A little late to both of these but I thought it was well past time that I caught up with one of my favourite X-Plane developers and see what they were up to. Turns out, quite a bit! Aerobask has taken the wraps off of their new Phenom 300 business jet as well as shown off an interesting video for their Falcon 8X project. Let’s check them out!
Phenom 300 anticipated for end of March
X-Plane 11 has long suffered with only a few business jets of any kind in the sim. Some high quality options would be preferred and it’s likely that Aerobask is going to be delivering one very soon with the Phenom 300.
The Phenom 300 is a light business jet designed and built by Embraer. It has two Pratt & Whitney Canada PW535E turbofan engines, a 450 knot top speed, seating for 6 passengers, 1 or 2 pilots and a 2,010 nautical mile range. Decent specs for a smaller business jet. Early versions had a G1000 suite of avionics which is what Aerobask has chosen to incorporate into the version that they are doing.
As for features here are some highlights:
- 4k PBR textures inside and out
- Detailed cabin and cockpit
- FMOD sounds
- Enhanced Laminar G1000 with Synthetic Vision technology by OscarPilote
- Realistic engine start procedures, functional breakers, custom coded systems
The announcement also makes special mention of how development on this project has also befitted their development work on the Falcon 8X.
Note: technology developed for this aircraft has allowed us to reduce VRAM usage of our Falcon 8X by roughly 1GB and workload by 1ms per frame on my old gear. In short, doing this aircraft was beneficial to the development of the Falcon, for those who worry.
Yoyoz from Aerobask on the X-Plane.org Forums
Look for Aerobask has an estimated release date projected for around the end of March or soon thereafter. Check out the announcement here!
Falcon 8X progresses
There’s not been much news on the Aerobask Falcon 8X business jet that has been under development since 2019. The developer, Yoyoz on the X-Plane forum, has periodically shared a few graphics or tidbits on development work but there hasn’t been much else to look at. It sounds like dev work continues quietly and that when the time comes, we’ll see some bigger reveals.
For now we can have a look at an early pass at synthetic vision for the Falcon which in this case shows off a runway on approach and how the vision system can be projected onto the HUD. Very cool technology! The devs are clear to point out that this is an early pass on the work and more will be refined over time.
