Hello, first off let me introduce myself to the forum. My name is Bill and I am a real life airline pilot, currently flying with a regional airline on CRJ 900's and 700's. If you routinely fly out of Charlotte, NC from the E gates, there is a chance you've been on one of my flights.
I've been a flight simulations junkie since middle school and been professionally flying since 2007. Even though I do not fly 757's, I do have a experience in a Level D 757 full motion simulator. I also have experience programming in C, C#, Java, and a little C++. So I also know just how hard it is to replicate the systems on a real airplane, and can only imagine just how hard it can be without any real experience on the airplane itself.
With all of this said, the Flight Factor 757 is an amazing accomplishment thus far for X-plane, however there are certain things that just are not correct that if I had known about, I would not of purchased it.
The FMS... It just simply does not work like the real thing. LNAV stays in white, some times you get a msg saying that you are not on an intercept course, other times you do not. Some times you are able to set it new altitudes for fixes, other times you are not able to. The FMS says invalid entry when in real life you can do it.
The bank angle limit select seems to be backwards, when you set it to 5, it banks more than when you set it to 15. Climbing to altitude, the mach/IAS button did very weird things. It would go from 100 to 400 when I pushed it. When the Lnav would not leave white, I tried resetting the auto pilot. It did not fix it. I tried selecting a new direct intercept fix, did not fix it. When you try to manually enter in a new fix in flight, I would get the Invalid entry, then the Execute button would light up, which it is not supposed to do if it is an INVALID entry!!!
The replies I read from the developers in other threads about the Vnav bug tell a very sad tale. They expect you to follow procedures exactly or don't be surprised if it does not work. What they are really hinting at is that their coding is sub par, and it's not their fault. In real life, in industrial applications, systems are modeled to work with tremendous amount of error checking, expecting the user to throw in garbage, and they are programmed to not accept it. In real life, in the airplane, you ham fist your way through the FMS and it will still work, you can do things backwards, and it will still work. Because in real life, they would get sued by the airline, the pilots union, the FAA, and the NTSB.
The amount of things that are seriously incorrect is horrendous. I am really dismayed at the lack of truthful knowledge based reviews not only for this airplane, but for others like the CRJ 200 from Rollins.
By the way, the crj 200 is horrible, nothing is correct.
I will gladly work with the developers if asked.
As for this 757, please if nothing else, at least buy the Level D 767 for FSX, and learn how a FMS is supposed to work. The 757/767 have the same type rating and same cockpit. At least do this if your not going to use real life experience to make sure your product actually models what it is supposed to.
When it comes to an airliner, the simulation is 90% about the systems, 10% everything else. When the systems do not work as they are supposed to, you no longer have a simulation, and much less something you can safely take online and fly on VATSIM during an event.
So please demand reviews from people with real world experience, it will force developers to actually go that extra mile. If there is one thing that FSX has over X-plane, it is high quality addons. If this was produced by PMDG or Level D, this post would not exist. Their products work like the real thing, and are tested to death before ever being released.
