Orbx is best known for their flight simulator storefronts and their extensive collection of scenery but they have recently started to venture into the aircraft creation process as well and they have just announced their second Microsoft Flight Simulator airplane. This time they are bringing us the PAC P-750 XSTOL. What is the P-750 and what does Orbx plan to do with it? Let’s have a look!

What is it?

I’d never heard of this airplane until the announcement came out. Designed and manufactured in Hamilton, New Zealand, this is a single engine turboprop utility airplane with short field capability. It can carry cargo and passengers and it can be used for skydiving, aerial surveying, firefighting, and agricultural duties as well.

It’s powered by a PT6A-34 turboprop from P&W Canada, it has a 170 knot maximum speed, a 140 knot cruise speed, it stalls at just 58 knots, has a range of almost 1,200 nautical miles, and it can land on a runway that’s just 543 feet long.

What Orbx is planning

The folks at Orbx look to be aiming to bring this aircraft fully to life with a lot of different features baked in. They have shown off passenger, cargo, sky dive, and agricultural versions of the airplane each with their own custom liveries and configuration differences to represent the different variants.

The aircraft also sports a conventional six pack plus a Garmin GNS 530 GPS, com and nav radios, and the usual assortment of instruments. Orbx have custom coded engine gauges complete with start-up sequences, refresh rates, sticky indicator lights and value rounding – this according to their announcement. Should be interesting to see some of these features in action. Working electrical and circuit breaker operation is also a feature.

Orbx are also integrating a panel mounted tablet for configuring the airplane, connecting ground power, enabling TDS GTNXi surpport, and so forth.

Not planned for release but intended to come later, Orbx are planning to incorporate a a custom sound pack, failure modeling, more liveries, landing challenges, bush trips and more.

Pricing is set at $24.95 USD and release is expected “within the coming days.”

A few extra thoughts

Orbx’s first airplane, the Edgley Optica, was kind of a novelty but it didn’t capture my interest and after the initial release there wasn’t much chatter about it. This time around the feature-set seems aimed very clearly at the “bushplane adventurer” style that has brought us a wide variety of airplanes. It looks like SWS’ Kodiak 100 is perhaps the closest competitor both in terms of simulated capability but also in the features that it intends to bring forward.

This should be a much more interesting release to watch particularly if Orbx follows through with their plans to add failure modeling.