I have spend 2-3 hours today - just sitting in the cockpit and playing around with the switches and the FMC-CDU. No flight, sorry, that had to wait, I little bit underestimaterd the depth of system simulation of this beauty and had to turn more pages in the manual than I expected. So the following is just another and not the final part of this "review". And I must admit:
"Iz naiß...!"
Those three Chinese were knowing what they were doing. This module is incredibly detailed - more than PMDG's 747 for FS9, I dare say so now.
It started with a short breeze of cold air. The 737s in this package do not get recognised by AES, so I needed to manually tune bridges and lifts to correctly fit the pax and cargo doors. Also, although there are some 60 liveries on CD, they are not installed with the main program, and need to be manually installed in two different steps in different softwares, which imo could have been solved more comfortably and elegant. By default, you only get the white-orange house-livery of iFly.
The exterior model is nicely done, though, with front and back pax doors and both cargo doors as well as the front right door all being operated via Shi-E. The engines can be opened too, via separate command. The plane looks well rendered and modelled, with a certain layer of dirt and oily dust sticking to parts of the plane, or so it seems.
The 2D cockpit is very well done, imo, and offers a wealth of perspectives that surpasses everything I have seen in FS9 before. For example, both FMC panels get operated independently, and even operate the maintenance pages that sims of this kind usually bypass. Also, many of the options you usually access via the menue (CTD or LCD style monitors, carrier options, etc), can be accessed via the FMC as well. I think I have never seen such a complex FMC, not in PMDG's 747, not in Flight1's ATR-72, and not in Level-D's 767. Many pages there that you used to think of as inoperational in other sim modules of this type. Also, you have more options to arrange the 2D cockpit. For example you have four different perspectives for the main panel alone, two for the pilot and two for the guy on the right seat, and both offering a VFR and an IFR layout, allowing you gaze at the panel in a way that you can monitzor all five - correction: SIX - monitors simultaneously. The manual has one multi-page chapter about how to manipulate the six displays alone, how to arrange and coimbine different layouts on different screens, I saw those display options in PMDG's 747 as well, but here it is brought to a much more complex level. Also, like in other modules, every monitor can be magnified separately, jumping into the foreground. If you lose sight in here, than it definitely is your own fault.
The virtual cockpit I like a lot, too. Everything is readable and almost crispy in fonts. You can operate (read and type) both FMC panels from here without calling them up in separate screens, if you want! It is not only functional, but also is no ergonomic crime to the eye to do so. All switches are 3-dimensionally modelled, and clickable.I have had no night conditions so far, but even at day the floodlight was working, putting out gloomy brown-red light onto the upper panel. The cockpit in the 737 seems to be much tighter and smaller than in the 747 and 767, and this is what I weas completely missing in the PMDG version of the 737 from so many years ago. A little bit I felt like inside a tank.
Some people seem to complain about the VC, but I do not have a single clue why. I like it very much. Just that sometimes, depending on the direction of light, it is a bit too dark, which is an inherent FS9 problem and no fault of the VC designers.
The FMC uses its own data format for flightplans. That is nothing new, PMDG does that, too, since years, also other addon producers. But I use Flight Sim Comande rversion 7, several years old, adn this one does not recognise the new format, and offers no option to translate plans into it. Just moving the flightplan into the according folder of iFly did not work. I fear I need to type in the list of waypoints manually every time. Okay, the price of using an old flight planner. Fortunately I plan my flights that way that they rarely last longer than one hour flight time at max nor that they have more than a dozen waypoints or so.
That'S it for tonight. Tomorrow I hopefully will carry of this beauty for a flight. It's really a hightech playground for big boys!
