Litjan

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

The engine sound doesn´t change with airspeed or altitude. The wind sounds get louder, but those are default X-Plane. So in a nutshell the ratio of windsounds to engine sounds changes - just like in the real aircraft, but the absolute engine sound stays more or less the same. Jan

With all my personal dislike for Airbus aside, making one is fairly unattractive for study-sim developers. The logic in the systems is so complicated that often even Airbus has to do some serious research into why the airplanes do what they do in certain unusual situations. To code that is a nightmare, and with our level of determination to make things work realistically we would only set ourselves up for frustration and disappointment. The Airbus family is attractive to make from a sales perspective, it´s a very succesful aircraft that is present in many flightsim users minds. And certainly a viable product, if you are not hellbent on pushing realistic system simulation into the high 90s, percentage-wise. As a disclaimer, I have never flown any of the Airbus-offerings for X-Plane or FSX, and I have heard some great things about those products. I DO wonder how they would hold up to the scrutiny and true and honest review of a type-rated and experienced Airbus pilot. Cheers, Jan

Very nice, thank you!

No, not yet. The real winglet´s benefit is fairly small, around 2% in cruise. On a typical 2 hour flight this would amount to less than 100kgs saved. I am not sure the real FMS distinguishes between "winglet" and "non-winglet", usually every aircraft has a "performance modifier" in the INIT page, which incurs a penalty against the manufacturer´s performance numbers. We might implement that sort of thing, and tying it into the "winglet" option wouldn´t be hard. But not for V1.0, I think.

The sooner, the better. Application is in the system...

Hi Steffen, you should get a pretty good idea if you watch the many videos we have out on youtube. There is of course the dilemma of wanting to have correct dimensions in the 3D rendition of the cockpit, but being limited to a 2D computerscreen that can´t move. Try driving your car and working the radio, looking at a map, finding sunglasses in the glove compartment etc. without turning your head ever so slightly. I bet in most cases you can´t even see the speedometer, because the steering wheel is in the way and you need to move slightly to glance past one of its spokes... We choose realism > convenience, so you need to look around the cockpit with the mouseview, a headtracker, pre-setup views or use a very large field-of-view if you want to access all controls and equipment. It´s not all cluttered in front of the pilot, just like in real life or on a 2D cockpit. It is entirely possible to set up your view in a way that lets you take in the window and primary flight instruments, so for really "flying" the aircraft you don´t need to move your view. Cheers, Jan

This would be akin to an inmate making a scale model of his prison... no.

This has been on our list of want-to-have for a very long time. So far we haven´t been able to put any effort into making this work, but we certainly plan to do so after release of V1.0 . It´s not easy, as both machines must stay synchronized and we have a lot of datarefs that need to be sent back and forth... It has been discussed before, it IS possible to operate this plane safely with just one pilot (and judicious use of the autoflight system plus some proper pre-planning for high-density workload phases), but for a realistic and redundant operation of an aircraft of this complexity and speed really two pilots are needed in the cockpit. Jan

Well, we couldn´t seriously charge full price for an airplane that is just a modification of another one, or could we? Of course in that case the -400 wouldn´t work without the -300, it would be an add-on, not a stand-alone. Or there could be a discount to existing customers... Countless possibilities...

No. IF we ever do a -400, it would likely have the 22K Thrust engines, so thats 10% more... Cheers, Jan