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The Challenger can be hard work on the approach and landing, but when it all comes together it's very rewarding. All the beta testers had difficulty learning how to land, it's all part of the fun. On approach be aware that unlike aircraft like the 737, the pitch response to power is reversed, that means a power increase will see the aircraft pitch down for a moment. This can lead to an oscillation developing, so be sure to fly the pitch attitude accurately. If you find you're wobbling up and down, aim to make smooth power changes, and remember the HUD flight path vector is useful tool, but can get you into trouble too. A useful check is 0.6 on the AoA index on approach. If it's higher than that, you're too slow. Remember Vref +5, and check your weights on the approach ref page. For the landing flare, lift the nose to to arrest the rate of descent, starting at just below 40 ft. Make a smooth power reduction and fly the aircraft onto the runway. The pitch attitude in the flare is around 3 degrees, but look at the end of the runway, not the HUD! You'll have plenty of time for butter later, so for now put the aircraft down positively in the touchdown zone. If you go butter hunting, you'll only find little bounces - ask me how I know! Once you've landed, extend the flight spoilers (the ground spoilers are automatic, but the flight spoilers need to be raised by pulling the lever), use the reversers and you're down. And stay away from that HLIS button, it'll trick you into making your landings worse!

I would like to chime in here - I have worked with Tom on this over the last week intensively - previously I had test flown the 737 in XP12 (after we fixed the major roadblocks of even getting if flyable, like making the flaps work, etc.) and I had tuned the flight model. Tom worked hard on 3D modeling over the last months with little for me to do (I am too stupid for blender and those things) and now with him approaching the end of that work, I dove back into flight and system testing. The more I test, the more stuff shows up that does not work anymore, because Laminar changed things - and these changes are all improvements in modeling systems, yet they still leave our "old" way of doing/overriding them unusable. So in a very real way we have to redo a lot of the things we already did for XP11, it is not a quick conversion at all - and this is something we definitely underestimated when we initially said to "upgrade to XP12 for free". The move from XP11 to XP12 is not an upgrade, it is in many areas a repeat of the dev work work we already did for XP11. And I am thankful for most of our customers to be very understanding of the fact that we charge a small price to compensate us for this! I think the old 737-300 still has a lot of life in her, I thoroughly enjoy my "test flights" and find myself again and again to "just finish this approach" even though I was just testing some autopilot PID constant ... simply because it is fun to fly and looks great in XP12 . Cheers, Jan

Preview of X-Plane's window icing effects, in case anybody hasn't seen it. This was my first time seeing it https://www.dropbox.com/s/o261awvzn9rotog/thermal_inertia_opt.mp4?dl=0 DISCLAIMER: This is Laminar's default window icing effect and in-sim developer tools....I'm only implementing it. They did a good job! It has been thought through fully. Without it, the IXEG 733 would have to be retired. You want some shock....ICON aircraft was 'selling' their aircraft at an estimated 140k about 5 years before it hit the market (and taking deposits against that estimate too)...it ended up hitting the market at over 350,000.00 (over 400k now maybe?) And their board of directors consisted of a prior Google CEO, Boeing executives, etc. The point is things change and you adapt as best as you can. We're not looking back, just forward. -tkyler

Yes....sort of. This question requires a bit more explanation. IXEG as a team, had four developers, two of which do not actively develop any longer as their families/lives/careers moved in other directions. Currently I am the only one of the original team pursuing X-Plane development full time. Jan, as most know, is a 747 captain now, which keeps him busy, but he also is still active in XP development when not flying. So its fair to say, that I myself, have not only thought of a future project, It's well far along (chipping on it in spare time over last decade). Whether or not it is branded under the IXEG name I cannot say, because I respect the work of all my IXEG teammates, and I would not release a product under the IXEG name without all the original team member's blessing. TBH, I haven't thought about the branding much because for me, its the same no matter what, I still click the mouse a lot and put the same level of workmanship into anything I do, whether on IXEG or TOGA Simulation work. So the future work may be branded under either TOGA Simulations or IXEG, depending on conversations yet to be had. In general, its the same developers for the most part. So....the future projects. Once the IXEG for V12 is out the door and any initial round of bugs squashed, I expect to make an announcment regarding its development. Until then, I will neither confirm nor deny any guesses made. For anybody "nervous" about the IXEG development suffering, I will drop a hint and say that the FMS work on the IXEG will have about 90%+ similarity with next project's FMS, so both will be getting worked on at the same time in essence. -tkyler

A freighter version for the -400 has potential because the workload to produce that is "relatively" light. The -500, being a shorter variant would require a much more laborious effort to change both the 3D and the flight model, being geometrically disparate...and the return on investment in that, I believe, probably would not justify the efforts. While I think a freighter variant would appeal to a statistically smaller set of customer use cases, I recognize that there is still a place for it...and so I do want to do a -400 freighter at some point. ..and yes, I'm still working on the 733 every day...my carpel tunnel and "tennis elbow" remind me constantly. I think I can safely say at this point that we'll definitely put out a more informative report this week on whats going on with the development. -tkyler