The ATR 42 and ATR 72 family of turboprop regional airliners occupy a unique and beloved corner of the flight simulation community. These twin-engine aircraft, produced by the Franco-Italian manufacturer ATR, are workhorses of short-haul regional aviation, connecting smaller communities to major hubs across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and beyond. Their relatively modest cockpits, with analogue and digital instruments blended across a compact panel, are instantly recognisable to regional aviation enthusiasts. In Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, the ATR has proven a popular choice for those who enjoy lower-altitude, point-to-point flying — and like any widely flown aircraft, it has attracted the attention of the modding community looking to refine the experience further.
Creator HUES has released the 🔗 HUES ATR Enhanced Cockpit Textures, a freeware modification that takes aim at the visual quality of the ATR flight deck through a thorough rework of its textures, materials, and colour presentation.
At its core, this modification is a comprehensive PBR — Physically Based Rendering — overhaul of the ATR cockpit environment. PBR is the rendering approach used by modern simulators and games to simulate how real-world materials interact with light. When done well, it gives surfaces a convincing sense of physical presence: plastics look like plastics, metals catch light as metals should, and matte panels absorb rather than reflect. When cockpit textures are not optimised for PBR, materials can appear flat, overly shiny, or simply unconvincing under different lighting conditions. This mod addresses those shortcomings directly.
The texture work itself has been sharpened and produced at higher resolution, resulting in improved clarity across instruments, labels, and panel surfaces. Reflections are reworked to behave more convincingly, and the overall lighting response of the cockpit — how it looks at dawn, in bright midday sun, or under the glow of overhead panel lighting at night — is improved as a result of the material changes. Beyond the technical texture work, the cockpit colour tones have been subtly adjusted to draw closer to the style seen in modern Airbus flight decks.
Early community reception has been positive, with users describing it as a mandatory addition for ATR flying in MSFS 2024. The modification is available now as freeware on Flightsim.to, exclusively for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. If you fly the ATR regularly and want a more polished, visually cohesive flight deck experience, this mod is well worth adding to your installation. As a freeware release, it costs nothing to download — but if you find it enhances your time in the cockpit, do consider leaving a donation for HUES to support further development work. You can find the 👉 HUES ATR Enhanced Cockpit Textures on Flightsim.to.