Hi all, I’m glad to present you the latest plane from AzurPoly.
The SOCATA TB-30 Epsilon is a military training light aircraft designed and built by SOCATA in Tarbes, France. With one engine and a crew of two, teacher and student, it looks like many other training aircraft. It is used by France, Portugal, Senegal, and Togo.
The feeling is just incredible, it’s like a mini jet, the sound is good and PBR texture looks very realistic.
I made a trailer aboard this plane , I hope you will like it Manual PDF
I bought the plane and it is great (Xbox Series X). Just one problem: the gamepad keeps vibrating all the time and I had to turn vibration off. I’ve never experienced this problem with other planes. Any tips?
I’ll be having this! When I saw the first pic I thought “bet it’s yet another glass 'pit!” but no! That’s great - I love steam gauges and the option to switch off the GPS!
This will do me nicely while waiting for the PC-9 - and probably thereafter.
Shame we had to listen to some tune on the vid, though, would much rather hear the engine.
edit: I looked through the marketplace a couple of hours ago, when I bought the Beech D18S - didn’t see this at all
2nd edit: from MSFS add-ons:
The TB-30 Epsilon is available now in the MSFS Marketplace, for both PC and Xbox, priced at €19.99.
Good morning. What a beautiful plane. I’ve spent a few hours in it yesterday and it’s really great.
Just the constant vibration on the xbox controller is a downside but i am sure this will be fixed soon.
i would encourage the devs to think about an autopilot in the EFB like flyingiron planes have. it is a good compromise and keeps the plane authentic. also having the wind data in the EFB would be great especially when landing on small strips without tower it is essential to have wind data.
i read the manual and was looking for details about cruise RPM and MP. maybe this information can be added how to operate the plane correctly.
either way it is already a great plane and i am off to another flight now.
i have had a chance to fly around a bunch in the tb-30 and have some thoughts and issues that i want to call to the developer’s attention.
first, let me start by saying i really like this plane. the flight model feels just right - full disclosure, i have never flown one of these in real life so i can only base this off my time in other planes but there’s something really nice about flying this plane. it doesn’t feel too twitchy but it responds very quickly to your inputs. the stalls (power on and power off) feel super realistic and the spins…whoaaaa, the spins. so good.
here are a handful of issues that i have noticed:
i really like the sounds. taxiing with the canopy open is absolutely phenomenal. once you close the canopy the engine sounds get a little too quiet (imo). once you get flying the wind noise really seems to drown out the engine almost completely. it’s a little disappointing since the sounds of the engine & prop are really top notch on the ground. outside views of the plane sound good so i think it’s just a balance thing.
one last little thing on the sounds. the starter sounds cool but there is a very abrupt change from when the starter stops to when the engine kicks in. it’s almost like there’s no sound there for a beat and then you have the engine running. not sure how hard it would be to make a little smoother transition from starting to running but that would be cool, if possible.
dme/ndb - the radio seems to operate in reverse of how it should. when you rotate the dial to change frequencies it is changing the numbers on the left, not the right so it appears as though you are changing the active frequency.
dme - i have scoured the manual but cannot figure out where the distance is actually displayed in the cockpit. i have tried multiple ndbs and just don’t see any distance indication anywhere. there’s a distance indicator on the hsi but it always reads —.
hsi - when trying to change the heading bug it is soooooooo slow to rotate. i haven’t tried but i am betting it would take upwards of 30-45 seconds to get the bug to move 180 deg even with my mouse wheel unlocked and rolling at full speed.
tds650 - when i change the nav frequencies on the tds650 they are also changing on the radio stack on the left. i was under the impression that the gps unit was nav1 and the radio stack controlled nav2 but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
hsi - i can’t seem to figure out how to rotate the course arrow. using vor, i have to cut over to nav2 and use the card to the left of the mfd because not only can i not rotate the course arrow on the mfd, there’s no cross-track indicator either. again, might be something i am doing wrong but if so it’s nothing obvious.
All extremely good questions. I tested everything on your list and couldn’t find any answers, and confirmed all of the same problems, though the HSI’s distance indicator does work if you have a nav frequency in range. It definitely doesn’t respond to NDBs though, I think you’re right that nothing in the cockpit shows the distance despite the manual stating “You can set any NDB frequency with right knob to retrieve your current distance from it” - where though?
Have you reached out to AzurPoly via email yet? I’ll be doing so as well.
I probably won’t be buying this one because I’ve bought too many other planes recently and am still waiting for Carenado’s PC-12, but I absolutely love AzurPoly’s BD-5J, so I expect this will also be super fun in much the same spirit.
Lovely aircraft but I have a slight niggle.
I was trying to trim out to counter the engine torque and noticed that I couldn’t quite get it right, was either too little or too much.
While using the mouse on the in cockpit aileron trim wheel I noticed that it doesn’t increase smoothly. It would jump numbers sometimes, like from 0.1 to 0.3, I don’t have an axis I can bind to aileron trim so this is problematic for me.
