How do you enter Active Pause in Flight Simulator on the Xbox?

If, like me, you’re still getting to grips with Microsoft Flight Simulator on the Xbox, you’ll probably have seen on-screen prompts to activate the Active Pause menu. But how do you enter Active Pause in Flight Simulator on the Xbox, so you can have a good look around and take lovely screenshots? Here’s how.

Active Pause in Flight Simulator

You might think, not unreasonably, that the way to enter the pause menu would be by pressing the Menu button, as you normally do in games. And you’d be absolutely wrong.

To enter Active Pause you have to press down on the left thumbstick, which should bring up this menu at the top of the screen:

When that menu appears, drag the cursor up to the pause button in the top left and the game will enter Active Pause.

This will freeze the plane’s journey, although any propellers on the plane will keep moving, which can be a little confusing at first.

Now, with Active Pause enabled, you can open the camera menu (as seen in the screenshot above) and switch to the Showcase camera. This provides a drone-like camera that you can ‘fly’ from your plane, allowing you to take stunning screenshots of the scenery below, from the position and angle of your choice. You don’t even need the plane in view.

If you have other interface panels open on the screen, such as objectives or satnav screens, switch these off from that top menu before you take your screenshots, such as this shot of sunset over Rio, complete with Instagram-friendly lens flare.

In case you don’t know, you can take a screenshot with the Xbox controller by pressing the Share button – the one directly beneath the illuminated Xbox button, with the arrow pointing upwards. For reasons I’m yet to fathom, these screenshots can sometimes take an age to upload to the cloud, from where you can share them using the Xbox app on your smartphone or PC, for instance.