Among a swathe of new features planned for an upcoming Sim Update 14 is a completely new rendition of the Airbus A320neo, which is being built by iniBuilds.
The news broke this evening on Microsoft Flight Simulator’s developer livestream. Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann, who made the announcement alongside a number of other features to be included in Sim Update 14, only briefly commented on the project, describing it as a “completely new plane”.
In terms of quality and fidelity, Jorg says that the target is for something of similar quality to iniBuilds’ Airbus A310, which was released last year as part of the Microsoft Flight Simulator 40th Anniversary Edition update.
This “completely new” Airbus A320neo will sit “side-by-side” with the existing Asobo A320neo that shipped with the launch of MSFS all the way back in 2020. This is, according to Jorg, because simply overwriting the existing Asobo A320neo with iniBuilds’ version would break a lot of the challenges and activities which are included within MSFS, and these would take “a tonne of work” to fix and rework with the new version.
Although the plane is confirmed to be shipping along with Sim Update 14, it was never explicitly confirmed by Jorg and the team that the plane will be a free addition to the sim. At this stage it hasn’t been confirmed either way by Microsoft, but we will be looking out for additional comment and updating this article when there is a definitive answer.
iniBuilds are also separately developing a “long haul Airbus” airliner, although no more details on that are known and the team has not given away any information as to the progress of its development.
The iniBuilds version of the A320neo is coming into what can only be described as a very crowded marketplace. FlyByWire, LatinVFR and Fenix all have versions of the same fuselage out there, albeit with different engine options.
No images of the aircraft were shared during the livestream, although when iniBuilds and/or Microsoft distribute some preview images we will be sure to share them here at FSElite!
And for more information about what was announced in the latest developer livestream, see our companion article here!
