iniBuilds and Synaptic shook the show floor when they shared simultaneous showcases of their soonᵗᵐ-to-come super-sized and short-haul Airbuses at Flight Sim Expo 2026.
Now that the dust has settled, the team published a new development update going over progress on the A220 in further detail.
In terms of systems, the team aims to have every part of the avionics feed from the correct systems component, and over the last few months, they’ve filled in many of the “remaining holes.” Indications including true/magnetic heading toggles, flight path vector caging, barometric minimums, and radio minimums have now been routed through the proper systems to make their way onto the displays and tie into the crew alerting systems.
The displays now indicate hydraulic, fuel, and battery temperatures, which change dynamically based on current conditions. As work is done by the hydraulic system, fluid temperatures will increase. As current draw increases on the batteries, so too will the batteries’ internal temperatures. Synaptic has even gone as far as simulating the heat exchange between hydraulic fluid and fuel.
Lag filters have been added to many of the systems indications to mimic the delayed and smoothed indications of the real aircraft in an effort to take the A220’s systems simulation from “good” to “convincing.”
Systems now interact with the simulated world. Physics and wind-based control surface reaction is modelled, so if the hydraulic system depressurizes, control surfaces will deflect with gravity and strong winds. Importantly, it doesn’t affect the ailerons or spoilers, since those are hard locked and do not move when depressurized.
iniBuilds + Synaptic A220 Flight Management System
In the development update, the team explained that they’ve entirely gutted and rewritten the flight management system from the ground up to provide a more stable, scalable, and sustainable foundation for the wide range of features that the A220 offers to pilots. This includes graphical flight planning, full lateral and vertical navigation, performance planning, crew alerting and messaging, vertical direct-to’s, configurable holds, and path offsets.
Graphical flight planning, in particular, is deeply integrated into the ProLine Fusion avionics in the A220, and it allows pilots to make modifications to their flight plans directly from the map. Pilots can click on any flight plan waypoint and insert holds, activate direct-to’s, perform reroutes, insert relative fixes, and toggle fly-overs. Additionally, any arbitrary fix nearby can be clicked and inserted into the flight plan or tuned in the relevant nav radios.
All of this functionality will be available upon release of the A220, and it’ll work with both MSFS stock and Navigraph data sources.
The team also managed to capture many of the A220’s idiosyncracies, like the 200 leg limit, 6 hold limit, and 50 descent constraint limit. In addition, if a fix is adjusted past the final approach fix, the entire approach is cancelled. FMS messages on the HSI now include approach status messages as well, such as LPV APPR.
Significant work has gone into performance planning across all phases of flight including FLEX takeoffs, derates for takeoff and climb, flap extension and retraction speed calculations, noise abatement departure profiles, configurable speeds for different flight phases, and even temperature compensation on arrival. All of this is integrated with vertical navigation and fuel predictions. Wind data uplinked from SimBrief is also taken into consideration.
Synaptic A220 Flight Guidance
Previews of the Vertical Situation Display (VSD) were shown- included above. The A220 is now capable of flying ILS, LOC, LDA, RNAV RNP (0.3), RNAV RNP-AR, RNAV LPV, VOR, and VOR/DME approaches.
Full autoland capability has also been implemented with accurate timings for mode transitions to RETARD, ALIGN, FLARE, and ROLLOUT. On the other hand, the systems now correctly revert in the absence of favorable conditions for autoland including improper flap configuration, extended spoilers, or failures within the air data or flight guidance systems.
Like the FMS, flight guidance comes with its own set of modeled quirks. When flying a localizer-only approach, the glideslope vertical mode is still armed. Per normal SOPS, pilots are required to press the NAV key to cancel the armed GS mode and revert to lateral-only approach guidance after establishing on a localizer approach. This also drops the guidance down to LOC1, which comes with lower-gain guidance to match the reduced precision of localizer-only approaches.
Another quirk that Synaptic modeled is the two different localizer guidance modes, APPR LOC 1/2 and APPR LOC. Essentially, each mode originates from a different computer. The approach starts on one, and then switches to APPR LOC, which feeds from a flight computer that adds wind compensation into the mix. This results in the aircraft re-adjusting its approach on final, which can be seen on real A220 flight paths during high-wind scenarios.
EDM, which stands for Emergency Descent Mode, not Electronic Dance Music, has been modeled. As the name implies, it descends the airplane quickly in the event of cabin depressurization. It can either be selected manually or will come on automatically if cabin altitude exceeds 14,500ft. In either case, it brings the airplane down to 15,000 ft.
Synaptic A220 Ambiance and Sound
The final section of the development update was dedicated to previewing the cockpit and cabin environment in greater detail, while explaining the most distinctive characteristic of the A220, the “whale sound.”
The sound is caused by pressure changes within the combustion chamber as the engines spool up through around 30% N1. Alongside Echo 19, Synaptic is bringing this sound to the simulator with a procedurally simulated howl based on live engine parameters. It’s complemented by the team’s extensive work to ensure equally accurate engine sounds in higher N1 ranges, PTU sounds, cockpit aurals, and other environmental sounds. A future development update will be dedicated solely to showcasing the A220’s audio environment.
To conclude the update, Synaptic stated that while there are still a few bits and pieces left to finish, the majority of the remaining work consists of hunting down and resolving bugs. Hundreds of bugs have already been resolved, and fewer still are popping up during flights. During all 3 days of FSExpo 2026, 5 new issues were found, 2 were fixed live, and 0 crashes happened.
No release date or pricing information was provided as of the publishing of this article. For more information, click here to read the full development update on the iniBuilds Forum.
