It’s essentially a monthly ritual, where sim pilots hit that “Update” button in the Navigraph FMS Data Manager to keep their navigational data up to date for their next flight. In doing so, the data manager updates all of the (supported) installed aircraft and add-on applications that simmers hold in their arsenal. This month though, Navigraph has made a lot of X-Plane pilots rather excited with the addition of support for Active Sky XP in the data manager application.
Active Sky XP (or “ASXP” as the developer has been abbreviating it) is the name of yet-to-be-released, X-Plane specific weather engine by HiFi Simulations, and back in June, they provided their biggest update on how the development was coming along, plus information on when X-Plane users might be able to see the engine working its magic in their sim. At that point in time they opened up beta testing applications, with an expected beta of Q3 2018 – at timeframe which we have just ticked over into the final leg of at the start of this month, meaning that the development appears to be right on track given the addition of this nav data support. This being the case, they also gave an expected final release of Q1 2019. All going well during the beta phase, signs seem to point to this being an accurate estimate too.
That said, FSElite is not aware of any beta invitations having been sent to interested parties at the time of writing, despite the enormous amounts of applications that were received by HiFi at the time of opening the expressions of interest.
Long having been at or near the top of the “stuff I want from the P3D platform” list for most X-Plane users, it’s almost hard to believe that it’s finally within reach.
