Tom Wright

I often have moments where I'm just blown away by how good the sim looks. Approaches in IMC conditions with low cloud and breaking out just above minimums are particularly impressive. Frequently I sit at the gate after a flight and just pan around, watching the BATC traffic land and taxi around the airport to their gates. It isn't faultless of course but it is just amazing to me how far we have come from FSX (and even P3D) 10 years ago.

Tbf I only really have experience in PA28 and a Cirrus SR20. Both have clockwise props and require right rudder at full power - the latter requires a TON of right rudder. I think there's only a handful of aircraft out there that have anti-clockwise turning props, and most of these are historic aircraft (a quick Google revealed the Tiger Moth and Chipmunk do). I do have about half an hour in a Chipmunk years ago, but didn't do the take off and was probably too inexperienced to notice whether the reverse was the case with the rudder!

In my opinion the only MSFS single engine piston that gets it right is the A2A Comanche. For everything else (default Cessna, JF PA28 and Carenado PA28) they've overdone the weathervane effect and underdone the torque effect. I've never flown a SEP in real life that doesn't need right rudder on take-off, even in a strong crosswind from the other direction. You might need slightly more or slightly less depending on the wind, but it'll never go in a straight line without and you will certainly never need left rudder.

To be fair to him though we all wanted to see how terrible it was without buying it and he did that for us.

WASM = WebAssembly Module. Most complex aircraft in MSFS use it in one form or another. To put it simply it is a sandbox which allows developers to use languages like C++ to code various avionics and systems. Some like PMDG and IniBuilds use it extensively for almost all their aircraft systems. Others like Fenix use it only as a handle to link to their external application.

I really do hope it's worth the hype! One thing I noticed in a preview video which bothered me was that they had it all powered down and the ailerons were drooped down like an Airbus with no hydraulic power. The 757 doesn't do this in RL because the controls are still cable operated (hydraulically assisted) so would stay wherever the yoke is.

Really? They are drastically different (and inferior imo) to both the Fenix and the Inibuilds in my eyes. The whole cockpit looks flat and plastic in comparison.

Yeah I reported it, didn't get an official response. As with others here, my sim time is limited so waiting 15 mins to load a plane isn't really that great for me when I could be up and flying in something else in a fraction of that. Never had loading times this long with Inibuilds, PMDG, Fenix etc.

Glad I'm not the only one with the issues loading. It often stalls during load with the spinning circle and I'm never sure whether to keep waiting or abort and try again. It's the only aircraft for me that does this, and it's not just the initial load like some that compile their WASM binaries on first load, it happens every single load.

Normally you'll be put on a intercept heading and below the glidepath, so no need to engage any other modes. Once you're on a intercept heading just arm APP mode and it'll capture localiser and then descend on the glidepath. If you're intercepting the glidepath from above you'll need to do some V/S trickery to try and establish it, but this is messy and most pilots wouldn't favour this.

I've been on a bit of a mission to land on short runways recently! Key West, KEYW is another good one - 1550m. There's a really good new scenery for it by MK Studios. Frequently served by A319 and 737-700s. And British Airways have just started up a new route (well resumed after a long break) from Heathrow to Guernsey in the Channel Islands which is also only 1460m and designated Airbus A319 or A32N only. Same for Florence LIRQ which is only 1560m. Jersey, also in the channel islands is also fun at 1700m.

Mehh, they're totally usable, yes. But it does add so much to the immersion to land at an airport with high quality runway textures, and where the terminal buildings look exactly like their real world counterparts. I buy a lot of third party airports.

Comparing your RAM usage isn't really an accurate metric because your system will use whatever it has. I've found 32GB to be fine. I think VRAM (which is on your card) is more critical than system RAM.

I thought the freeware offering for LEPA on flightsim.to is one of the best freeware airports there is?

2024 user here and 95% of my use is high altitude IFR flights. Leaps and bounds ahead of 2020 in every aspect.

That is a shame. I never use anything other than live weather (or sometimes historic by a few hours).

I bought it and took it for a flight today. It's good, don't really notice an awful lot different to the -800 but tbh I didn't think there was anything wrong with that. Generally a solid aircraft and fun to fly. Does anyone else find the VNAV a bit all over the place though? Pitching the nose up and down very harshly. Feel like the Fenix has a much smoother autopilot than the PMDG Boeings.

Out of interest, what's wrong with the A340s flight dynamics? Seems to handle alright to me.

Flying using BATC tonight it was the first time I got instructed to reduce speed on approach (first reduce speed to 180kts or less and then second reduce to minimum approach speed), which I'm guessing it did to increase spacing between me and the aircraft ahead. Very impressive. Gatwick was nicely populated with accurate airlines in the right terminals and gates too.

Indeed! Just a couple of good days out flying IRL I could almost buy my whole setup for the same cost. 2 hours could get me most of the WinCTRL range.

I'm not really a long hauler but their 340 is one of my favourite planes in FS2024. The texturing is excellent both inside and out, it's really nice and weighty to hand-fly, the systems modelling I think is enough that you wouldn't really notice anything missing unless you're going really off-piste or trying to replicate failure scenarios. And it has arguably the best designed EFB of any of the airliners available.

Honestly if IniBuilds turned their attention to Concorde I'd be all over it. We know by now that visuals and sounds wise they are extremely good at what they do. I really like what they've done with the Tristar. Obviously not directly comparable (nothing is), but the way they've implemented traditional navigation methods (INS) and the Flight Engineer functions but made them accessible to the average simmer via the Paper Flight Bag, without diluting the experience for those that want to turn all the help off and fly it completely manually, I think is really well done. IniBuilds have really stepped up in my book. This and the A340-300 I think are superb, and the A350 now it's seen several updates is also very solid.

Concorde's INSs could be corrected in-flight using DME updating - you would tune to an in range DME station and then the INS would correct its error using the known distance to the DME against its assumed position. I haven't done enough reading yet to know whether the Tristar's was similar.

Yeah, I guess that's why they've included the GPS as an option, which isn't entirely unrealistic. My dad recalls when we got a flight deck visit on a Caledonian Tristar in the the late 90s they had a Trimble Flightmate (very early handheld GPS) that they were using. One of the pilots remarked that he wouldn't fly one of those without it.

The thing is, it's not possible in most cases to navigate 100% true to life as nowadays most of the SIDS/STARS aren't possible to be flown purely using radio aids which they would have been back then. But it's nice that IniBuilds have included the feature to include these waypoints in the INS upload - they wouldn't have been originally.