Bought it on the Contrail sale and flew it into the busy Boston airspace today on VATSIM. It’s quite a handful managing the descent without VNAV, but I made it in without getting yelled at, so I’m happy! This plane is a bit better than I expected.
BTW does anyone know if there’s an option to turn on the altitude banana on the MFD? That would make it a lot easier to carry out descents.
I just tried the last 0.9.16 version and is still quite bad, the AP is hit or miss it can work acceptably or go totally wrong, the new custom ILS is working but the plane plunges down into the glideslope quite violently for an airliner, passengers will demand some explanation.
I guess we’ll have to be patient as the devs now announced a “vacation” that is of course a common trick in these early access programs.
I made the mistake of buying the aircraft, I’ve been convincing myself that it was an early access to be prepared but never expected to be so early. I will take some holidays as the dev team did…
I bought the aircraft a few weeks ago and I love it for the most part. The comments from Luis are spot on though. On top of that, performance is not good. I have a 4090 and a 13900 and even with frame generation, it can get quite stuttery and this without FSLTL. But as I said, I really like to fly this aircraft. It’s a nice change from the 737 and the Fenix. Overall, apart from the performance I would say it is more or less on the same level as Aerosoft’s CRJ.
Since the update I am finding that once ILS is captured the auto throttle goes full fwd and results in overspeed. (With auto throttle on).
I think this may be related to the Custom Auto Throttle or Custom ILS settings but as mentioned above, there is not much info on what exactly these do, other than a few lines in the release notes. (It is most certainly not “in depth”, unless I have missed some detailed info. If so, please do let me know).
It seems better with Custom ILS on and Custom Auto Throttle off though.
A few points:
The good news is that the devs are aware of all of the above. They announced the vacation just so we’d all know that the next 2 week scheduled upgrade won’t be coming until 4 weeks.
Great info. Thank you.
Flight sim devs have families too and its the summer months. They’re not large corporations. I think it’s fair to allow them to take some time off as well…
Fair enough but it would have been nice to know from the start of the early access program.
If you ask me the best a dev could do in these cases is not to make any promises and say “I release this as-is with no promise of adding anything, fixing anything or improving anything, if you buy it you help me”.
They choose instead to make promises and now have to stand behind those promises. But of course you are right a break with the next release date announced is perfectly understandable. Hopefully will give the devs more energy for the next improvements!
If you want a complete, polished product and an expectation of timely fixes, wait for the early access to be over before buying! 
That’s what I’m doing, and it sounds like it’s coming along nicely but still not complete.
If you want a complete, polished product and an expectation of timely fixes, wait for the early access to be over before buying!
Here here… And that’s what I’ve been saying all along. While the devs have made great strides, they certainly have a long way to go, and they know that. The plane isn’t bug free, isn’t feature complete, and isn’t optimized yet. If you want those things, stay away.
If you want to help and be part of that dev process, by all means jump in. It’s flyable (which it barely was for me at the beginning) and if you accept its limitations, even enjoyable.
As for the “vacation,” FSS is a European company I believe, so that often means, what, a month off or so during summers? I’m in the US where “vacation” usually refers to a week. A German friend of mine used to say no one in Europe would call a vacation anything less than 3 weeks .
Installed. Purchased from Just Flight, they are my favourite store nowadays. Annoying - the installer is the installer for Aerosoft One. The whole reason to buy from JF was because I don’t want anything to do with Aerosoft. Then I had to paste the license number into A1 so that it would install. The aircraft is a mess. Autopilot is hunting for altitude in FLCH mode and it does so in 2-3K feet. Overclimbs, then overdescends, then overclimbs again. This is NOT a good experience right now. I know it’s “early access”… They will PROBABLY get there at some point. That point isn’t now. The EFB is poorly designed. The highly automated E175 is not at all highly automated right now. Yes, I knew there was no VNAV yet.
I hear what you are saying, but… $40 gets you a PMDG 737-600 that isn’t a mess. This? If they know their stuff isn’t up to par, they shouldn’t have gone to the market so early in the process. Get me a VNAVless E175 and it’s ok… but an E175 that can’t maintain speed or altitude? I am all good.
