FSReborn’s second big aircraft release of the year is a Microsoft/Asobo partnership that brings us the Piper M600 – a small turboprop light utility airplane in roughly the same class as the Daher TBM series. This journal is light on review but I do have some issues that I wanted to mention while flying this aircraft for the first time on a nice cross country route across the UK. Let’s go!

First flight

For this flight, its a single pilot, no passengers, lightly loaded M600 flying from EGCB Manchester Barton Aerodrome down to EGHC Land’s End Airport. Both of these airports are part of the MSFS 2020 and 2024 scenery packages and they make for fun destinations for all kinds of aircraft. Land’s End, fittingly named as its at the very south-western tip of England, is a particularly fun airport thanks to frequent strong winds.

I ran into my first issue with not being able to find a click spot for the engine cover. The chocks were easy enough to get to but nothing from the engine covers. I ended up using the EFB based companion app to remove them.

Running through the checklists and I found out quickly that the M600 is pretty easy to start-up. Engine running, systems online, navigation and flight route entered, and taxiing out onto Manchester Barton Aerodrome 26R grass runway.

Sidenote: I did a bit of reading on if the M600 has grass field operations allowed and apparently it does though some modifications are required as part of the SLS package. No idea if we have that but let’s pretend that we do. EDIT: It says SLS right on the side of the airplane… so I’m going with yes!

Powering up, the engine briefly overtorqued so I brought the power back into the green and then launched the aircraft. Off we went down the grass runway and then into the air. After a couple of weeks of Phenom 300E flying, this is much less of a rocketship. But we were still gaining altitude quickly.

My flight plan had me at a nice 17,000 foot cruise altitude. Not the most efficient but I did want to fly in some lower altitudes on this first flight. More VFR style than IFR – lots of that kind of flying to come.

I did spend a bit of time in the cabin as well finding that it does have some limited interactivity. Its not like the Phenom 300E but this is a different class of product and the Expert Series tend to blur the line between highly detailed full fidelity while offering at a good price. So it doesn’t have the passenger interactivity or anything like that. Fine.

I did run into some other problems. The G3000 system I’ve gotten quite accustomed to and here I was having a severe problem not being able to adjust the map zoom. Comments on the forums tell me I’m not alone. It has some clear flaws. I ended up using the right window split with the radar/weather mode to get the zoom I needed.

Problems aside, the M600 is a very nice GA cruiser. I’ll put it through more paces soon but we did make good time flying down from the Manchester area to Land’s End.

And then it was time to setup for landing. Descending at 2,000 feet per minute, I came into the Land’s End Airport area at 3,000 feet just ahead of schedule and took in some nice scenery on my way into the area.

Entering a left hand pattern I came in and setup for landing on runway 07. The M600 can make it work but it was a bit of a hurried stop right at the end of the runway with beta mode and full brakes. Good challenge for my first landing in the airplane!

Taxi, park, and shut down. No problems there!

Thoughts

I was kind of hoping for some of that FSReborn magic with this Expert 02: Piper M600 and while its mostly there, the rough edges on this release did stick out a bit more than I’d like them to. They aren’t flight ending problems but if you do pick up this airplane you’ll need to do a few workarounds until the problems get sorted out.

Hopefully we’ll see a quick fix sometime after everyone gets home from FSExpo. Once they are done, the M600 should offer quite a good bang-for-the-buck kind of experience offering 90% of what you can often get at $30-40 but at half the price. This will be great cross country cruiser stopping in at airports along the way and blasting along with power and performance in between.