Digital Cartographies of Exclusion: Mapping Inequality in Global Virtual Flight Simulation

Digital flight-simulation networks present themselves as open, global spaces limited only by skill, but this paper argues the Virtual Air Traffic Simulation Network (VATSIM) is unevenly inhabited, shaped by material thresholds, institutional availability, and the accumulated prestige of particular routes and regions. Reading VATSIM's procedural architecture as a site of infrastructural inheritances, the paper names the mechanism through which colonial-era route imaginaries, standards, and governance logics persist inside newer digital systems, shaping who becomes visible and what participation is recognised as legitimate. Drawing on postcolonial game studies, critical infrastructure studies, and platform governance theory, the paper treats VATSIM as a procedural environment rather than a self-contained game. A mixed-methods analysis drawing on StatSim network activity and event data, the Navigraph FlightSim Community Survey (2025, 2026), and semi structured interviews with pilots, controllers, and event organisers indicates that realism norms, voice communication, and governance capacity help produce corridors read as "alive" while others remain comparatively sparse, a pattern live maps intensify. South Asian participants account for 1.3 percent of baseline departures against Europe's 47.4 percent; the controller-hours disparity approaches 29:1; an eightfold gap in high-end GPU ownership tracks comparable shortfalls in documentation access and event geography. That these disparities cannot be explained by lower interest among underrepresented participants, who in the 2026 survey wave report higher, not lower, engagement with live air traffic control and group flying, points toward infrastructural filtering as the more adequate explanation. Three pathways carry this filtering forward: standards inheritance, documentation and route inheritance, and prestige and network inheritance. Cross the Pond, VATSIM's largest recurring transatlantic event, exemplifies how these pathways converge, functioning as a ritual infrastructure that periodically renaturalizes an Atlantic-centered geography of legitimate participation. The question the paper ultimately raises is not whether South Asian pilots and controllers want to participate in global virtual aviation, but on whose terms that participation is currently made possible.