For several years now I’ve been flying airliners, primarily in Microsoft Flight Simulator, so its a bit bewildering to me that its taken this long to write an X-Plane airliner review. That changes today! For this review I’m looking at X-Craft’s E-Jets Family V2 – a collection of five different variants of the Embraer E-Jets series which are available for purchase either individually or as a group. I find out what’s on offer, what these jets are like to operate, and if they are worth having a look at. Let’s go!

Disclaimer

X-Crafts reached out to me some months ago to share access to their latest E-Jets Family aircraft. I happily took them up on the offer and promised to write a review when I had the opportunity. It’s taken a long time to get there but I have got there!

As always, with any review where a product has been shared free of charge, I like I write my standard disclaimer. My opinions are my own and the developer has not expressed any interest in editorializing the review. They will be reading this at the same time that you are.

A bit of history

Following the success and strong demand for Embraer’s ERJ regional jets, the company began studying options for a follow on successor that would be larger and able to seat more passengers while also be more advanced than its predecessor. The initial concepts were initially focused on an enlarged ERJ before the company publicly decided in 1999 that they would develop an all-new aircraft to meet future needs. The new jet concept would go on to be unveiled at the June 1999 Paris Airshow.

A series of issues lead to initial delays and it wouldn’t be until 2002 that the first prototype would make its first flight. Different sizes, the E170 through 195 would offer different seating configurations depending on what was needed from the airline.

The series has gone on to considerable success with 1,730 units delivered across the family of jets and the E-Jets have developed something of a monopoly on short and mid range jets . The shorter and lighter variants have been a success in the United States for regional jet offerings while both short and long variants have been popular worldwide on nearly every continent.

Fast forward two decades and Embraer has developed new generations of the jet. The E175-E2, E190-E2 and E195-E2 feature new longer and more efficient wings, new higher bypass engines, and further refinement to systems. The E190-E2 and E195-E2 have been selling well to a number of airlines while the shorter E175-E2 has been sidelined due to the “scope clause” in the US of which the new variant and its larger engines are just above the weight limit. The E175, for the moment, continues to be in active production thanks to its lighter weight.

Two additional variants also exist. The Lineage 1000 is a business jet version based on the E190 with luxury accommodations instead of the conventional commuter layout. More recently, Embraer has revealed a freighter conversion for existing E190 and E195 airframes which would potentially give them a second life after their days in passenger service have run out.

Doing things differently

In the world of X-Plane airliners, things aren’t that different from over in Microsoft Flight Simulator. There’s a couple of heavyweights that attract the majority of the attention and the rest kind of have to fight to get noticed. The ZiboMod 737 is the go-to 737NG series experience in X-Plane and one of the aircraft that gets a lot of attention… deservedly so as a high fidelity airliner that is also a community driven freeware effort. For Airbus fans, the payware ToLiss series attracts most of the attention with their products spanning most of the Airbus line-up at this point. There are some others too such as the Flight Factor 777 and Felis’ 747 Classic. However, as in the real world, the virtual Boeing/Airbus duopoly pushes the rest of the airliner world out to the edges. Marko and the team at X-Crafts have been doing their best to bring a different experience to X-Plane airliner fans with near relentless development on their simulation of the Embraer E-Jets series.

X-Crafts first generation of the E-jets have been available for nearly a decade now. The aircraft had pretty good visuals for the time though they saw a mixed reception due to mid level systems simulation. Doing things differently has meant that X-Crafts have kept their first gen around as a freeware option and have even put resources into keeping them up to date with the latest X-Plane 12 enhancements. They even support the new radar systems added in one of the most recent updates. If you want a freeware airliner option that isn’t the ZiboMod and you’re looking at a mid fidelity offering, you should check that out!

The focus of this review is on the second generation option from X-Crafts. The E-Jets Family 2.0, out for a few years now, is payware and sports deeper system modeling, rebuilt visuals and even more features. Since release, the aircraft have continued to pick up features adding depth, responding to new feature additions in X-Plane and generally evolving into a comprehensive E-Jets experience. Remember I said they were relentless?

