After a period of radio silence, Aamir has broke some big news regarding the progress of the Fenix A320. Starting off - Aamir sympathises with the impatient and as such, bluntly announced that the A320 has finally reached the end of its beta phase, with the first release candidate circulated internally in the past two days. Strap in for the following, as we are going on a scenic tour on the A320.

Aamir joked that the second revision will be pushed on Friday the 13th, which included some “unstable behaviour” that was very fitting for that day - but shone oppurtunism that the issues identified were out of the team’s control which will not affect the team’s product development schedule.

During the beta testing period, the A320 has received substantial rework and refinements across all fronts, most notably the systems and flight modelling. While the product is feature complete at the start of the beta testing, some of the issues requires more thorough rework that extend beyond the original broken component which made for a tedious process that “ feel like an endeavor”. That said, Aamir breathes a sign of relief as he gladly confirms that “things now look stable and representative”, providing the team a well built platform which the team can build upon in the future.

Significant effort were also put into tertiary features that arent explicitly related to the aircraft itself but serves to enhance the user experience, Aamir explains that a bluntly modelled a320 wouldn’t provide the immersion that the team is aiming towards, which defeats the purpose of a high-fidelity aircraft simulation. So while the systems and flight modelling were refined, a separate group of developers worked on “refining the customer experience.”

Technical frills such as “seamless and synchronized real time loading” enables a one-click flight plan import that doesn’t require any downloading - the user is presented with different ways to set up your flight, either in real time, quickly, or instantly:

The following steps are rote and consequential, things such as making sure to turn on the No Smoking sign and turn off the Seatbelt sign while refuelling are minor detail that fill in the gaps and make for a complete procedure that reflect the real world:

These details in the procedure are persistent throughout the flight and adds additional responsibilities outside a strictly flightdeck-only operation. Aamir believes that simulating crew duties amongst other secondary items “go a long way … It adds to the immersion of flying the aircraft.”

The entire visual model has been primed and polished to perfection, with several small frills such as vibrating extended flaps being implemented to ensure a picture perfect representation of the real aircraft. Aamir also unveiled a full fledged modelled cabin, produced with equal amount of passion and attention to detail, from the 3d to textures, to the soundscape that dynamically adjusts to your position:

A video demonstrating the detailed sonic environment will be produced and published soon “at some point after this post.”

Needless to say, the flightdeck also received refinements all around, with an “entire suite of analogue instrumentation” also thrown into the feature set - these aren’t just a cosmetic and functional implementation, as the team made sure that they even sound like they do, digital and analog instruments sound different. “There are gyros and such supporting the ADI, and so the soundscape changes, quite noticeably too.”

All of the flightdeck configurations are easily customisable in the EFB. But when there’s hundreds of options, many of which you’ll struggle to figure out, the Fenix team made it easier for you, that is if you fly with their stock liveries which the art team went beyond the paintscheme to reference by hand, each aircraft registration painted for a “rough configuration”, matching at the least, their standby configuration - that means that each livery would deliver a different airframe for you to fly on - all of which are easily accessible on the EFB as well. Textures and liveries are done at a razor sharp 8k, which a “downsized” resolution of 4k are also available. Users are also given the option to install liveries in a custom folder of your choice:

In response to people’s feedback on the pointlessness of manually triggering on failures, the team now features “Mean-Time-Between-Failures” modeling, which apply rough failure rates to your flight calculated using engineering data. The feature is flexible for both novices and experienced simmers where one could select a “myriad of configurations”, such as having only failures that still allows you to complete your flight, to failing any component including major ones. Or a realistic failure rate or an abridged probability for those who wants more thrill than realism, there’s a option for everyone.

Once you’ve arrived at your destination and plan to start the second leg of your flight, you’re able to also ring maintenance from the MCDU to fix any issues that arose during your flight earlier. The “maintanance team” will come out and simulate a maintenance period of up to 10 minutes (as realistically simulating the time to fix components aren’t very practical of course).

After the walkthough, Aamir flatly dropped the news of the product price, that being £49.99. This is all inclusive with local goods/service taxation factored in. The team believed that the market is large enough for such an asking price, which a user shouldn’t have to spend hundreds of pounds/dollars to experience the “care and attention put into a high fidelity aircraft.” Knowing that this is a risk, the team genuinely believes it will pay off, or hope so at least - if not, Aamir puts a positive spin by saying that a few more would enjoy their product.

With the closing of the update, Aamir joked that this is the “short post” after the silence. Which marks the beginning of the team’s marketing push, more news is to come in the near future.

To read the original update, visit their blog post.