Airline2Sim

I’m on the beta team for the Mad Dog. I can state that absolutely they are working on patches and fixes for the aircraft as we speak. The Mad Dog itself is superb, as in PMDG/FSL/Majestic level of detail.

I use the twist axis on my joystick with the ‘steering set’ axis in FSUIPC. Works well. No need to faff about pressing buttons as once you let go it self centres.

I’m excited about some of the new toys they’ve fitted into this but there’s appears to be a fairly extensive list of things that aren’t functional yet - holds, step climbs, non-precision approaches, DME arcs along with managed descent. Plus no independent FO's side display. I’ll hold (no pun intended) for now although I acknowledge that in value for money terms this is a fantastic deal.

I’ve heard tales like this from our real pilots too. One of my favourites was that if you left the Q400 flight/taxi switch in the ‘flight’ position (you’d normally have it in ‘taxi’ on the ground of course), then you could taxi as fast as you liked because the aircraft didn’t log taxi speeds as it ‘thinks’ it is on the runway. If you taxied faster than the airline SOP allowed with the switch in ‘taxi’ then the aircraft would log it and sooner or later when the data was downloaded to the safety department, you’d be called in for tea and no biccies (cookies, to our American cousins). Anyhow on topic, the QW 787 doesn’t seem to descend with idle thrust which is precisely what VNAV is designed for. The 787 VNAV works somewhat differently to the 777 so I can’t give a definite opinion in it right now until we do a 787 Training Program and I get a real world skipper to show me how it works. I hope they continue to work on this as the rest of the aircraft itself is really nice.

I was just thinking the same thing. The fonts and texturing look much more accurate on the FSL Bus to me. And I do have both....

Certainly the A319 *seems* to perform rather better than the A320 did. I use unlimited frames forced to 30 on a 30hz screen. I did a quick test today at an overcast EGLL with 50% AI and got 26-30fps. Upon changing the cloud density to 'medium' from 'high' I got back to a steady 30. It's very smooth for me and the immersion from the windscreen bug feature is a real game changer. V5 might be a loooong way out. I pay the $10 monthly developer subscription which allows me to automatically upgrade to the latest version. Where I'm from ten bucks buys a couple of slices of pizza so it's a no brainer. Go on Chris, you know you want to 😉

It’s still whacky when it comes to LNAV and VNAV for me, which kind of ruins the show. Much of it is spot on but I almost wish I could give it to PMDG to finish off the fiddly bits. *runs and hides*

Do you have separate rudder pedals? I assign the steering tiller via FSUIPC to the the twist axis of the joystick and use that for tight turns. Gentle turns can be done via the rudder pedals. No need to press anything or assign any buttons.

We can only wish; - Sloped runways (that don’t break AI) - PBR - Improved performance of dynamic lighting (I actually avoid flying at night now because of the performance impact) - Better ability to control which runways are open and in use in the sim (currently needs to be done in the afcad, gets complex for multiple runway airports) - New graphics engine - ATC improvements - in fact the default ATC is still the most integrated and easiest to use of them all, but it still only has American accents and can’t support SIDS and STARS, as well as the infamous 30 mile vectors to final. But it does control ground AI which the rest can’t really do and if you make allowances for the things it can’t do then it actually works very well. It’s a big ask to create realistic voice sets for the whole planet but it’s doable as an add-on. We could do it, if LM opened up the BGLs to allow the voices to be replaced. I think DT did it, so it’s definitely possible.

I think my first Airbus was Wilco’s A320 PIC. There’s a review of it still knocking around on AVSIM somewhere, behold the quality of those textures! I recall it was the first aircraft I used with a VC. There was then the PSS A320 that wasn’t bad but I couldn’t land it without stalling for some reason. Airsimmer was almost really good. I think they bit off more than they could chew and then bailed out when they realised that developing study level airliners is actually really hard. They left behind a buggy mess and a lot of angry customers from what I recall. I think they were angry partly because they could see that they were almost within reach of a really good Airbus. Who else? Leaving aside the toys that use the default gauges you’ve got Wilco again, Blackbox and probably the best of the lot until recently - the Aerosoft Airbus. I remember when it first came out it didn’t support SIDS and STARS. Wow, we’ve come a long way....

Spent a few more hours with it today and I quite agree about the sounds. Pushing the thrust levers into the FLX gate actually puts a smile on my face. I also had a go at my first LOC DME approach having been showed how to do it yesterday and it really does it all remarkably well. Without wanting to derail the thread into the thorny subject of FS Labs recent woes, I for one am glad that they are still in the business of making aircraft. For years we’ve been crying out for a true study level Airbus that performs and looks great. Many have tried (a few not very hard) and none have ever hit the sweet spot. But this really does.

So I spent a day shuttling between Belfast City, Heathrow and Manchester with my BA Airbus guy today and he was very, very impressed with the A319-X. The windscreen bug FX sounds like a gimmick but it’s actually incredibly immersive and yet rather subtle at the same time. It also adds to the sense of looking through a pane of glass, so feels much more realistic. I like it a lot. Performance is good and this is a worthy addition to any serious simmer’s hangar.

And I’m spending the day on the sim in the company of a BA A319/20/21 pilot tomorrow too. Perfect timing! Only one member of family missing now 🙂

PMDG. PMDG. PMDG. Did I mention PMDG?

This post made me chuckle, but actually quite a bit of it could be implemented to increase the immersion a lot - stuff like chocks, connecting the GPU (and not forgetting to select it inside the flight deck before shutting off the APU), ground AC connections etc. This is all accomplished inside the FMC mostly now with no interaction with what's going on outside. It would be nice to come up with a more integrated approach to ground services like this.