First of two planned flights for today. Just finished the first in Hamburg, set to the early evening. I started with the BBJ1 set up on the runway, and imported one of four preset panel states, which range from "cold and dark" to "before taxi" (you can also define that the planes always start with a preset panel state, wich for me usually is c&d). I had electricity when loading "before taxi", but engines were not running. It was nice to find my way thorugh the panel due to former 737 modules, making some light, and getting the engine started, pretty much the same way like I used to do in the old PMDG 737. I had no flight plan, just wanted to manually take off, cycle, and then land. The BBJ it was because it has the HUD.
On the HUD, you access it from 2D where it replaced the front view that deletes the cockpit, gives you full sight and just five basic instruments at the bottom. Here you have no instruments, but the HUD. In VC, you can click on it on the top of your windshield, it then slowly moves down and into place. In VC, I found it to be quite dark, both the glass, and the dark grey-green symbology, in 2D it was bright green. The display infomation is functional and very nice I think especially during takeoff and landing. But in VC I really would not use it beside these two phases of flight. Also, while it is a solid design, it is a bit blocky and not really animated in fine lines, so: it is nice to have it, one can use it, but one maybe will not miss it too much when flying one of the 600-900 range of 737s that do not offer the HUD option.
The flight went fine, with solid frames over Hamburg by night, with lots of light effects, Ultimate terrain europe, Environment, German Airports, and mixed sky condition. I noticed that when looking to the left side, frames, locked at 32, dropped for a split second to around 27-28, an effect that may be stronger with the HUD being run in VC, and while the addons and lights may contreibute to system stress in this location, I have not seen this happening in any of my other addon planes, not the Level-D767 and not the Piper Cheyenne and not in the Flight1 ATR and not i the PMDG747 - all of these once were known as frame hogs, but the iFly 737 maybe consumes more system resources than any of these. However, despite these rare micropauses, playability did not suffer at all, and there were no other "problems".
It looked all very niuce, the cockpit light in VC is the best I have in any of my airliners, I just love it and have the dome light on all time: it is that certain DefCon-1 kind of atmosphere it creates. Lights on the 2D panels also were nice, giving a good mixture of lit instruments and generally lit panel.
The plane, manually flown via stick, felt very heavy, and reacted slower than I expected and am used to froim the 747. Well, that is a change. I do not know if that is realistic behaviour, or a bug (don'T think so), but it certainly gives you the impression to handle something really big and heavy. I got used to it, after all you do not fly a 737 to do aerobatics with it. The manual approach went very differently therefore, with me needing more time and a longer line-up distance than expected, that'S why I needed a second approach. I do not know if that is realsitic when flying the 737 manually, but I armed speedbreaks, but they did not activate on touch-down, maybe becasue AT was not engaged?! For the same reason I think the reversers also did not sprung to life, without AT they do not do it. It took me half an hour to figure that out!
After all, it was a very satisfying short flight experience, and the plane felt different than expected - but "right". If that is realistic or just a tricky illusion, I cannot judge and it does not really bother me. That it gives me a convincing sim experience, from my point of view - that is what convinces me.
The sounds were different than I remembered from videos. Sound mods got mentioned, maybe I took one of these mods for the default sounds in those vids. However, the default ones are not bad - just not so attention-catching like those I heared before.
I noticed the 737 was rolling in idle with parking brakes released, don'T know if that is realistic?! N1 was 20.3 and N2 was 59.3 at idle - empty plane, no pax, no cargo.
Well, good start so far. Show continues later this afternoon with a prepared flightplan LOWW-EDDG and full autoflight. Then it is about autopilot systems, FMC and CDU. But there are vids on youtube showing flawless operations like that, so I do not expect any bad surprises anymore.
I came over some discussions between guys arguing about whether the to-be-released FSX-onmly PMDG 737 or the iFly, now available for both FS9 and FSX, offers richer details and realism. Well, for FS9-users like me, that is a no-brainer. PMDG does not offer the new 737 for FS9, and the old one which they released so many many years ago, always remained to stay in a medicore state, imo, it had some issues especially with flight dynamics in certain autopilot modes, and visually it now is inferior, too. Do FS9 users interested in a new 737 sim have alternatives to iFly these days? I don'T think so. And the argument over the FSX, PMDG still needs to release their package, and then - I leave the disucssion to those whom it concerns: FSX-users exclusively.
Tests run green lights so far, everything looks like this is a real winner!