10 hours ago, GregP said:

@atco, how's the DC-9 going? 

Honestly its not bad - Its by no means great or "study level" and price wise its a little high for what you get.
I do find the system depth pretty decent. Systems all seem to work as they should and you can definitely fly it according to the book. If you are familiar with the MD-80 you will find the DC-9 very similar and in a lot of places identical.
Autopilot also worked well for me, held headings, altitudes and tracked NAV with zero issues. I was able to use VS and IAS hold in climb and descent without trouble. HDG and NAV mode worked fine, tracked VOR and ILS no problem. GS tracking was a bit up and down but I suspect that might have been a thing in the real plane.
Sounds are not great, but I use the FTSim+ sound pack which is much better. Model was good, possibly not to the highest standards of today and texturing is a bit of a mixed bag. In the cockpit I find it perfectly fine.
Flying wise, using the figures from the loadsheet it flew fine. Rotation was at the correct speed based on the set trim value, have not experienced the plane rotating on its own. Hand flying was good, although at linear sensitivity its a bit pitchy. A nice adjustment to the pitch curve though has it hand flying nicely.
The -30 seems to be a little overpowered
Overall I like it. Biggest real drawback is that right now it can only be flown using VOR/NDB and there are so few of those navaids left around now. I love flying old school, but its tricky to find routes, especially in N America now where you can fly any realistic route VOR-VOR. Some kind of GPS function would be really nice to open up more routes now that we are in the era of RNAV.
I'm glad I got it, the update was certainly significant and I enjoy it. It's fair to say that its night and day difference from the videos I saw of the release version. To their credit they've obviously done a lot of (needed) work on this update, and this is probably the version that should have been the initial release. I'll definitely be flying it a lot, and its likely the only DC-9 we are going to get for a long time. I feel overall they've done justice to the great airplane and I have no regret about picking it up. My view may also be biased because aircraft like the 727 and DC-9 (737-200, 1-11 etc) were the aircraft I grew up with as a child so I have an innate love for jets of this era.

A few more observations as I've just taken her out for a couple of Astral cargo flights around Africa....................
1: Performance is quite poor for a relatively basic aircraft in avionics terms. Lots of little hitches and micro stutters even in cruise. In this part of the World even the Ini A350 is smooth as silk. I think the model might be poorly optimised. Certainly no reason for it to be as stuttery as it is.

2: Ground handling isn't great. Very squirrely on the runway, and it taxies like its on ice.

3: Its a handful on approach. I suspect the flaps might be too draggy. I know these older jets were not very efficient, but at flaps 40 in the -30 (not even full 50 flap) you need an awful lot of thrust to maintain the glideslope.

4: So far I've found it pretty difficult to trim nicely on approach. Once you get below 200kts IAS I've found the altitude hold doesn't work very well, it will just keep descending even though the VS is set to 0, and even applying positive VS to climb does not arrest the descent

5: Landing is an adventure, it is very, very pitch sensitive. I have -25 set on my sensitivity but I think it needs even more

So again, its getting there but there's still a way to go. I'm happy enough with it, fills a need for me but if this is the final version I'll be very unhappy. It needs more refinement, but certainly leaps and bounds better than the wreck it was on release.
Hope this helps. My advice, if you want a top of the line, polished DC-9 then this isn't it yet. If you want a decent DC-9 that still has some quirks and issues to work out and will give you a decent enough simulation of a DC-9 then this will scratch that itch.