Thursday, June 9, 2011

QualityWings Begins Showing Off BAe146/AvroRJ

QualityWings has been giving us some eye candy, with external liveries of their upcoming BAe146/AvroRJ add-on over the last several months.  This week, they have begun featuring some views of the interior 2D panels as well.  Enjoy!

Supposedly, this is scheduled for release in Q3 2011.  Hope they stay on target...this one looks very interesting.

Speaking of the PMDG NGX...

PMDG has been slowly releasing more tidbits about the NGX.  It seems we are inching ever closer to completion, but they are sparing no missed detail along the way.  This should truly be a great product.  I have avoided reposting every new update that PMDG posts, because, well, I am trying to avoid PMDG fatigue here, and frankly, there hasn't been much new to tell.

One interesting bit that came out a few days ago is that you can apparently configure your 737 NGX on-the-fly.  Want to switch from the Honeywell-style MCP to the Collins-style MCP?  Or from EFIS/MAP to PFD/ND displays?  No problem!  This video clip provided by PMDG illustrates the on-the-fly configurability of the NGX:



This is very interesting - as I previously pointed out in my review of the iFly 737 NG, the 737 NG is arguably one of the most configurable jetliners around.  It seems every carrier flying the type has its own, slightly unique flavor of it.  iFly handles these details by requiring you to define the configuration of each model on a per-livery basis in its Fleet Manager, which is an entirely reasonable approach.  The NGX, however, takes this to an entirely new level - the dynamic reconfiguration of the cockpit is a nifty feature.

Though the pragmatist in me actually sort of likes the iFly approach, in a sense - if you know the configuration of a particular carrier, it seems like it would be a pain to have to wade through all the settings and dynamically set them to match your preferred carrier's configuration before flight each time.  I would hope the PMDG will have some kind of per-livery default configuration you can set ahead of time, so you don't have to waste time configuring the cockpit to your liking each time.  I'm sure they probably will - but this video doesn't seem to make that particularly clear.  Nonetheless, the ability to play with the cockpit configuration on-the-fly is a feature that we will all have some fun with.