I’ve got a tale of two F-22’s today. The first is news about a new F-22 release for Microsoft Flight Simulator from Top Mach Studios. We’ll have a look at what’s been released and what you can expect with this add-on for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Second, we have news about IRIS Simulations F-22 and what their plans are. Let’s go.
Fly the F-22 Raptor in Microsoft Flight Simulator
If you’ve dreamed of flying the F-22 Raptor in a flight simulator, now might be your chance as Microsoft Flight Simulator now has an F-22A from Top Mach Studios. The team have reportedly spent over a year creating the simulation around this making use of the built-in native flight model for Microsoft Flight Simulator and doing their best to make it simulate this high-performance fighter jet.
Among the challenges they faced are getting performance and systems setup correctly for what is still a very highly classified jet. From the information they have put out, it sounds like they have done their best to create an authentic experience using information that is out in the clear – public reports from USAF pilots, maintainers and PR people, public photos and documents, etc.
The aircraft has features such as detailed afterburner model, functional HUD and MFD/PFD systems, detailed flight model with custom coded fly-by-wire simulation, detailed 3D exterior model, detailed cockpit model, and more. Essential avionics for cross country flying are also provided.
The team also report that they have done as much as they can to simulate the F-22’s unique thrust vectoring system – something that is not in the current MSFS flight model by default.
The result seems to be pretty spectacular as the video above shows off.
The package comes with over 50 pages of documentation in a manual that describes how to fly the aircraft as well as perform some of the F-22’s more unique maneuvers. The F-22 from Top Mach Studios is on sale on the Just Flight online store for $35.99 USD. You can also read more about the project on the Top Mach Studios website.
IRIS Simulations cancels their F-22
With Top Mach’s F-22 release you may be wondering where IRIS Simulation’s own F-22 project sits and the answer is that they have decided to stop work on and cancel this project. A statement made yesterday on their Facebook page revealed the news.
Top Mach Studios have recently released their new F-22 product, which is a superb replication of the F-22 Raptor aircraft. In our opinion, to continue development on our aircraft would not be in our best interest and instead we’ll focus on the Pilatus PC-9 and PC-24 moving forwards.
IRIS Simulations
Included in their statement is considerable praise for the Top Mach product as well as clear indications that their studio is moving forward with their other announced projects. Both PC-9 and PC-24 are underway while their already released Jabiru J160/J170 and Grob Tutor continue to attract attention.
Stormbirds 
I’ll definitely wait for a review video. I don’t like it when plane videos have 10 seconds of the exterior view to every one second of the interior.
I find all the planes look good, but then when you really get into the cockpit things can looked dated very fast.
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Always wise to check around and see what it’s all about. It’s very new so it might be a bit before someone does one.
I might get around to testing it myself but I’m backlogged for quite a while yet.
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“Into the Blue Simulations” has a decent review of it:
Haven’t watched the specific one but I find them to be meticulous enough in their reviews.
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* Meant: “haven’t watched the specific one in full” – only skimmed through it and it seemed on par with their other reviews.
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The Bredok3D F-22 is quite good in MSFS2020, and the AOA Simulations F-22 for X-plane 11 is excellent. I can’t see myself buying a third F-22 right now. You can always fly the Iris version in P3D.
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My friend, I highly recommend you look into other developers of military aircraft addons as the two you mention are very, VERY far from “quite good” or “excellent”.
The Gold Standard for military aircraft simulation is DCS World. It’s free to play, and you can trial any/every addon available for 2 weeks, twice a year.
They are, quite frankly, in a league of their own.
In the civ sim space, MilViz for P3D is likely the best (and they have the government contracts to prove it), followed by A2A, Just Flight and VR Sims.
In terms of X-Plane, only Just Flight and Flying Iron offer “excellent”. But other devs like X-Trident, DWS and FACO deliver good to very good quality, relatively. I won’t even bother with AOA because of how utterly lazy they are with their cockpits…
For MSFS, it’s Just Flight, MilViz and Flying Iron (again!), with India Foxt Echo and Sim Skunk Works offering good – very good addons.
But again, if you’re a fan of military aircraft, you’re cheating yourself if you’re not flying something in DCS 🙂
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AFAIK the only way to destroy an SU-57 in MSFS is to … fly into it. Would be nice for Top Gun’s Maverick to fly upside down and say hello to the Russion (or other) pilot though. Those 5th-gen F-35 and F-22 Jets are nice, but I’ll stick to the older F- planes in DCS for a while with which I can create havoc 🙂 !
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My experience with fast jets in P3D and X-Plane is that those sims don’t cope well with the loading of textures and meshes. Maybe MSFS is gentler with the system overload but I doubt it; and it may have to download the Bing data on top of that. NVMe should help a little, I only had a SATA SSD back then.
At least (I suppose) it’s not forbidden to have weapons in MSFS, unlike P3D.
I’d rather have the full and authentic experience in DCS too, and with more iconic aircraft. 🙂 I think there are even community-made 5th-gen modules for those who like them but since the specs are still classified it’s for people who don’t care too much about realism.
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Stormbirds wrote this about it : ” Not everyone knows this but the MSFS marketplace doesn’t allow weapons on the aircraft sold there. There are aircraft with weapons hung on pylons but those are sold through other stores. The main store is a no-weapons zone. Right out of the gate I expect that Flight Simulator will not be changing its course any time soon and offering a modern combat flight simulation experience….”
Dunno about changes to this (weapons) policy but I got my information from Shamrockonfive himself (at the time). That iw exactly why I did NOT buy MSFS… I want weapons on my warplanes/birds and I sure want to use those too !
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It’s true that there’s no weapons on the MSFS Marketplace. But there are other marketplaces and they are selling slightly modified versions with weapons on the pylons. Some of them even fire… but they of course have no effect.
That’s what DCS is for.
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If you want to fly inverted, I *think* there was a MiG-28 skin for the F-5 in DCS 😀
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There is. Jester AI in the F-14 even recognizes and calls it out as a MiG-28! 😀
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Personally, I’m overjoyed to see such competition in flight sim.
Previously, many of the developers would announce an addon and we’d wait. And wait. And wait some more…
And meanwhile, no other developer would touch the same IRL aircraft, even if it was a different variant.
And in the case of many, that meant that we were forever stuck with just “okay” versions of whatever they produced, and the product would rarely get an update beyond compatibility with the latest version of the simulator.
So this is a Good Thing, and hopefully IRIS (and other similar developers) will turn up the heat on the development of their addons as a result.
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It is indeed fantastisc that there is competition and it seems Increase interest in flight sims in general, maybe – mostly- thanks to msfs ! ?
The new Kola map for DCS is proof that a company that was until now only involved in non military flight sims is now going to produce a map for DCS!
It is a dream come true!
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