilds that typically makes our airliners. They worked on the A320neo and they’re making an A330 for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. They are top notch, the best of best in the industry to make airliners [for flight simulators]. And secondly, we worked with Oliver Moser, who I would call a highly enthusiastic aviation fanatic. He inundates himself and basically gets every book, newspaper, or any piece of information he can get. He’s German, so he has a much easier time with the [Condor] documentation and is probably now one of the most foremost knowledgeable people in the world on the subject. He’s responsible for the flight model and the flight deck and everything, while iniBuilds is providing the artwork, the animation, the sounds, and all that.”

This collaboration paid off in creating a highly detailed representation of the Condor, inside and out. Oftentimes when Microsoft and a partner create a Local Legend, there is not enough information available to create a highly accurate representation of a cockpit. Cockpits are usually not preserved in most museum pieces and there usually are also not sufficiently detailed photographs available to really have high confidence that everything is historically 100% accurate, but in the case of the Condor, the team had sufficient information to get everything correct. 

In talking to Triesch, I was curious to know what he thought now that the Condor will now be able to “live on” as a digital preservation flight model in Microsoft Flight Simulator: “I remember there were many talks about just trying to get an engine to run, or ‘We’re sorry, this aircraft will never fly again,’ but now we can! For me it’s a miracle. I was told the Fw 200 is gone forever. Now we have an aircraft in Tempelhof and Microsoft Flight Simulator has made it possible to fly it again!”

“When you think about these people spending 20 to 22 years of their life, remaking every inch of this aircraft, for them to know that this [now enables] us to make it an authentic digital model that can be enjoyed by millions of people – yeah, I think it’s super exciting for them,” Neumann adds. “I think we sort of take aviation for granted these days, but it’s these pioneers and early innovations that are really making all this possible. And I think the Condor plays an important part in that story. And it’s a beautiful, beautiful plane.”

The Fw 200 Condor is available now in Microsoft Flight Simulator’s digital marketplace.