The team have also done things differently by creating their own community around the airliner product. To help get people into the Embraer way of doing things, they’ve created cheat sheets and supplemental information to teach people about the E-Jets and how to get started. A 5-minute refresher is intended to get you up and going into the jets after time away and its a great resource even if you’re new to the series. And if that’s not enough, there are over a dozen short tutorials and tutorial videos intended to teach you how to use the FMS and some of the aircraft’s advanced systems. They also have a list of suggested routes and operators to fly with if you want to recreate some real world ops. All aimed at getting you going with the jet. It’s a smart business move but also perhaps a necessary one. I appreciate the extra effort in either case creating an ecosystem around the aircraft and encouraging a community to come together.

What’s available

I’ve already mentioned that the series has an available freeware option using the older first generation of X-Crafts E-Jets. These have fewer features and aren’t as visually impressive as the next gen but they are still good, still supported with new X-Plane 12 features, and worth a look.

Then we get into the payware options which are more sophisticated, more visually impressive, built from the ground-up with all of the lessons of the first gen and with more fidelity all around.

X-Crafts have five models of the E-Jets family available. You can fly the E170, E175, E190, E195 and the Lineage 1000 business jet. These are sold separately or in a five aircraft bundle.

• E170 for $74.95 on the X-Plane.org Store
• E175 for $74.95 on the X-Plane.org Store
• E190 for $74.95 on the X-Plane.org Store
• E195 for $74.95 on the X-Plane.org Store
• Lineage 1000 for $74.95 on the X-Plane.org Store
• E-Jets Family package for $149.95 on the X-Plane.org Store

The company is working on offering a Freighter variant of the aircraft as well. No release date is currently on offer.

Visuals and sounds

I’m very impressed with the visual work that X-Crafts have put into their E-Jets series. The V2 family was a complete rework offering more detail, more accuracy, and intended to use the advanced features of the late version of X-Plane 11 and the most recent advancements in X-Plane 12. For this review I’m focused purely on X-Plane 12.

The 3D model looks accurate to me both inside and out. Compare photos and real world experience (as a passenger) with the jets and I can safely say that everything looks and feels authentic. If there are issues, I haven’t been able to detect them. Even under close inspection, there’s a lot of detail and you can get up close and personal and appreciate the details. The effort looks consistent overall. It doesn’t quite hold up as well as some MSFS airliners do at extreme close camera views but you do have to get very close to have that happen. I think it’s more than adequate.

Textures and materials work is also excellent and I especially appreciate the subtle detail on the wings when viewed at a high angle to the sun. There are a few instances where the aircraft, together with the latest lighting updates, really does have a photo-real quality to it and I don’t say that lightly. Its rare moments but its very good looking indeed. That’s coming from someone who has been very critical of X-Plane and various developers approaches to lighting and materials work in the sim.

They’ve modeled extra features like the covers, pylons, an external power cart, and chocks for aircraft when you’re starting into them from cold and dark. All of the cargo and cabin doors open though there are no ground vehicles that connect. If you load up the E175 variant, you’ll also have the option of picking one of two winglet styles with some carriers retrofitting or ordering their aircraft with the longer style of wingtip. Uniquely, the Lineage 1000 has its own airstairs as not every business jet destination has available truck mounted airstairs.

Something I’m not used to are some of the X-Plane effects that aren’t standard on MSFS aircraft. Spray from rain kicks up realistically behind the aircraft and thrust reverser effects are similarly accurate looking. Overwing vapours in high humidity aren’t the best effect that the sim is capable of but it’s still good… and present!

X-Crafts have also worked hard to try and deal with some of the quirks of the X-Plane environment. For a few years now we’ve had a situation where cockpits were often too dark. XP12’s enhanced lighting environment brought added (and desperately needed) depth and colour but it came with the downside of not modeling how the human eye adapts to changes in light intensity. We also have to remember that we’re squeezing the colourspace down into something that an LCD monitor can display so some HDR style compensation was required and so X-Crafts have their own compensation system built into the airplane.

Offered long before Laminar came up with a whole sim solution themselves, X-Crafts version is toggled via their tablet. In the latest version of X-Plane 12, I prefer the default setup which is still a bit darker, but you do have the option of having a lighter looking cockpit with it set on.

The interior cockpit area is solidly done with good textures and details. I have no real complaints about it except for it perhaps looking a little dull in some circumstances – mostly with the lightened cockpit contrast setting on. But generally is pleasing and the lighting, especially at night, is superb!

