It's been another whirlwind week for the Microsoft Flight Simulator team at Asobo Studio, with May 7th's promised update already upon us.

No doubt the main headline of today's update is a refreshed roadmap, detailing the group's plans for the next few months. Available in the Insider Area, the new roadmap adds columns for June and July of 2020, with additional information on this month's news too - for example, the SDK update promised for this week has now been deferred to mid-May's update.

According to this sheet, v1.4.X.X of the alpha build will be available in early June and v1.5.X.X to follow later in the month. Throughout June, we'll be learning more about the three partners announced last week - NAVBLUE, meteoblue and FlightAware - all with their own partnership series entries. An SDK update is also due in this same timeframe.

July 2020 brings three more partnership announcements, though the names of said brands is yet unconfirmed. The main drawcard of this month's preceedings is a new "Closed Beta" tag assigned to mid-July's update, which indicates the move into a more advanced phase of development: pre-release testing. At the same time, we'll have a new development roadmap similar to today's update and more news on the SDK for developers.

Here's the full roadmap:

Moving back to the public area, the first items on the new blog post's agenda regard sections which have been delayed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Feature Discovery Series episode 8 - detailing IFR operations - now set for May 28th and the next update for simulator partners set for early June. This comes after last week's announcement of three new partners, which you can learn more about in a previous article.

Regarding the newest alpha build, v1.3.X.X, the status post says: "The team has started preparations for releasing the upcoming Alpha build. We’ve spent a few extra days incorporating a number of fixes for the Airbus A320 based on feedback from the community testers. We’ve completed integration and now just running a final pass to ensure everything is working, as expected."

In the coming week, the update is expected to move into release candidacy and have update notes ready for launch at any time.

Alpha invitations also get a mention in this week's update, with the developer saying that their earlier  goal of ensuring all who have been accepted into the alpha now how access to the software has now been completed. Now, the focus shifts to prioritising early-applicants for pre-release build testing. Besides this information, there is no news on whether new alpha testers will be accepted at this time.

A slightly refreshed feedback snapshot also made its way to today's blog post, which goes as follows:

See more in last week's Microsoft Flight Simulator development update. Alternatively, see more images from today's update in the source post.