Litjan

Sorry, I didnt read the original post carefully enough. You want to trim pretty much all the time to alleviate any forces on the yoke. It is possible to accelerate to a new speed without trimming, but the further you get away from the "in-trim" speed, the more force you have to exert on the yoke. This makes precise flying hard. If you accelerate a long time without trimming, and then "reset" the speed trim to the new speed by a very brief application of trim, then of course the speed-trim system will have to run for a while to achieve this new in-trim speed. Does this make sense? Cheers, Jan

Which Christmas?

To my knowledge all of Lufthansa´s 737 Classics (-300, - 400, -500) only used the analog mechanical instruments. I can confirm this from 1996 to present day, and I don´t think they had any EIS versions before that... Jan

That is what we are looking at, and have been in contact with those people. We will see how that works out after the plane is finished. Jan

Personally I would love that as well, but again the answer would be: For V1.0 no. For later we won´t rule it out, but it would be very far down on the list (mostly because of the very unfavourable relation between ease of implementation and customer demand). In addition I think that the number of actually in-service aircraft with that configuration will be in the single digits very soon. Cheers, Jan

Without going into details I can tell you that the whole development team did already have their share of strange german food.... Cheers, Jan

"Wo ein Wille ist, ist auch ein Weg". Paypal is really easy to set up - or maybe you know someone with a credit-card. I am sure you can figure something out. The options available are very much the standard for international online transactions. Good luck!

As long as the judge leaves the computer with you, I don´t see a problem with that. Jan

Yeah, you can buy one - but then the trouble starts. Where do you put it? Do you have a licence to fly it? Maintenance costs, fuel, landing fees, flight attendants you need to keep entertained during their time off duty... It just never stops. Not so with our IXEG 737! Install, fly whenever and wherever you want (as long as it is within the approved latitudes) - it parks on your harddrive, no follow-up costs... That can´t be beat . Cheers, Jan

For 76 million dollars you can have a beta tomorrow morning . Cheers, Jan

But you forgot that we are moving in fits and starts....

I see your point. It is one of those decisions between ultra-realism and ease of access. I think, however, that restricting the choice is a bit too harsh. It is not like either gauge form is "easy" and the other one "hard", so there is no unfair advantage of one over the other. Yes, switching gauges or winglets while at 37.000 feet is not realistic, but neither is changing the weather, weight or time of day (and X-Plane lets you do that). And changing gauges and winglets is just "optical" change, no functionality change. We don´t allow access to the "ground services" menu while the plane is in motion, I think that would be too unrealistic. But for ultrarealism regarding changing of aircraft equipment during flight: Don´t do it! Cheers, Jan

Yes, the FMS is the last "big block" that needs to be finished for our initial release version tentatively dubbed V1.0. There will be many versions following up on that one, including many things that we would like to have on the airplane, but won´t have on the initial release due to time constraints. One example is animated cabin doors. We have the gui in place to operate them, but it takes a lot of time to model the animation correctly, and this won´t happen for the initial release, most likely. So if you plan to buy this plane that took 5 years to make to mostly sit and watch the doors open and close - hold off on your initial purchase . Jan

Except for the "historical coolness" factor I see no reason why you would want to use CIVA if you have a modern FMS. Even if you totally dislike putting in "full routes" you can just hack a few waypoints into the LEGS page, and off you go. Of course you can get out your VFR chart and use the stopwatch for some good old-fashioned dead-reckoning as well . We don´t have a skyport for shooting a fix on the sun or stars at night, Omega or Loran C either, though . Jan

Just a little headsup from the development front: This is a copy+paste from our internal Skype-chat, written by me this morning: [09:30:47] Jan Vogel: ok everyone - I am just testing the latest revision, Tom has implemented a change of DEST "on the fly". I am flying over Los Angeles, changing my mind ALL THE TIME - entering new destinations (Van Nuys, LAX, Burbank, Santa Monica, etc...). The FMS is holding up beautifully - this is the way the FMS is supposed to help the pilot, being flexible, easy to use, no "kinks" to avoid... [09:31:01] Jan Vogel: (^) big one for Tom! [09:31:20] Jan Vogel: I am still finding some odd bugs, totally expected, I am really doing some stupid stuff :-) Just so you know we are not sitting on our thumbs, watching you squirm for a release date . Cheers, Jan

Yep, if I didn´t have some special connections, then both my kids would be on the list already so they are elligible for the 737 when they are 21. And if they don´t want it then, we could always trade it in for something else...

Here are two comparison shots, the first one from the cockpit of the IXEG 737, the second one from the cockpit of the default 747-400. Location is EDDM. As Cameron said, your mileage will vary, according to system properties, but this should give you an idea... Cheers, Jan

What, you are not on the list yet??? How do you expect to receive your plane in 2016 then, we have a backlog of many hundreds of planes, and we can only manufacture like 10 a month! Viele Grüße, Jan

We are at exactly 93.77% completion.

Cool idea, I love it! Jan

Hi everybody, We totally understand where you are all coming from. I have been a navigraph user myself for many years, and never had a problem AS A CUSTOMER. Right at this point - where we are crunching hard to get this plane out of the door - we are going to stick with what we have running, and what we are comfortable with. Navigraph fumbled that ball a few years ago, when we inquired into getting our own format on their site, just like Cameron said. Without going into details (we even wrote them in Swedish!), the response wasn´t courteous or professional, and we decided to look somewhere else. That being said, a lot of years have gone by, and I think that we would very likely get a different response nowadays, both with the way navigraph evolved since then, AND with the impetus that our 737 will hopefully have. We are going to ship with aerosoft AIRAC, and if you want to upgrade that dataset, it will set you back a few Euros. Alternatively you can run with the supplied dataset (it´s not like it becomes unusable when the next cycle gets published), or just wait with your purchase until we also support navigraph data (no promises to when that will be!) As we have said repeatedly elsewhere - we listen to our customers very much, but can´t cater to every wish instantly or always. We do put all wishes on our feature request list, though, so hopefully eventually... Cheers, Jan

Amen!

Performance in our 737 is very close to the real thing. I can´t speak for other addons, but X-Plane is using a very poor large bypass turbofan model that neglects many of the highly dynamic effects of a real jet-engine. That´s why most developers will have a very hard time tuning their model, it will either behave well in the lower atmosphere/lower mach numbers, or at higher levels/speeds. We have found a way to overcome this problem, therefore the climbrates we see are realistic. Jan

No - we have a custom "taxiing sound", but default wind sound, iirc. Jan