It’s been years in the making and it has just received an official release date. BlueBird Simulations has been working on their 757 for what feels like ages but they report that they are ironing out the remaining features and issues and are closing in on release date. Earlier this summer, they also revealed features and pricing so let’s catch up on all of that and take a look at the news!

Is it finally coming out?

BlueBird Simulations 757 has been in development for several years now. It has been hotly anticipated for nearly as long as its been in development and that excitement and several release windows come and gone have caused lots of folks to be skeptical of most release dates. Still, we now have one for the first time in the history of the product and that date is October 23, 2026. Slightly beyond the Q3 release window that the developer had initially hoped to hit but fairly close all things considered.

In their latest development report we’ve learned that the aircraft itself is largely complete. The systems, sounds, flight model, and visuals are all receiving final checks. The dev also reports that substantial work has been done on performance optimization and hunting down of critical issues within their tester team.

They are also turning their attention to items located beyond just the airplane release itself. I’ll let them explain more:

Because this is our very first product release, standing up our initial infrastructure has taken longer than anticipated. Setting up reliable activation services, delivery networks, web portals, and server capacity to support thousands of simultaneous downloads on day one is a massive undertaking. We want to ensure that when launch day arrives, the download, installation, and licensing process is seamless and stable for everyone.

It is likely that, given the high level of anticipation, that BlueBird’s 757 will see large numbers of downloads on day one. Unlike a team like PMDG or iniBuilds, this group is building a lot of their base from the ground up and for the first time.

Read more about the release date and expectation setting right here.

Feature list revealed

Back in July, BlueBird Simulations also revealed an official feature list. It went largely unreported by me as I wanted to wait and see what happened with the actual product.

BlueBird are touting deep system modeling with 500 circuit breakers planned (200 at release and a further 300 planned for post launch), fully simulated cabin systems and temperatures, custom avionics and nav systems with full LNAV/VNAV and RNAV abilities, holds, missed approaches, go-arounds, autoland, CDU and ACARS, EFB with aircraft state presets, weight and balance systems, and on the list goes.

For this, the aircraft will be priced at $80 USD which is about even with many PMDG and iniBuilds releases. Right in the premium price bracket. It has the feature list to match but we’ll have to see for ourselves if launch and subsequent support manage to live up to the high expectations. Still, this may be one of the most anticipated and consequential releases for MSFS this year.

We’ll be looking to October 23 and seeing what happens come launch day.