Also… I bought the Red Wing Super Connie when it was early access. It wasn’t feature complete then, and the thing was… it was flyable by all basic measures. They added features such as failures over time and it was expensive for early access, but worth it in the end. They didn’t release a BROKEN aircraft, which is what this thing is right now. I can’t imagine what it was like before the latest updates.
“Vacation” is basically from july to the end of august. It varies from region to region depending on the school’s summer break which is usually 6-8 weeks. Especially throughout the month of august, everything runs a little slower in western europe.
Anyway, I remember Flight Sim Studios saying that the next update is scheduled for the 15 september.
I sent a post a we bit up but you guys might have not understood stood my jargon 
But…
I’m considering buying this as a bit like landbanking… get it cheap before the price goes up…
Do you guys think it will go up considerably once its all but near completion and worth the buy now and put it away somewhere…
Or…
Will the price be “negligible” and not worth the hassle of buying something thats not quite there yet… and just wait for the final product…
Quite tempted in doing some of those E jet flights
Realistically, the price on the Super Connie was supposed to go up once it was no longer “early access” but it never did. Honestly, a lot of the time, it’s just a strategy to encourage people to invest early. My humble advice is to wait on this. It’s not a pleasant experience right now. This is the time you could be spending actually having fun in PMDG, Fenix, Just Flight, or Leonardo aircraft without the frustration of knowing what the aircraft SHOULD do and what it’s NOT doing. 
Being honest here, I haven’t had issues like those in months. AP, AT, routefinding, altitude changes, flight level changes, ILS lock has been fine (up to this recent update, where the custom ILS has bugs). I’ve done a ton of flights and haven’t had the problems you have, so I’m at a loss there. If you’re finding issues, please (in more descriptive fashion) report them to their Discord.
I agree with you that most of the other planes you listed are better right now, but for times when I want to replicate IRL regional routes like the one I did yesterday from KEWR to KBOS it was flawless.
BTW: In Boston myself…
You raise my biggest concern about this aircraft, the E-Jets are highly automated aircraft, even a step beyond airbus in terms of the plane doing most things alone. I’m not sure the devs are really aiming at the final product I’m expecting, what we have now are some default systems mixed with very rough and often wrong custom systems that need a lot of polishing, in the best case, or redoing from scratch in the worst.
My second big worry is that while the devs seem to be working actively the quality of their work does not seem to be very good, maybe they will learn along the way but so far it seems they stepped into shoes they won’t be able to fit.
I hope to be wrong about both points.
I would also say that the textures done by X-Crafts for their X-Plane line of e-jets is not, in my eyes, in the quality that MSFS can offer. A brand new E-Jet is a beautiful aircraft and for some reason they want to depict it as a beaten up jet from the 70s or so.
But we are already in the ballroom so I think we shall dance and see what happens.
I think your post gives this thread a turn back from fantasy into reality.
I don’t see my role as defending the devs, but from the Discord, um, discourse, I believe they know actually what the E-Jet is supposed to be, and there are a number of IRL pilots active on their Discord giving a lot of feedback telling them what’s right and not… I think they know what the goal is and that they’re not there yet…
There’s also been a lot of conversation on the Discord that the current texturing is just OK for now, and certainly not what MSFS is capable of at its best. It feels very XP11 right now. They know that too, it’s just not the priority at this stage of development. There are some talented graphics sim community members who might even moderate a section of the Discord just to discuss texturing and graphics possibilities for the E-Jet…
Time will tell whether the devs can deliver the goods. I said at the beginning of the Early Access that I felt the plane was 2 years away from being at the A-level of MSFS planes, and I stand by that. They are making the slow, steady progress we all hoped and expected. Anything thinking this would be PMDG 737 level with VNAV by summer’s end was in a fantasy-land, but I can see this being at the level of the CRJ, ATR, or A310 by MSFS 2024, if the devs keep at it and we keep their feet to the fire…