The passenger cabin area meanwhile is also generally good! I spend very little time back there but its good enough to be immersive. There isn’t much in the way of interactivity but that’s fine. All of the jets, so far as I can tell, have business and economy seating. I’ve been on a couple of Embraers over the years and it looks familiar!

I want to specifically mention the excellent work done with the Lineage 1000 as well. This is the business jet version and the rear cabin area has been extensively overhauled with its own custom look and feel. And its stunning!

For liveries, X-Crafts have included a small list of available options right from the get go. Eight are available include Austrian, Delta, American, Alaskan, JetBlue, KLM, United, and a white overall scheme. Three aditional liveries are available out of the box for the Lineage 1000. The company has also offered up a paint kit and maintains a spreadsheet list of over two-hundred third party artists who have created their own liveries for the jets. If you want to recreate a flight with a specific operator, you’ll likely be able to. Liveries information is available here.

Over on the sounds front, X-Crafts have done a good job here. X-Plane airliners haven’t traditionally been strong on the sound front and there are quite a few sound packs out there to try and compensate. I don’t feel that’s necessary here because the X-Crafts E-Jets have a good soundset with avionics fans, engine start-up, throttle up and down fade, sound attenuation over distance, and a subtle buzzsaw sound at high throttle levels. Cockpit button clicks are there as are some controls. It could use more variety and sometimes the cockpit sounds feel a bit muted, even without the headphone setting checked, but mostly the sound work is good. Even in the flyby drone camera view its good.

Systems and flying

Over the years I’ve read various comments like X-Craft’s E-Jets are “good but missing features.” A little digging into those comments reveals precious few things that seem to be missing. Keep in mind that I’m not an E-Jets pilot (or any kind of pilot) and I still feel like a relative newbie compared to some airliner flyers out there with decades of sim experience, but I have put in some time on a wide variety of types and X-Craft’s E-jets feels like they’ve got nearly everything important going on here with one or two exceptions.

Custom coded autopilot and FMC come together with full VNAV capabilities and the ability to do almost everything you need from it. It does direct to waypoints, it handles waypoint changes without issue, it can do SIDS and STARS, and it lets you setup an approach with both RNAV and ILS support. There really isn’t much left wanting here save for one feature: no automated holds are yet available. I know some folks aren’t comfortable flying on VATSIM without that feature so that may be a showstopper for some. And to be fair as well to the critics, there are a couple of pages of the FMC that aren’t functional though I’ve not needed them in any of my flights.

The developer also admits there are still a few quirks with how the computer and autopilot manage some waypoints and approaches as well. The aircraft will “follow” waypoints rather than “flying over” certain waypoints as specified. That means it will cut some corners on certain approaches when its ideally not supposed to.

Most of the flights I’ve done have worked perfectly save for the quirky circling approach for Innsbruck which was a bit of a mess. I ended up doing some manual intervention there and nearly crashing into a mountain. But that is, after over a couple dozen flights into various airports, a rare exception because every other flight I did worked great – VNAV and all!

Another feature supported is X-Plane 12’s new weather radar system. Its more accurate and sophisticated than the one I’m used to in MSFS. Here the depiction is very readable and very useful for deciding your course through bad weather and there are realistic sweeps of the radar visuals back and forth.

There are also some helpful sim concessions available. The range adjustment is a bit difficult to get to while looking at the screen (in sim) so a clickspot lets you cycle through ranges on the screen. Good stuff! There is SimBrief support which built into the tablet. There are also options for sounds, equipment and other miscellaneous adjustments to the aircraft covered in the EFB. The near ubiquitous AviTab plugin is supported and integrated with the EFB. Realism is great but making it workable in a virtual environment is important too and these are good!

There are a few things lacking that I’m kind of used to as well. While the EFB does import data from SimBrief, its mostly limited to weight and payload. To get a flight plan imported, you need to do the old school way of downloading a file off of SimBrief and then importing it through the FMC.

I’ve been flying so many MSFS airliners that just do the import right there in the airplane that this feels a little behind. The tablet also doesn’t have any SimBrief flight plan display and no OFP or summary display either. There are AviTab options out there but I haven’t found one that I know definitively still works in 2025. Nothing deal breaking but a bit of a surprise for me at first.

Then we get to the actual flying of the jets and here I was very impressed! One of X-Plane’s advantages over MSFS remains its flight and ground handling model and X-Crafts takes full advantage of that platform to model the E-Jets.

