It’s been one year since Fenix Simulations unleashed their Airbus A320 simulation for Microsoft Flight Simulator. They went from relatively unknown developers to a top contender for highly detailed airliners and were part of a series of releases over the last year that have seen the sim pick up quite a few highly detailed airliners. The Fenix A320 remains at or near the top of the heap and it looks like they are set to make it better with updates to the aircraft that include an overhaul of engine simulations, updates to the EFB, and flight model improvements to name just a few.

A quick summary of a long update

The 1-year anniversary post on the Fenix Simulations blog is lengthy. There’s quite a bit of narrative to it and I think it’s best left to the folks at Fenix to tell their story. I did want to touch on a few key points.

One of the big updates is the engine model which has increased details that include a thermal model of the engine’s core. The video shows the shutdown process of the engine with a realistic bump in temperatures as the core of the engine cools at a differing rate to the air still blowing past the EGT sensor immediately after shutdown. Thus a bump in temperatures. Cool!

There’s also extensive talk about the glass panel displays with efforts to both increase the performance as well as update the visual appearance to better represent the real thing.

The art team spent a lot of time examining the way that they were drawing the instruments. This also applies to work being done on the exterior of the aircraft with investigations into what was taking up the most amount of render time and then finding ways to reduce the hit on performance. The summary is that version 2 will be much more efficient than the currently released version. Great!

They have also done work on the flight model with hundreds of hours of investigation aimed at fixing some specific and critical flight regimes including crosswind takeoffs, and landings. There are multiple comparison videos and detailed examinations of what was going on before and what is happening after the fixes.

Finally, the other big item they talk about is the EFB which gets a rewritten foundation with the resulting improvements being quick transitions between “apps” on the tablet.

The overall message is clear. Fenix Simulations has been busy making their version 2 release of the Fenix A320 a big one with upgrades across the entire airplane with performance and accuracy improvements everywhere.

There’s no release date but future blog updates are promised so stay tuned.

Read the full Fenix Blog update right here!