Mini-Review: Wilco E-Jets PIC

I know I promised this one a few weeks ago, but real life happens sometimes. I have finally had a chance to spend several hours flying around in the Wilco Publishing E-Jets PIC add-on, so I will now take the time to share a few of my impressions of the product.

Overall, I really like flying around in the E-Jet. For starters, here is a view of one of the JetBlue E-Jet liveries from the optional airliners pack, which contains extra liveries from McPhat Studios:



The E-Jet offers excellent flight performance: typical cruise speed is around Mach 0.80, and maximum cruise is around Mach 0.82. Service ceiling is 41,000, right up there with the Boeing 737 NG among others.

The avionics used in the E-Jets are among the most advanced around. One nifty feature is the use of touchscreen technology on the glass displays. Wilco has faithfully modeled this technology on the E-Jets add-on, as seen here:



Embraer uses the Honeywell Primus Epic avionics suite in the E-Jets. This is essentially an enhanced version of the same avionics suite seen in the ERJ and Cessna Citation X: the Honeywell Primus 1000. Among other things, the FMS bears a strong resemblance to the one seen in the ERJ:



One nice advantage of the E-Jets over the ERJ is the availability of an autothrottle. This makes speed management much more consistent.

The manual is a little on the thin side, even thinner than Wilco's manuals for the Airbus Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 products. It covers the basics and gets you up and flying relatively quickly, which is great for less experienced flyers. Wilco also throws in some tables for recommended Vr and Vapp speeds, which is a nice touch.

The E-Jets base pack comes with a respectable set of liveries, although they are not exhaustive. If you are more into flying the plane without worrying about bearing the colors of any airline in particular, then you can get by just fine with the base pack. On the other hand, the deluxe pack is only around $10 US more, and you get pretty much every airline known to fly (or planning to fly) the E-Jets to date. The deluxe pack has all the JetBlue variants for the E-190, for example, which I think is really fun.

When learning to fly a new add-on, I typically fly the same route over and over again several times to get the hang of the plane. This allows me to spend more time getting familiar with the plane's systems, and less time worrying about routing. When I lived in Texas, I used to fly KAUS-KDFW and KAUS-KIAH a lot. For the E-Jets add-on, I decided to simulate KLGB-KSJC in a JetBlue livery on several occasions. This is one of the shortest E-Jets flights that JetBlue operates out of Long Beach. It took me a few tries to fully get the hang of the behavior of the autopilot, but it is very nicely done.

The FMS uses the same navigation database as Wilco's other recent add-ons, so if you subscribe to the navdata updates from Navigraph, the updated information will appear in the E-Jets FMS as well. The FMS does a very nice job of handling terminal procedures. My descents into KSJC were practically effortless.

I have just a few complaints:

1. The E-Jets add-on is a major resource hog, at least with FSX. If you have anything less than a state-of-the-art CPU, plenty of RAM, and a top-notch video card, you may have a less than satisfactory experience flying this particular plane. My GeForce 8600 GS (admittedly not the best) really struggled to keep up at times. You can dial down some of the FPS settings in the E-Jets configurator, but this trade-off comes at the cost of increased visual stuttering -- particularly on the gauges.
   
   
2. Elements of the 2D panel tend to be very cramped at 1280x1024, as seen in the following image:
   
   
   
   I know there is a lot of data to present, but I wish they could have devised a way to space it out a little more. Some of the text in the glass displays tends to be rather small to read as a result. This can be mitigated some by right-clicking on each glass display to bring up a zoomed-up version of the display, but this is kind of irritating in flight:
   
   
   
   
3. Related to the above, the center console 2D panel is hideously cramped:
   
   
   
   I wish they would have just broken this up into multiple, larger 2D panels as seen on many other add-ons.
   

On the other hand, the 3D virtual cockpit is beautiful. You may actually get a more satisfying experience flying with it, rather than the 2D panel:



Bottom line: I found the Wilco E-Jets add-on to be a really fun plane to fly once you get the hang of it. If you have a system beefy enough to handle it, it is well worth the beans to get hold of this one. Were it not for the minor issues and resource constraints, I would rate this one even higher.

Overall rating: ****