Sim Client for Windows
Fly Microsoft Flight Simulator or X-Plane, and watch your aircraft move on the chart on your iPad — the same way a real GPS source drives the app in an airplane.
What it does
The app already knows where every airport, airway and approach is. What it cannot know, sitting on your desk, is where you are. This program tells it — reading your position and attitude straight out of the simulator and sending them across your own network to the tablet.
Position updates five times a second, attitude fifteen. For comparison, the tool most people use for this sends one update per second, which is enough to drag an airplane symbol around a map but not enough to make an attitude display look like anything but a slideshow.
Nothing leaves your network. The data goes from the PC to the tablet and nowhere else — there is no server in the middle, no telemetry, and no account.
What you need
- Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 or 2024, or X-Plane 11 or 12
- Flight Kneeboard on an iPhone or iPad, on the same network as the PC
Setting it up
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Unzip it anywhere and run
FlightKneeboardSimClient.exe.Windows will show a blue “Windows protected your PC” box the first time. That is SmartScreen, and it appears for any program without a paid code-signing certificate — it is not a virus warning. Click More info, then Run anyway. Once only.
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Allow it through the firewall, on Private networks.
Windows asks the first time it starts. If you miss the prompt, the tablet will never be found: fix it under Windows Security → Firewall & network protection → Allow an app through firewall.
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In Flight Kneeboard on your tablet: Settings → Sim Connect → on.
iOS asks for Local Network permission. Allow it — without that the tablet cannot announce itself and the PC has nothing to send to.
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Start your simulator.
Nothing else to do. It detects MSFS or X-Plane by itself, and starts sending the moment one appears.
X-Plane needs one extra tick: Settings → Network → “Accept incoming connections”. That is the only setting it requires.
Reading the status
One colored dot tells you where you are:
- Grey — no simulator running yet.
- Amber — receiving flight data, but the tablet has not been found. Or a problem, described underneath in the same color.
- Green — data is reaching your tablet. Your aircraft is moving on the chart.
If it stays amber with “DEVICES: none found”, it is almost always the firewall, or the tablet being on a guest network. A router with “AP isolation” switched on blocks this completely, and no setting in either program can work around it.
Leaving it running
Tick Start when Windows starts and it launches minimized at login, waits quietly for a simulator, and begins sending when one appears. It does not run as administrator, and you can remove it any time from Task Manager’s Startup tab.
A note on what this is not
Flight Kneeboard is an advisory aid. Feeding it simulator data does not change that, and none of this is a substitute for the instruments in a real airplane — it is for flight simulation and for practising with an EFB on the ground, which is a genuinely useful thing to do before you need it in the air.
Found a problem, or want a simulator supported that is not on the list? Get in touch — the program prints its own error messages in plain English, so quoting the amber line usually pins it down straight away.