New year and a renewed interest in checking out how well X-Plane 12 has evolved over the last several months has had me reinstalling all of my old favourites and spending some time getting to know them again. On this flight I take out the Aerobask Phenom 300 on a relatively short but eventful flight across the south of Italy from Bari on the Adriatic coast down to Palermo, Sicily. Along the way I wanted to see how X-Plane’s weather, lighting and other systems were working these days. Let’s fly!

Like riding a bike

Aerobask’s Phenom 300 is one of my favourite business jets to fly in any sim. Fast, highly capable, not that big that you feel like you’ve got a big airliner behind you but also easily capable of climbing up to 40,000 feet if you want to, the Phenom 300 flies great, sounds great and looks great. It’s a project that the company no doubt took on to help bolster sales while their long in development Falcon 8X continued to churn away but its one of their best products even if it may have been something of a side venture.

Getting back into it was easy. I’ve flown it enough times that I generally remembered the left to right flow around the cockpit and my recent ventures out in the Cockspur Phenom 100 in MSFS also helped the memory banks. The cockpits and procedures are basically the same and they both take advantage of the automation and ease of use that Embraer is known for.

So suffice to say that it didn’t take me long to remember how it all worked and I was asking for takeoff clearance.

For this flight, I wanted to mix it up from my last few X-Plane flights (flown in real time, in real dreary weather). I wanted sun and heat! So I set it for mid July, 28 degrees C, and with a mostly sunny preset but with worsening conditions. This is something X-Plane does well!

A stormy departure, then sunward!

Despite that desire for sun, my departure was actually quite stormy as those worsening conditions hit almost immediately. Clouds were billowing up and grey skies turned dark, lighting flashed in the distance, and raindrops began to hit the canopy. This was good actually because X-Plane 12 does rain generally well. It looks great in the puddles that form on the runway and even better on the windscreen on suitably upgraded aircraft – Aerobask’s Phenom 300 among them!

I taxiied out to Bari’s Runway 25, got clearance to depart, and went to TOGA power.

The Phenom 300 is an incredible performer and the transition between in flight, gear up, flaps up, and nose pitched to 15 degrees or more has to happen quickly as you pick up speed very fast.

After that it was a climb first to 8,000 feet and then up to 32,000 feet. Along the way we punched through heavy rain and through some pretty thick cloud before emerging above it.

Up here I got to answer one of my questions. Is X-Plane 12 just too dark? And the answer is that it is possible for it to be quite bright and sunny.

I am finding that the sim often looks dull and washed out and it seems like some of the problem is how they filter the sunlight through cloud layers. Get up above most of them and its a bright world up there. Place even a small amount of cloud between you and the sun and its sometimes flickering bright and dark like a light switch. That’s when the dullness starts to creep in. Even a bright sunny day in the Caribbean can sometimes look like a mid winter sun to my eyes.

X-Plane 12 does lighting in a physically calculated way, far better than its previous iterations, but I feel that they are missing something. It may well be how they handle how much upper level clouds filter sunlight and how much bounce light filters down… because its just not quite convincing for me yet. The on/off switching is, of course, jarring and obvious.

Dodge the storms

Another thing I wanted to check on was how cloud rendering was going with the sim. Its still not at DCS or MSFS levels but its slowly improving and kudos to Laminar Research for continuing to improve.

One of my last outings with the sim had odd pyramid shaped clouds sprouting up in different places and very fortunately we seem to be well past that now. There were still some oddly shaped (or blended?) clouds from time to time but mostly I saw natural looking formations and the cumulonimbus clouds were better than those that I’ve seen in MSFS 2020 (we’ll have to see with 2024).

The variable nature of the weather preset I was using ensured that there were pockets of thunderstorms, rendered convincingly, and open areas of sky too. I did at one point thread the needle between two storms before then running headlong into another. Yet another storm I steered around after climbing to 40,000 feet and realizing that the storm was still towering above me.

This is far better than my previous experiences though I will be following up with some more flights with real time weather as that can make or break the experience too.

Clearing for landing

After dodging the storms, it was time to descend into some clearing skies.

I had to make a bit of a departure from my planned flight route to get down from my incredible height of 40,000 feet. I did a holding pattern outside of my planned departure before vectoring straight into my planned approach on Runway 25 at Palermo Airport.

It was one of my better landings in the Phenom 300 too, despite my lengthy stay away. Pilot accounts vary slightly but I’ve read that the real world jet should be flared minimally before aiming for a 2-3 degree nose high angle and then let the jet settle down quickly with the trailing gear absorbing the impact without much trouble. Other techniques can lead to bouncing and ideally you want the jet on the ground. I ended up using the spoilers prior to landing to bleed some speed, though it does have auto spoilers.

After that, it was a quick taxi, park, and shut down.

I was enthused by my time with the airplane and with the sim. I’m pleased to see X-Plane 12 evolving despite marketplace headwinds favouring its competitor. It does have immersion issues with its weather but it is getting better and its far better than the messes that I’ve seen in the last few times I’ve been out in the sim. A definite improvement!

The ATC is also happily working better than I’ve ever experienced it. I still need to learn quite a bit about how to work best with it and that’s where the sim as a teacher comes in and when the system is working great then its all about your learning rather than worrying that the sim has it wrong. This is all good!

It still absolutely, desperately, needs a scenery upgrade but I hear that’s in the works.