MSFS Airliner Revolution! Synaptic A220 & BlueBird 757 | The Major Development

[00:00:00]Hello and welcome back to the channel.

[00:00:01]If you've been following Flight Simulator for the past few years, you know that we're living through a golden era of airliner development. But there's one lesson the Flight Sim community has learned the hard way, and that's building highfidelity airliners from scratch is a gauntlet.

[00:00:16]Two of the most anticipated aircrafts for Microsoft Flight Simulator are coming out pretty quickly here. And we're talking about the Synaptic A220 and the Bluebird Boeing 757.

[00:00:28]Both projects are on the cusp of being released with the A220 any week now and the 757 is locked for quarter number three. But getting here wasn't smooth sailing. Both teams underwent massive scope shifts, complete code rewrites, and developer changes. Today, we're looking at a dynamic evolution of both projects, what went down behind the scenes, and why these two aircraft might define the next generation of airliner simulation. Let's start with the Airbus A220. Originally announced as a freeware project, Synaptic set out with a passionate community team aiming to bring the Airbus's modern narrowbody regional jet to the Flight Sim world.

[00:01:09]But as systems grew more complex, the team realized that delivering a surface level freeear aircraft wouldn't cut it.

[00:01:17]In early 2024, Synaptic made a major announcement that they were pivoting from a freeware to a highfidelity commercial release in partnership with Inbuilds.

[00:01:27]Partnering with Inbuilds provided infrastructure, publishing reach, and resources needed to take the project to the finish line, but making the true-to-life A220 required rebuilding the plane. The real A220 runs on Rockwell Collins Proline Fusion avionics, which features graphical flight planning, a system notorious for being incredibly difficult to code in simulators. Synaptic literally gutted and completely rewrote the entire flight management system from the ground up.

[00:01:56]Over 21,000 lines of code were written to ensure full navigation, temperature compression, performance calculations, and true graphical flight planning directly from the map's displays. And it's not just the avionics. They modeled a custom electrical system with nearly 650 components, custom flight control laws, and even physics driven control surface reactions. Meaning if your hydraulics are decompressed, the elevator and ailerons will drop and flutter realistically in crosswinds.

[00:02:30]Adding custom audio from Echo 19, capturing that ionic PW engine howl. And the A220 has evolved into a powerhouse.

[00:02:40]Following a massive reception from the expo and from recent developer streams, Synaptic is putting a final touch on the system and the wait is almost over.

[00:02:52]While Synaptic was mastering modern flybywire avionics, Bluebird Simulations was tackling one of the most beloved Boeing jets of all time. That's the 757.

[00:03:02]The story of Bluebird 757 is the classic case of necessary scope evolution.

[00:03:07]Originally envisioned as a mid-fidelity product targeting a release of 2023, the community's appetite for deeper systems pushed Bluebirds to pivot its building to a full-fledged study level airliner.

[00:03:20]That shift came with engineering hurdles. The team experienced significant developer turnover early on, requiring a new team to step in and completely rewrite the aircraft's code with WASM to achieve a massive performance and system death required.

[00:03:36]That rewrite paid off. Priced at $80, the 757 isn't cutting corners. Bluebird has mapped over 500 circuit breakers with over 200 fully functional at launch directly tied to the electrical buses.

[00:03:51]They built a custom flight control computer for autopilot modeling the FMC and engineered dynamic environmental systems under the ATA2.

[00:04:03]Bluebird is currently pushing through multi-stage beta testing with systems being polished for a firm quarter 3 release window. It will launch initially for flights sim 2020 that will work with 2024 but then a full 2024 version will be released to those users.

[00:04:23]Looking at both the A220 and the 757 side by side, their journey tells us a lot of where flight simulation is today.

[00:04:31]Great developers are no longer willing to rush out halffinish products just to hit the calendar date. Whether that's Synaptics spending their time to write a 21,000 code change or Bluebird taking their time to rebuild the back end of 500 circuits, both teams chose long-term quality over quick release hypes. And as virtual pilots were the ones who will benefit. One of the things that has been remarkable within the Flight Sim world is the advancements with social media and having access to all this information whenever we want. And that also comes with a price. And the price is that we continue getting little tips and tricks and information about these developers working on products such as a 220 and the 757. We've known the development for quite a while. And in the past, we're talking about the early days of flight simming. When developers were working on a new plane, we wouldn't really know about it until it was getting really, really close to release or has been released. And because of this modern age of social media, we now want and desire these products faster and we expect the developers to push them out sooner. And that is not the case because while the teams might have grown slightly with modern technology, it still is a complex system to work on to ensure that they're properly working planes, that the audio is up to date, the graphics are up to date, and that the optimization behind the scenes can run on most PCs and potentially on a console. And I feel that we need to be patient with all these developers. I want the 220 to come out. I've been raving about it for a long while. I want the 757 to come out.

[00:06:16]Again, same thing. But we have to be patient and allow these developers to work on these products instead of pushing them to release that product before it's ready because then we have a product that comes out that's not ready to be released and us as the pilots are going to be paying the price. And I really, really want to know what interests you in either one of these two planes. Uh they're both very different from each other. They're both different in terms of modern versus a legacy plane and you know fly by wire versus not flybywire, Boeing versus Airbus. There are enormous amount of differences between these two planes, regional versus long, you know, flying. And I so I'm big into short flights. I have absolutely love it. If you've been on this channel, if you watch any of the streams, you know that I typically do short hall flights. Uh, but the 757 of course is a incredible aircraft just to look at period, but also the system depths of what Bluebird looks to be doing with it and I'm very intrigued.

[00:07:18]But for me personally, I'm super super excited for the 220 more than I am for the 757. Now, when it comes to the release of these two planes at the end of it, oh, which plane am I going to fly the most is going to be the big question. But I'm very curious to what you think. which one is your going to be your plane you're going to fly the most and uh you know are between the two of them which one let's say they both came out in the same day which one you would purchase first that is definitely the big question and of course leave me a comment down below with that information give me a like up for this video and please subscribe to the channel we'll see you for the next video everyone as always take care flying