It’s a big day for Microsoft Flight Simulator airliner fans as a highly anticipated release has just arrived. iniBuilds have released their Airbus A350 simulation for both Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and 2024. Here are some of the details you need to know in-case you’re thinking of making a purchase.

Extensive features but some compromises for 2020

Aiming at the high fidelity market, iniBuilds new flagship airliner product has just arrived. Their A350 is aimed at being an extremely realistic and full featured simulation product with all of the bells and whistles that you’d expect.

The team are touting the usual array of high end features from impressive interior and exterior detailing, complex Wwise soundset, custom terrain radar, built in visual effects like condensation and fan vortex spouts, realistic systems including a fully interactive MCDU, brake to vacate system, SimBrief and NaviGraph support, GPS jamming simulation, birdstrike simulation and more.

Two variants are available on launch, the A350-900 and A350-1000. Planned for a Q2 launch is the A350 ULR with extended range capabilities. There’s also over 90 liveries available to install via the iniManager so no matter what variant or operator you wish to operate with, they’ve likely got it covered on day one.

The folks at iniBuilds have decided to release for 2020 and 2024 so the airliner is coming to both sims, however, the developers did appear to plan primarily for 2024 so there are a few compromises you’ll want to know about with 2020. The biggest is with the interior model which, on 2020, will be a “lite” version with no cabin, crew rest, or avionics bay. The 2020 version also won’t have dynamic weathering or LIDO charts – both features of 2024.

Xbox versions of the A350 will have similar compromises on both 2020 and 2024 versions.

Likely these are related to performance issues and technology limitations of the older sim. MSFS 2024 aircraft and scenery appear to be more modular in nature and are better at removing details when you can’t see them and that seems to translate into more detailed airplanes. The older sim doesn’t appear to have the same abilities.

Pricing and initial reactions

The A350 has released today and, unless you’re living under a rock, will probably be seeing it pop up everywhere within the flight sim community over the next few days – such is the anticipation.

The pricing released by iniBuilds puts the A350 at £59.99 GBP or roughly €72.32 EUR or $75.71 USD. The pricing is similarly in line with PMDG’s 777-300ER product though iniBuilds are offering three variants (including the not yet released ULR variant) while PMDG are offering just one. The comparisons are close but not quite direct but it does seem to be occupying a similar part of the high end airliner market.

Meanwhile, the embargo for the aircraft dropped a couple of days ago and several notable YouTuber and Streamers have been showing off the airplane in action. The version they’ve been running is a release candidate so slightly behind the public release.

If I were to summarize the reactions I’ve seen, opinions seem to be considering this an overall excellent aircraft release with great visuals, sounds, and systems. I was watching when Captain Canada suffered a WASM crash which may well have been fixed before launch. Nonetheless, day one releases of such a complex product can sometimes come with their share of challenges. iniBuilds worked diligently on the A300-600R(F) post launch to sort out most of its issues and I expect there will naturally be work that gets done post launch here too. Still, the aircraft does seem to be working well.

Performance is a concern too as iniBuilds airliners have traditionally been a bit heavy on framerates. So far I’m hearing positive reactions from streamers with frame rates quoted as being 40-50fps in complex environments. How it works with a more generalized audience post launch we’ll have to see. Stay tuned for more as this one is too tempting for me to pass up.

Interested in the aircraft? The airplane can be purchased here on the iniBuilds website or from the iniManager software. You can also read more about the aircraft in this introductory forum post.