FlightSim Studio set out an ambitious but also slightly controversial plan for their E-Jets project about a year ago with an early access for the E170/175 and periodic price increases as the project reached maturity. Although the team have been true to their word of regular updates, they have also met some headwinds like almost every flight sim development team, and thus the plan has changed a bit. A new status update from the team lays out, in quite a bit of detail, what their ambitions are for the next 12-months.

The new roadmap

A status update from FlightSim Studio lays out the future of their E-Jets project for Microsoft Flight Simulator. While the current iteration of the jets are far from finished, the team have been true to their word and their plan of providing frequent updates to their E-Jets series and the project has evolved quite a bit from its earliest release. More work, however, is required to satisfy the desires of flight sim airliner pilots and the team look to be tackling that albeit with a change in the schedule.

The original schedule called for a release of the E195 and E190 in the middle of this year with a custom developed FMS and autopilot system around now. That, however, didn’t happen as the original timeline was delayed while the team tackled other bugs and issues with the aircraft. With that in mind, here’s what they had to say about their new plans:

Our current plan is to release a first version of our custom FMS and autopilot in summer 2024. First version because it will certainly still contain a number of bugs and will not yet have the full feature set. Based on the experience we have gained, it is better to plan another 6 months for this, resulting in a version 1.0 by the end of 2024. Of course, a lot can still happen along the way, but if we take a look behind the scenes, we can be cautiously optimistic.

A helpful roadmap graphic provides the broad strokes of what they intend to do and how they intend to reach version 1.0.

The good news is that for folks looking at a discounted airliner option, the FSS E-Jets remains somewhat cheaper than the competition. While it lacks a custom FMS and VNAV capabilities, it is quite a bit of fun and this more casual airliner simmer has found the E-Jets to be quite approachable as the number of bugs and performance problems diminish.

The status update goes on to talk a bit more about the nuts and bolts of the custom FMS and autopilot. The short version is that the team have taken their development of that outside of the sim environment to develop it more quickly before integrating it later on. They also show how some of the programming is not yet there with the autopilot following nav information incorrectly. Similar, yet different, from what Aerosoft had to say about their A330’s own autopilot woes.

They’ve also laid out their project chart with the items that they need to tackle as they move towards version 1.0. 41 items on the roadmap will eventually all come together as the team works towards their vision of a fully launched product.

Interested readers should visit the company’s website to read the full status report and check out the video example and other graphics that make up their update.

Although the FSS E-Jets project has a ways to go, at least another 12 months, I appreciate their efforts to keep us informed. I’ve been on their Discord server a few times and seen their developers responding to issues and gathering data in a generally open fashion and I have high hopes that their efforts will ultimately lead to an impressive “finished” release.