A question for you - I find the iFly AP on approach to be very touchy, seemingly overcompensating for wind and gusts (even 10-15 kts) resulting in a lot of rocking back and forth left and right in a way that other plane products do not do in trying to stay on track. LNAV will also occasionally overcorrect in cruise or other phases of flight. Even in manual flight on approach I find it very touchy in scenarios where the PMDG feels rock solid by comparison.
Now, I’ve read some IRL pilots say that IRL systems sometimes aren’t even as good as in sims. For example, I recall some IRL E-Jet pilots saying that their AP, especially in the early planes, weren’t that great on approach and I’ve definitely read IRL CRJ pilots saying that their systems were legendarily quirkly, including in ways that got modeled into Aerosoft’s rendition (that some people ended up thinking were bugs but were actually just “accurate” modeling). The IRL A220 supposedly also has not terribly accurate VNAV and LNAV that needs to be babysitted (or just turned off) as well.
Your thoughts regarding iFly’s depiction of this in the sim? Thank you.
Interesting, because for me the iFly autoflight system is much more solid than the PMDG, that’s one of the things I appreciate about it. The iFly is more precise, and at the same time smoother, than the PMDG. I torture test this stuff on custom-coded RNP approaches that are real world approaches performed by 737s, but are more demanding than your standard public approach, and the new PMDG navdata can basically not do them at all, it puts me into a mountain. A transition from an RF leg in one direction to an RF leg in another direction seems to break it. The iFly makes a nice smooth roll through wings level into the other arc.
Now, I’ve read reports that what the iFly DOESN’T play nice with is any sort of add on wind or turbulence effects, like FSRealistic, Active Sky turbulence etc. Are you using anything like that? Might try disabling it and see if it helps.
I know the LNAV handling is still a work in progress, as it seems to be in every sim airplane. I’ve wondered why it’s such a difficult thing for sim devs to get right when they’ve got the computing resources of modern gaming rigs at their disposal, and the real airplane probably has less computing power than my wristwatch haha, and the plane stays absolutely glued to that magenta line. I can’t speak to an E jet (I flew brasilias and 145s years ago but we didn’t have these kinds of procedures), but a Boeing rides that magenta line like it is a literal rail. I mean, on an RNP .10 approach, you’re talking a margin of error (that’s technical error plus x trk error) of 600ft, so clearly the plane wouldn’t be certified for pax carriage while doing these things if it wobbled or got sloppy.
I imagine the difference is in the algorithms themselves. In reality, entire teams of professionals have spent years of full time work on developing and refining this performance, and a game studio has like three guys working on it for a couple months .
I’m guessing this is why this plane barely handles 2x sim rate, and 4x is totally uncontrollable? Hope this is in their next release. I did a hold the other day, and it could barely track the outbound leg at 1x.
Yeah, no sim airplane seems to handle path tracking in time accel very well. I guess this is why most airline devs have some flavor of smart time accel that slows things back to 1x for the turns.
Can’t say I’ve seen any problems with holds. Well, there was a bug with the pre-release version where it wouldn’t do left turns; no matter how a hold was coded in the navdata it was always rendered as a right turn. Wonder if that’s been fixed, I haven’t checked? It was funny; a buddy called it the Zoolander airplane lol. But yeah as far as hold entries and tracking, I’ve been happy. Remember that the outbound leg will be re-drawn as you fly based on turn radius; if you have a strong wind or are flying faster than the hold speed in the box you’ll go wide and it’ll have to re-draw. Same for leg length if you’re flying a time-defined hold.
i’ve run into some serious issues with the plane getting tossed by wx generated by activesky. i had toned down my settings a few months back because my pmdg 737s were getting wrecked by wx that didn’t seem that bad (ex. flying into a low cloud layer / fog) but this plane is still taking a beating. not sure how much more i can turn the settings down but it’s definitely impacting the plane
I posted a similar post in the PMDG 737 topic, but for anyone wondering the iFLY 737 MAX does seem to be working in MSFS2024 after copying over the iFLY folders from the LocalCache and LocalState folders. It seems to work quite well, actually.
A few issues I noticed early on:
MCP numbers don’t change (but knobs do actually work)
No RAAS (probably due to plugin not made for 2024)
They are working on it - how long it will take no one knows, depends on the amount of work they have to put in. I’d expect couple of weeks to a month or 2 as minimum.
And there are several levels of “working on it.” There’s everything from, “everything that worked in 2020 works in 2024” to the far more complicated, “it takes advantage of and is optimized for all of 2024’s new features.”
The first will probably be weeks, the later months… Remember, most of these devs just got access to the sim yesterday just when we did…
It is MUCH higher fidelity than the A320neo was when 2020 came out. But that doesn’t mean it’s “high fidelity”. It’s… fine. A competent aircraft that will get you from point A to point B. But it has issues. My one flight had (a) the APU refusing to turn off, and (b) the FMS failing to smoothly follow the ILS glideslope, resulting in a nose-down landing completely on the nose gear. (Which, of course, snapped like a twig… in all ways except visually, of course.) Also, the transponder code wasn’t changeable. Still, the flight was fine for the most part.
But I do not regret buying the iFly version for one second. It’s much superior.
I’ve tried to get the iFly to work in 2024 with no luck so far. Copied over the main Community file and the work folder to the applicable 2024 directories. Plane loads in to the sim fine, it seems. But when I try and attach the GPU through the EFB, the sim crashes.
I never tried attaching the GPU. Despite initially thinking it ran mostly fine, I gave up on getting the iFly 737 to work properly with 2024. There’s some strange sound issues. There’s no pack sounds at all, sounds are very choppy (although seems to be a known 2024 issue), and the interior sounds will completely stop working when switching to external view.
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