Microsoft’s most recent weekly development update blog post has stated that the much anticipated A320neo from iniBuilds is currently set to be released on March 26th, along with Sim Update 15.
The A320neo was previously released via a beta build of Microsoft Flight Simulator, however was removed from the simulator after approximately 10 days following reports that the aircraft had crash issues on the Xbox platform.
Following a series of tests, the aircraft failed to reach the standards required by Microsoft in terms of stability. Jorg Neumann later commented on last November’s Developer Livestream to say it had an application crash rate that was too high to pass certification.
Although results may have varied on your system, it was enough for the Microsoft Flight Simulator’s team to pull the aircraft and work on performance and stability issues. Up until now, there has been no further comment beyond November 2023, although Microsoft’s latest blogpost says that the aircraft and Sim Update 15 are now “targeted” to launch on March 26 2024.
The verbatim wording from the roadmap statement is: “iniBuilds is working on the new Airbus A320neo that will sit alongside the existing Asobo version of the aircraft going forward. Level of complexity will be similar to iniBuilds’ A310. Stability is improving but not quite ready for primetime yet. Will try to get this into SU_15, but not confirmed yet”.
Also set to be included in Sim Update 15 are improvements to air traffic including better model matching, fixes to 1st party aircraft and some paywares, ATC improvements, fixes for some of the in-game achievements which would fail to trigger, glass cockpit performance improvements, and iced water improvements which will increase the threshold of snow depth that causes water surfaces to ice from 27 to 72cm.
Working Title are also working on the popular G3X Touch unit from Garmin, which will be included in the VL-3, XCub and NXCub when Sim Update 15 is made available.
The wording of the statement on release schedule is still quite open ended and it leaves Microsoft with some wriggle room to delay the update and new A320neo some more if the issues with stability continue to go unresolved in the lead up to release.
You can read the development blog post in full here.
FSElite will keep you updated with further developments on Sim Update 15 and the iniBuilds A320neo.
