bennyboy75

I have to agree with you about the nav display. The fact that we have to self vector a lot of the time in the sim is made much easier by being able to visualise where you are in relation to the nav course/localiser etc without having to twirl a bunch of courses and VORs and build a mental picture. Autothrottle also takes a lot of the workload away. I passed on the 146/F28 for precisely the reason that they’d barely get flown. Am very excited about the RJ and Fokker 100/70 though.

I had exactly this problem and also wondered the same thing!

Nice to see the return of another big name from the FSX/P3D days but I’ll sit this one out until some reviews are in. Unpopular opinion, but I find the weather engine in MSFS to be pretty solid at this point. AS’s metar to metar injection model is well behind the tech under the hood already. As previously pointed out, we are also getting back to the stage of bloating the sim with lots of third party apps (I’m running fs realistic, real turb and the FPS LOD program already) so am reluctant to keep adding more unless it’s really good. Looks like we won’t have to wait too long to find out.

AI traffic is more trouble that it’s worth. After a long flight the last thing I want is a plane landing on the opposite end of the runway I’m using, which is quite a regular occurrence. I now use FSLTL to spawn traffic at the gates so I don’t feel lonely but I have the IFR traffic set to almost zero.

Anyone who can fly the Q400 will be able to handle the UNS FMC in this which is a good thing. Unfortunately I’m quite a lazy flier these days due to the wonderful scenery in MSFS that I enjoy sightseeing instead of grappling with flying old iron so the lack of glass and autothrottle means I’ll probably pass this time. I will be all over the Fokker 70/100 and RJ like a rash though!

I have their Dubai and Abu Dhabi and they’re decent enough, although I’d certainly not put them up with Flytampa or Pyreegue. Abu Dhabi needs a bit of patching on things like taxi ways that don’t have lead in lines etc. It does feel a little rushed to me. Performance is fine on my mid-tier rig with some of the interior stuff switched off. This looks good though, I’d definitely give it a go.

Quite agree with you that most sim pilots aren’t great stick and flyers but handling a desktop sim with consumer grade hardware is way more difficult than the real thing. Even very experienced RW pilots/simmers who stream struggle to fly within the parameters that they would be expected to in the real aircraft. Excessive sink rates, landing off the centreline, rather unstable approaches etc are regular features of many of these videos. I flew a brand new Level D A320 NEO sim a couple of years back and it was way easier than the desktop sim to fly, and the skipper who was next to me said the the real one is easier still!

This is usually the result of the simbrief route having waypoints or airways that aren’t in the database. I kept getting this after a reinstall and then realised that I’d forgotten to update the navdata. I’ve never seen it with a route generated with current navdata from both simbrief and in the aircraft.

The DC6 sold pretty well but it was the first PMDG high fidelity model for MSFS. I think I flew it once as the learning curve is very high. I’m fairly sure if you looked at Vatsim or Simbrief data then you’d see the number of people flying not only the DC6, but other classics like the 146, Fokker F28 and even the A300 to be absolutely dwarfed by the 737 NG and A320 crowd. The money is in the new stuff, which is why I’m astonished that no one’s had a go at a 787 yet.

Can’t help the feeling we’ve seen it all before, since 2013 in fact, as alluded to in an earlier post. The lack of real innovation will hurt at some point. That all said, it’ll be a typical solid and dependable PMDG release and we know exactly what we’re getting. It will get the job done and do it well. I’ll buy it, as will everyone else. But in the longer term, is just enough really going to be enough?

One thing they definitely got right was the ground handling. It’s a nice solid bird to taxi on the ground and feels well coordinated through turns. The same can’t be said for other add-ons.

GSX is certainly more feature rich but it still has its idiosyncrasies and does seem to fall over at inopportune moments. This would be a nice backup to have, for sure. I do love the simplicity of drawing the pushback to be perfect every time. Would be amazing if GSX could incorporate this kind of drag and drop simplicity into the pushback.

Fuelling this thing is weird - it seems to start at 20 tons and then de~fuels itself slowly to the desired fuel level when you select the load. I like the idea of real time fuelling but going up, not down! For one, it’s incredibly rare to de~fuel.

Honestly doubt that they’ll go with anything as old as a 707 or 727. These things are an enormous handful to fly period, yet alone in a modern RNAV environment and by all available data (vatsim/navigraph etc) there’s a vast amount more interest in modem glass airliners than the old stuff. A 75 or 76 is probably a reasonable mix of old and new but is now lost to Bluebird. A 787 would make the most sense as the freeware stuff is good, but it’s not PMDG good. However, the gap is closing all the time….

The B777 has a tiller on both sides and certainly at the airline my friend used to work for (a sandy one in the gulf with a lot of A380s) the FO would taxi and park it when it was his sector. The images look good, but we’ve seen it before - twice. PMDG make dependable and solid products but they definitely aren’t in the innovation game any longer.