I am not sure how to tag the 3rd party developers on this thread or even if that is allowed. But from the Piper series, we have the Warrior, Archer II, and the rest of the well known models. What we are missing is Piper’s latest aircraft the Piper P100i. Is this a doable aircraft in the simulators? I feel that this plane would benefit schools who use these aircraft in real life for the students to practice on with systems and handling. I know for sure the school I go to would benefit. Maybe they can create the aircraft and solicit liveries for the flight school or the different configurations and build it to match their real life configurations. I feel there is some money left on the table here.
Standard it comes with a Garmin 3x Touch, GNX375 with transponder, Garmin 225B Nav/Com, GFC 500 3 Axis AP, and a G5 for backup/standby with the Lycoming IO360B 4 with 180HP.
My thoughts: I’m not buying any aircraft that use Asobo’s G3X Touch. I’d be surprised if somebody coded their own just for the PA-28, which is all the P100i is–a new Archer. In its current state MSFS can teach as many bad habits as good ones when it comes to real life flying. Sorry to be a pessimist but I don’t see much of a market for yet another trainer.
To be frank, I think a sim rendition of this aircraft would be a terrible commercial prospect for any developer.
Even if every flight school using these bought it that’s still just a handful of copies sold in the grand scheme of things, and that isn’t going to happen. Are the flight schools also going to buy and set up gaming PC’s with peripherals for students to practice on?
Meanwhile, to the MSFS community at large, this is just a marriage of an airframe from a family which is already well-represented in the sim (as you mention) with avionics that are generally disdained by many simmers (either because of problems with Asobo’s implementation of the G3X or because they just don’t like glass cockpit flying in general). So at best it doesn’t really offer anything new and to many would be seen as inferior to the renditions of the Archer, etc we already have.
Interesting points of view. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I do beg to differ about the Archer being well represented. The Archer for MSFS is not a good representation, I’ll give it a rough percentage of about 60% close to the real thing. The flight model is way off and it does not behave the same way in the real world. Case in point, when doing power on or power off stalls, at the point of minimum controllable airspeed, the Carenado model immediately loses lift on the right wing and goes into a spin, 100% of the time. The platform should be extremely stable even at minimum controllable airspeed with proper rudder inputs. It’s one of the reasons why the Archer platform is selected more often for training aircraft because of it’s stability. It’s also extremely nose heavy like a Seminole in the simulator which is not the case in real life. JFs Warrior model has a much better representation of a more accurate flight model/behavior but the platform does not have the 180HP option for its engine which is what makes an Archer…an Archer.
If I knew enough on how to tweak or design an aircraft, I’d do myself.
I won’t argue about the G3X interface. It is disasterous.
But that’s one of the points I am trying to make. With the likes of the PMS & TDS GTN750 and 650, I’m sure someone out there can replicate the G3X touch or the GNX375 from the Garmin trainer software.
Also, the flight school I am currently at for my commercial ratings, does in fact use MSFS and does in fact have an entire simulation lab of 20 computers with full peripherals for each for training. They use it for training people on the G1000 series, lectures about systems/aircraft behavior, XC flight planning, and also for the many high school outreach programs they run. In the real world there is no certifiable P100i BATD or AATD device so using MSFS as an introduction could help reduce the overall familiarization time for students.
With the P100i made specifically for flight schools and many of them transitioning to the platform because of it’s reduced cost compared to a fully decked out new Skyhawk, I have no doubt about the actual market value of bringing a P100i representation into the MSFS Ecosystem is in fact a worthwhile venture. If I had that during my PPL and Instrument training, I could have saved a lot of money by training at home before going into the plane for my lesson, which I still used the Archer in MSFS for, but it still didn’t have a very good representation of it
My point was that we already have models of lots of the “Cherokee family” in the sim, as you yourself mentioned in the first post.
But from the Piper series, we have the Warrior, Archer II, and the rest of the well known models.
I didn’t comment on the quality of the Carenado Archer in particular or any of the others. (Although some of them like the Just Flight models are very highly regarded.)
The bottom line is lot of people would say “Do we really need another Cherokee derivative in the sim? Nah.”