It’s a new year and a new news round-up with all of the things that I haven’t been able to update you on so far over the last week. Let’s have a look!
HotStart Challenger 650 nearing release
Launching under the Take Command! brand, X-Aviation and HotStart are set to release their long awaited Challenger 650 business jet. Extremely high levels of fidelity are part of the feature list of the jet. It includes a highly detailed Collins Pro Line 21 Advanced avionics suite, detailed electronics modeling, and a fairly unique feature where you can see visualizations of how various systems including electronics and engines.
Release date is anticipated to be January 7th.
The thread announcing all of this and going into the details is available here.
IndiaFoxtEcho MSFS F-35 on the way
Developer IndiaFoxtEcho says their F-35 for Microsoft Flight Simulator is definitely coming this week. Final updates to documentation are underway and the module is ready for release.
New J-3 for X-Plane 11
iniBuilds and SimSolutions is bringing their own version of the Piper J-3 Cub to X-Plane 11. I haven’t been able to dig up many details but iniBuilds have released a number of high quality X-Plane addons so this one is worth watching.
Learn more about helicopter flying
Sergio at HeliSimmer.com is starting up a webinar to help introduce people to helicopter flight simulation. Flying helicopters is a unique challenge.
Baltic Dragon DCS campaigns
A graphic from Baltic Dragon give us a sense of what campaigns we can expect from him soon and what is coming down the pipeline. In the to be released category, Ottoman Courier for the AV-8B, a prequel to Raven One called ‘Dominant Fury.’ Finally we have ‘The Gamblers’ for the F-16C.
Also in development are four more campaigns. Part two to the Iron Flag training campaign, Tomcat with Mooch, the Raven One Training Campaign, and the Apache with Casmo.
Navigraph survey out
Every year Navigraph runs a flight simulator survey and the results for this year are out. Plenty of interesting statistics are available and they show the massive size of MSFS in the marketplace, the rise of VR, and the proportion of the community that are pilots versus interested generally in aviation. It’s worth a read although I have a minor bone to pick over once again missing IL-2 Sturmovik from the list.
IRIS Simulations ‘Advanced Tactical Fighter’
IRIS Simulations is bringing out an F-22 for Microsoft Flight Simulator. They have announced that the project is nearly ready and is coming in January. Few details are available, however, the thrust vectoring system will not be available as no such feature is currently in the sim.
See the announcement on their Facebook page.
Stormbirds 
I love Baltic and his campaigns (he always does a superb job) but all I hoping to see from him in 2022 is a finished AV-8B manual.
His work has been exceptional so far, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a bit disappointing to see a 450+ page draft of a manual that doesn’t have any information on weapons systems and/or the targeting pod yet.
Razbam has done so much with that aircraft but the documentation is sorely lacking. Thankfully Chuck’s guide is helping to fill the void for now.
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Chuck’s Guide is nearly always my go-to no matter how good the other documentation is. Hopefully we’ll see more systems stability in terms of procedures this year.
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