Last week, Aerosoft’s well known project manager Mathijs Kok announced he was parting ways with the company. Although he stated in his message that the Airbus A330 project that the company is currently working on would not be affected, the departure after a long tenure has left some community members concerned. Follow-up messaging, a new preview video, and a planned release date for a product page for the A330 are all now coming. Here are the details!

Mathijs Kok is leaving Aerosoft

For much of the last 20-years, anytime a project was being talked about in respect to Aerosoft and you could be sure that Mathijs Kok’s name would come up soon thereafter. Often a face for the company and a regular contributor to the flight sim scene, Mathijs was also a prolific poster to the Aerosoft forums. Change, however, is in the air at Aerosoft and Mathijs has announced that he’s leaving.

Those rumors are correct.

After more than 20 years, it felt like Aerosoft and I have grown apart and that it was time to leave. These things happen. I was a bit surprised that even though I am old as Methuselah, there were still companies and people interested in my expertise and experience. I will start a new career, and I am very much looking forward to that. We’ll meet again.

I will hand over the project management for the A330 (and other) projects shortly and am confident that the new project manager will take over here to inform you. I am confident that the project will not be seriously affected.

Mathijs Kok

The departure follows on the heels of a recently headline making announcement that the A330 would be joined by an A330neo variant sometime after the initial aircraft released. I think that left some in the community feeling a bit of whiplash with some good news and semi-frequent developer updates followed by news of a major departure from the company.

Around the same time, Aerosoft released their first A330 teaser trailer which gave us the best look at the A330 that we’ve had yet. Even the trailer ignited some discussion over features like the less-than-smooth wing flutter – though that issue seems to be more about MSFS’ replay system than the animation itself.

Fast forward to Thursday of this week where we’ve had our first official update since the announced departure.

Tom from Aerosoft posted the following message:

We at Aerosoft are aware of our responsibility towards our customers and employees. The A330, our major project, was and is the focus of our activities. Therefore, we have seamlessly staffed the project with a new head and team members.

On 21.07.2023 we will go live with a brand-new landing page for the project at A330.Aerosoft.com which will contain exciting information, media and development updates about the A330 project – You may be interested!

Tom on the Aerosoft forums

The website is currently not active but we assume it will become active next Friday and hopefully come packed with information and screenshots on both the highly anticipated and surely closing in on release of the A330-300. Then some sort of teaser news on the A330-900 (the neo variant). That’s my hope!

My two cents

Anytime there’s a change of management, especially the face of a company for 20-years, there is going to be nervousness. With quite a bit of anticipation for the A330 one would expect that the community would become somewhat concerned on what, if any, turmoil there is behind the scenes and what a seemingly sudden departure would mean for the project.

Although this will be a big shift for Aerosoft, sometimes changes like these can be positive ones as a project manager like Mathijs can both help and sometimes hurt projects.

In the Microsoft Flight Simulator era, Aerosoft have had have two partial misfires. Both the hope of the community and likely the company itself is that the A330 succeeds and it very likely needs to do well out of the gate. A change of project management at this point may have a limited impact either way but it may change how the product is supported post launch – for better or ill.

I do hope that a change will be a net positive as Aerosoft really do need to step up their game in a crowded and increasingly talented market. Although they are not strangers to this space, MSFS rise in popularity have attracted plenty of new as well as established partners and new developers are making names for themselves while established developers are seemingly stumbling a bit more than they used to.

Aerosoft made the unusual move of suspending sales for their DHC-6 Twin Otter earlier in the year. It’s still on the Marketplace but its no longer sold through the Aerosoft store. This was a product that I think should have been a success, however, poor sound quality (later solved) and bugs on launch together with as yet unresolved issues with how the airplane flies has turned what should have been a very popular airplane into one that has been forgotten about. Read my full review for more of my thoughts on that.

My more recent experiences with the CRJ are painting a similar picture. This is a project that is most of the way there but one that also faces long standing issues. Those include show stoppers such as the whole simulation of the airplane grinding to a halt mid flight. That combined with some other issues and misses on launch soured its reputation on what is legitimately quite a good experience otherwise. My full review will eventually come for this plane.

Don’t get me wrong on this. I really like both planes but they needed just a bit more to make them legitimately great.

I hope Aerosoft launch a successful A330 and I hope that the current shuffling, be they turmoil driven or simply the result of inevitable changing of the guard, lead to positive development and long term sustainment of their current and future products.