On the ground and in the air I find a feeling of solidity and weight to these aircraft. Subtle movements in turbulence, crosswinds, on takeoff and final approach all give you this feeling like its really there! The wings shake a bit in turbulence and when you touch down and its so smooth and natural that you almost take it for granted. The ground handling is very impressive too which just adds to the experience! Hit the brakes and the suspension system rocks the aircraft back and forth believably. Roll, turn, or otherwise maneuver and it feels like there’s a whole airplane behind you.

Part of this is the X-Plane platform and part of it is the developer themselves but both are to be commended for making the aircraft feel very real and present. It’s immensely satisfying to hand fly the E-Jets as a result. Landings are terrific!

Fast and fun?

Those familiar with my MSFS airliner reviews will know I frequently do a section called “fast and fun” where I evaluate how casual and quick you can be with the airliner in question. How does the E-Jets Family stack up? Its not bad but it is missing a few items that I’m used to seeing.

There’s no state saving feature in X-Craft’s EFB so if you want to get the aircraft rolling quickly, you need to use the X-Plane “start with engines running” feature and you’ll be on the runway and rocketing off into the sky. If that’s what you want to do. That does make it quite fast and fun! Minimal setup required.

If you want to start cold and dark though, you’ll need to run through the start-up process, input the flight plan, and then get going. Its a bit more of a binary choice than with many MSFS aircraft where state saving lets you go more realistically, though automatically, get to the flying part.

Fortunately, the E-Jets series is intended for a relatively quick and easy start-up so that also alleviates a lot of the lengthy start-up process with the actual airplane. If you’ve flown any reasonably complex aircraft before, this will seem easy! Most of the systems are automated (realistically so) and Embraer went all out to keep pilot workload low for the aircraft’s use in short hops between cities. This helps real world pilots but it definitely helps us simmers too and thus the E-Jets series is really good at getting up and going pretty quickly. After a couple of flights, you can do it mostly by memory – though a checklist always helps of course if you want to do everything by the book.

Final thoughts

I’m really impressed with the E-Jets Family V2 series! They look good, sound good, hand fly incredibly well, are well integrated into the X-Plane ecosystem, there are a ton of third party liveries available, tutorials and quick tips are available. The developer has worked incredibly hard to ensure that all of these things are available to you through a nicely designed website adding quite a bit of value to the product. There’s an awful lot to like here.

There are some issues like the lack of holds in the FMC, a few quirks with the FMC/autopilot at certain airports, and the SimBrief import system is a bit old school requiring a file rather than working via import from the website. But none of these are fatal to the product.

Some folks like to ask: “Is this study level?” That’s one of those loaded questions that is difficult to answer. Do I suspect that this does nearly everything that the real one does while offering a high quality sim airliner experience? Yep, definitely. Would you use it to study to fly a real one? I’m guessing that it’d be good to familiarize with the cockpit but it may have a quirk or two that the real plane does differently. Because I care almost entirely about the sim experience I can say that this is a good one!

The biggest issue that X-Plane airliners have in general is pricing and X-Crafts is not immune to this. Aircraft development is expensive and time consuming. Developers need to be compensated and the X-Plane community is smaller than the MSFS one by several orders of magnitude. Airliner projects are expensive to make, expensive to maintain, and thus are expensive themselves and E-Jets is pricey.

The way that the E-Jets Family is packaged can be quite expensive. If you want the whole package, $149.95 USD is your price. That is five, albeit quite similar jets, for the price of about $30 each. If you want just a single individual model (doesn’t matter which one) you can get that for $74.95 USD. Want more than one and you’re better off getting the whole package. Individually its not too different from what we see with some of the high end MSFS airliners but the bundle price is significant. At time of review, there’s also a 40% sale on so the prices are quite good right at the moment.

So is this worth the price? Generally, yes. If you’re in the X-Plane ecosystem and looking for a solid regional jet you can dig into, this is going to be great. Approachable, easy to learn, well supported by the developers behind it, but also deep enough to require quite a bit of time to master. These are a well balanced product with a ton of value and lots of great experiences to be had. They were so good I kept coming back again and again. Now, its not a casual price you’ll pay but if you’re serious about having a commuter airliner experience in X-Plane, I think you’ll like these a lot!

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