Earlier today, Synaptic Simulations presented a live stream showcasing their work on the Airbus A220. The presentation showed off the visual fidelity, previewed systems, and the developers responded to questions in the chat. They’ve also laid out their roadmap to release. Let’s have a look!

Rivet counters should be happy!

At one point during the stream, one of the Synaptic videos zoomed in on some of the close details that the team have done including labels on some of the aircraft’s rivets. That’s how deep they and their iniBuilds partners have gone towards detailing the airplane.

The visual presentation took at look at the fuselage, landing gear, access hatches and fuel panel (functionality planned for launch), and the engines. There were tons of details at the level that you’d expect a high end airliner project to offer. Great to see.

The team also did a demonstration of how some of the systems are coming along. They are still in progress but the overall look is promising. They showed off some of the fly-by-wire control laws in action too so the aircraft is indeed flying.

They did have some videos that ran poorly prompting concerns that the aircraft’s frame rate would not be up to par. This has been a concern with many of the airliners associated with iniBuilds having performance issues for some users. The devs noted that the videos were pre-recorded and that some of them were running more slowly than others. Indeed some ran quite smoothly which says more about the difficulties of doing a live presentation.

It’s also far too early to judge a development project’s find performance numbers but lets hope it meets or exceeds expectations. Synaptic have, for their part, said that the systems work is their own so while the impressive visuals is being done together with the iniBuilds artists, systems are from Synaptic. We’ll have to see how they do as a team but for now we’ll just have to wait and see.

Project planning and pricing

More content and previews are planned by the Synaptic team. One of those includes a preview of the prototype project at the iniBuilds stand at FSExpo 2025 in Providence, Rhode Island.

Following the expo, Synaptic will be doing a series of videos including a deep dive into the complex systems including electrical systems of the A220. That will be in July. Then in August they will be exploring displays, menus and information systems. September will bring air data, electronic flight control and autopilot.

Then the race is on towards release and the team are expecting the A220-300 to come to initial release for both 2020 and 2024 in Q4 of 2025. They have confirmed that the A220-300 will be later joined by the A220-100 and the ACJ TwoTwenty private jet configuration.

The team haven’t yet set a price, however, they said that it would be priced “reasonably” and similar to other aircraft on the market.

The team have also teased that they are planning to do another modern jet in the future though they are focused on the A220 right now and aren’t yet planning to reveal what that is.

All in all, a promising if occasionally tech-challenged preview of what I think may be the most anticipated airliner release that I have on my list. This should be an interesting one to watch.