Over on the Aerosoft Forums, Mathijs Kok has shared a status update on their upcoming A330.
First and foremost, the Aerosoft A330 is now in beta. The plane is slowly being shared with a larger group of people who will start putting the product through its paces.
Mathijs also shared that the 3D modelling of the plane, as well as the textures and animations are complete. The flight and engine modelling, together with the FADEC, are also more or less complete. The team is very confident in its accuracy, lauding the team is within 3% of the accurate behaviour of the real plane.
The same goes for the systems, which according to Mathijs, are in a “more or less okay” state. He states that development could probably continue on this forever, as the systems go deep and many of them are linked with each other. As an example, he explains the cabin heating. When the cabin needs to be heated, this heat will be diverted from the engine. The electrical system involved means that the generators will need to provide a little bit more power, meaning there will be a drop in engine thrust. Systems like these make the aircraft complex under the hood, although simmers might barely notice these intricacies when flying the plane.
The EFB is quite feature complete at this point. It has Navigraph integration, as well as Aerosoft’s own NavDataPro. It features weather, runway data and simbrief integration. The team even included Aerosoft’s own sat imagery.
Despite the aircraft being in such a good state already, there are also plenty of areas where work remains to be done. The MCDU, LNAV and VNAV functionality are where the team still has the most of the work to do. The ECAMs need a lot of changes as well.
Though Mathijs did not make any comments on the release date, he did remark that the Aerosoft marketing team will soon receive information on the plane from him, after which streamers and other media outlets will receive info on the product as well. Though there still remains work to be done, this does sound hopeful that a release might happen sooner rather than later.
Last but not least, Mathijs shared some screenshots from beta testers. The screenshots only show the exterior of the plane for now, as a lot of work remains to be done in the plane’s flight deck.
