The good, bad and the ugly. My impressions.

[NicholasB 6]

Hi forum members and Aerosoft staff,

Just yesterday I purchased the Airbus, and have for the last 24 hours been fidling around with it in order to get her to fly. From reading various posts in this forum I did manage to apply a few fixes to get her operational. In regards to the "good" in mentioned in the topc title they are as follows:

1) I think the overall appearance of the aircraft is excellent.

2) The Virtual cockpit is beautiful and the VC lighting is very immersive and well done.

3) I am very very pleased with the sound set provided and feel it is very close to the real bus.

4) The frame rates for me have been very very friendly.

5) The ease of loading a flight plan from the FSX flight planner is simple and easy to do.

6) The aircraft will follow a lateral flight plan perfectly and also intercept an ILS smoothly provided the VOR radio is tuned through the FMC. Have been unable to insert an ILS frequncy in the ILS scratch pad area in the FMC nav radio page.

7) The autotrottle is working well once i was able to resolve the issue regarding hardware allocation within FSX.

The Bad:

1) Although not a major issue, I would like to have a pop-up function for the Primary flight Display, Nav Display and FMS by clicking on the screens with my mouse, At present they are to small for me to read. and annoying to have to switch views.

2) Seems I cannot tune the any of the Nav radios from the pedestal, ie, NAV1, NAV2, ILS/LOC and ADF. I am assuming one can only tune and pre select Comm1 and Comm2 radios from the pedestal.

3) During replay, which many of us enjoy to watch after a landing, there is no animation of Spoiler deployment upon touch down and the wing view is messed although I believe this wing view issue has been resolved, but not the spoiler depoyment animation.

The Ugly:

1) In the current state, the inability to trim the aircraft during full manual operation is near to impossible. In addition the basic pitch and bank functions have been very poorly modeled. The control surface inputs by the pilot are extremely sluggish and outright dangerous making the aircraf unflyable. This issue has been mentioned by various purchasers and I have found a work around provided by another member of the forum, who has advised turning of 3 switches on the overhead panel. forgot the name of the switches but you all know what they are. I have done this, and have since been able to have complete and confident control over the control surface inputs and can thus make smooth and enjoyable landings etc. Nevertheless, as we all know this is more Boeing like characteristics and an unfaithful representation of the Airbus fly by wire system. These requires some hard and sincere work on behlaf of Aerosoft. We all bought this bus hoping to be able to fly it like a bus and not a boeing.

2)Major performance issue regarding thrust in all phases of flight. Take off roll is very slow and long and upon VR the aircraft looses speed and I must pitch down in order to achieve V2. There is also a Voice alert in the cockpit "speed"

3) Climb thrust in managed mode: I believe this has been sorted but i will not install the patch utill we are provided with an installer. The aircraft climbs very slowly to cruise altitude, in my case the aircraft climbed at a speed of 260knots and no more than 500ft per minute and decreasing untill TOC. For the last 5oooft or so of climb untill cruise altitude of FL300 the bus climbed at a dismal 100-200 feet per minute. Once at cruise the aircraft was only able to maintain an IAS of 260knots or roughly 0.61 mach for the entire cruise phase in managed mode.

4)TOD calculations are unrealistic. I unlike others was able to see a TOD marker on the Nav display, however, the TOD was indicated at approximately 35nm from the runway. I cannot imagine a normaly functioning aircraft descending smoothly from FL300 within 35nm of its destination, Let alone descend in time to the final approach fix altitude, without basically having to dive and ignore all speed restrictions and airframe damage. I had to make an estimate myself then descend using speed and vertical speed modes. But i think it iessential that TOD calculation be looked at closely and reolved.

5) It seems all altitude calculations on the FMC are in meters and there is no meters/feet toggle switch that is operative on the Autopilot. This will make it very difficult to have an efficient flight on vatsim if all altitudes are in meters, except if you fly on Vatsim Russia. I believe this may be due to the inability to insert ALT restriction for waypoints and the fact that there is no option to select a runway in the FMC. I can live without the select runway option, but i think we all need to have the option of a waypoint altitude feature. EG: If my was final approach fix was say "glenn" intersection, i want the ability to at least insert say 3000ft at "glenn" in the legs page.

I know the Airbus X from aerosoft has always been marketed as a lite type add-on, but still there are a alot of unaccaeptable flaws that need to be solved quickly. For me Especialy the control surface, thrust, and TOD calculations. Furthemore, I am aware that you guys at Aerosoft are actively working on these problems. I have been tempted to buy other A320 dd-ons, and in fact i have bought one for FSX, but each time i have been greatly dissapointed. I bought the Airbus X primarily because I though Aerosoft is a company I can trust, based on their other products and reputation. I am also willing to wait for you guys to work through the problems, but at the end of the day, I am expecting to get what I paid for and dont want to settle for anything less than an Airbus A30 that flies how it is supposed to.

I dont want to complain too much, but I am sure many other are feeling the same and are wishing you all the best in resolving all the main issue addresed by customers in this forum.

Good luck and also thanks for an aircraft that has so much potential.

Cheers,

NicholasB

[Ivek 4]

Thanks NicholasB for nice and long review.

[Spud 27]

NicholasB, excellent read and great review ! Thank you.

[william.m 13]

Seems I cannot tune the any of the Nav radios from the pedestal, ie, NAV1, NAV2, ILS/LOC and ADF. I am assuming one can only tune and pre select Comm1 and Comm2 radios from the pedestal.

You can tune the NAV Radios 7 ADF from within the FMC Radio page (like in the real thing) by typing the frequency and insert it in the appropriate field.

Cheers.

Will

[patrickrizzo 1]

Hi,

Aerosofts other products aren't necessarily developed by their employees; this is a launch product of their own development team.

Mathjis said there won't be managed vertical mode, that is, vertical flight direction with pre-programmed altitude targets on your flight track. Apparently, that would make this add-on too sophisticated compared with what their development aim was. There is also no alpha speed protection, as you sort of noticed.

Best regards

Patrick Rizzo

[tup61 185]

2) Seems I cannot tune the any of the Nav radios from the pedestal, ie, NAV1, NAV2, ILS/LOC and ADF. I am assuming one can only tune and pre select Comm1 and Comm2 radios from the pedestal.

Correct. Because there is an explanation of the NAV and STBY buttons in the manual, I also presumed these things would work: afaik the manual ONLY explains things that do work. I asked about this on this forum but didn't get an answer. I suppose all this information was added to the manual by accident...

2)Major performance issue regarding thrust in all phases of flight. Take off roll is very slow and long and upon VR the aircraft looses speed and I must pitch down in order to achieve V2. There is also a Voice alert in the cockpit "speed"

3) Climb thrust in managed mode: I believe this has been sorted but i will not install the patch utill we are provided with an installer. The aircraft climbs very slowly to cruise altitude, in my case the aircraft climbed at a speed of 260knots and no more than 500ft per minute and decreasing untill TOC. For the last 5oooft or so of climb untill cruise altitude of FL300 the bus climbed at a dismal 100-200 feet per minute. Once at cruise the aircraft was only able to maintain an IAS of 260knots or roughly 0.61 mach for the entire cruise phase in managed mode.

Why not try the patch...? You simply have to unzip the zip into the FSX folder and overwrite (merge) everything. Simple as that. About your take off problems: never heard of that. And since you hear 'speed' you must be doing something wrong... (that's the only explanation I can think off ).