They got me. I wasn’t going to buy anything this close to the launch of MSFS 2024 but I’ve been following Just Flight’s Avro RJ progress and when it came out last week I just had to have it. I’ve done a bunch of flights with the airliner now and while I’m not quite full review ready, let’s do a quick first impression now.

The MSFS 2024 elephant in the room

I wouldn’t have bought the Avro RJ now if it weren’t for Just Flight’s announcement that the airplane would see an update to 2024 free of charge. Here’s what they said:

Following the release of MSFS 2024 we will release a free compatibility update to all owners of the RJ Professional. The update will be made available as soon as possible once the RJ Professional has been fully tested in the release version of MSFS 2024.

It looks like this will be updated fairly quickly to 2024 and so when we get to it I’ll be reviewing this on the new sim.

How it looks and sounds

I don’t need to write a full review and spend too much more time with the RJ to be able to tell you that Just Flight brought their usual attention to detail here.

The RJ looks great and it also sounds great. It’s got automatic call outs from the flight crew, from the co pilot, there’s a coffee maker that works and makes coffee maker noises, and even the passengers boarding make noises. It’s so good.

There’s a ton of liveries for the three versions of the RJ that we get and they cover world wide operations with a huge variety of options. The enjoyable part is too that you’ve got some long standing operators but also some flash-in-the-pan airlines that no longer exist and may have existed for just a short while. Just Flight saw fit to give us a great mix.

There’s some fun visual and audio pieces built into this as well. The flight attendants position has some interactivity that includes the ability to turn on and off as well as cycle through music. You can even load your own in. There’s also a coffee maker complete with brewing sounds.

I’ll have more to cover in the full review but so far I have no very few complaints about the visuals or the audio experience.

Variants and flying the RJ

The Avro RJ is an avionics update to the BAe 146 so the two share quite a bit but there’s also some big differences. Just Flight have a whole document on it on their website explaining the difference but the short version is that the Avro RJ was a modernized follow on to the BAe 146. The two together filled an interesting niche in the 1980s through to the early 2000s offering a quiet regional airliner with jet performance that was quiet enough to fly into noise restricted airports like London City.

The RJ distinguishes itself from the Base 146 by introducing several more modern features. There’s more glass in the cockpit, FADEC controlled engines, auto thrust, auto pressurization controls, and the GNLU-910A FMS. The autopilot looks to be very similar to 737 autopilot controls, likely on purpose to match the popular airliner, and that makes it easier for virtual pilots to get into too.

It also shares the three lengths of airplane. The BAe 100, 200 and 300 are replaced by the 70, 85, and 100. I’ve only flown each one at least once so I’m still getting a feel for the differences. It’s subtle but there with slight performance differences between them. I find landing the shorter versions a bit harder as the nose likes to wander a bit more.

All of the RJ models feature four LF 507 engines which are slightly improved from the ALF 502 from the 146 and boast a slight increase in takeoff thrust. These aren’t the most powerful engines but there are four of them so the aircraft does get up and go pretty quickly.

Also interesting to note that the RJ, in an effort to simplify the airplane, has no thrust reversers. Instead it relies of spoilers and a butterfly style air brake on the tail of the airplane. It gets the job done and a dedicated brake temperature readout in the cockpit lets you keep an eye on how things are going as you use heavy braking on short landings.

EFB and “fast and fun” comments

Just Flight have put in their well developed EFB/tablet interface. It’s not the best in the industry but it’s generally fully featured and the various apps on the tablet give you performance calculations, an interactive map, checklist, options screen and a aircraft overview screen that lets you open and close doors, control a custom tug, and choose aircraft states.

On that last point, choosing aircraft states, makes this a fairly quick to turn around aircraft. Press a button and you can quickly move the aircraft into a ready to fly configuration. Great if you want a quick flight and you just want to get going.

There’s also a clickable checklist that sits on the pilot’s yoke. It’s got multiple pages of references built in that you can cycle through as you need to. It’s brilliantly presented as a paper

SimBrief integration is in, however, I haven’t been able to figure out how you import a flight plan. To date, I’ve been inputting manually. It’s not so bad as the RJ tends to fly shorter routes and has less waypoints to input so it’s not a deal breaker. Hopefully by the time I write a full review, I can get into how you can click to import.

I’d say its moderately good from a fast and fun perspective!

Price and final thoughts

I’ve got more flights to do, more discoveries to make, and what I’m sure will be plenty of enjoyment to be had with Just Flight’s Avro RJ. Unsurprisingly, this is a quality product and while I need to learn more about it still to do the full review, I can already tell you that this is well put together in all respects. Just Flight take their time with their products and the RJ is one that’s long been in the works. Now that it’s here, I’d say it was worth the wait.

The biggest problems with this appear to be the challenges in importing a SimBrief flight plan without having to enter it yourself. It’s something Fenix, PMDG and iniBuilds do well but I haven’t figured it out on this airplane. It looks like you might be able to do it old style and import the plan by file, but it’d be much better if we could just pull it down.

If that’s the biggest problem that we’re dealing with, this should be a great aircraft purchase. It comes at an unfortunate time as we do the switch from MSFS 2020 to 2024. That will overshadow this airliner that should otherwise be quite a popular option. Hopefully the update to 2024 will help highlight this again so that it doesn’t get overshadowed.

Just Flight are asking for a premium airliner price for this aircraft unsurprisingly. The RJ Professional is priced at US$69.99 and is on sale in the Marketplace and on the Just Flight Store. The pricing is in line with the level of product and puts it in a similar price bracket to PMDG’s permanently on sale 737-800 for example. It’s highly competitive on a feature and quality basis, however, it’s a slightly taller order to convince the 737/A320 crowd that they should try something different but I think they should because this is a lot of fun and its less different to fly than what you get with some of the more classic airliners like the Fokker F28.

A full review will eventually be coming along once the jet has made the transition over to MSFS 2024. In the short term, however, if you’re looking for something a bit different, this is another great airplane from the team at JustFlight.

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