Aug 16, 2016. As a flight in a real full cockpit A320 Simulator that is used for real pilot training (non-moving though), comes in at about 120€ or about 135$ here in Germany. That is for 120 minutes with an instruction and help by an instructor. (Got gifted such a session for my last birthday some months ago.

PSS Airbus A319/A320/A321 By Andrew Herd (18 March 2002) he Airbus was conceived and developed by a partnership between France, Germany, Spain and the UK, the result being a family of aircraft which is renowned for its use of advanced engineering techniques as it is for its safety record. While Airbus sales cannot match those of the longer established Boeing, there is no doubt that this upstart European company has unsettled its giant rival, not only by diverting sales, but also by introducing new and often radical concepts into aircraft production.

The A320, for example, is famed as the first airliner to feature fly-by-wire flight controls, a system which has the virtue of making it almost impossible for a pilot-initiated manoeuver to trespass outside the normal flight envelope. But there is more to the A320 than just an advanced control system: the flightdeck features six color EFIS displays; joystick-like controllers have replaced conventional yokes; and advanced composites are used throughout the design. Apart from fuel economy and a small noise footprint, the most attractive feature of the A320 series is that all the planes in it share a common type rating, which is possible because they have been designed to share many features.

This is a key feature of the popularity of the type, because not only does it increase crew rostering flexibility, but it also cuts down significantly on training expenditure. The A320 was launched in 1982, with first flight five years later and certification in 1988. Typically the aircraft seats 150, which is where the A319 and A321 come in - the A319 is a cut-down A320 that seats 124; while the A321 is 23 feet longer and seats 185 - see, there is some sense in those designations after all. Ranges vary from 2300 nm to 3700 nm, but these are basically transcontinental aircraft, the intercontinental role belonging to the A330/A340 series. PSS are no strangers to innovation themselves, having made their mark with the release of a, which in its day was one of the most sophisticated packages available for FS2000. The 777 was followed by a, which featured the most complete implementation of the 747/757/767 base (FMC) available for Flight Simulator until Wilco trumped it with their package.

While FMCs are something of a minority interest among flight simmers, they surely have their fans, and I have to admit that I was extremely curious to see how PSS had risen to the challenge not only of implementing an Airbus-type FMC, but also of relating it to the sophisticated electronic environment that makes up an Airbus cockpit. First, a word about the packaging. PSS have opted to market their product as a base package, costed at £15.00 (the exchange rate hovers around $1.40 to the pound), which contains six aircraft in total.

These are all in 'factory livery' and include two A319s, two A320s and two A321s. The reason for providing pairs of planes is that PSS have modelled the real world choice between CFM56 engined and International Aero Engines (IAE) powered variants of each aircraft. This may seem like a nit-picking detail, but it does produce some differences in the Engine/Warning Display readouts, in procedures, and in the sound sets. It would be super to see PSS release an A318 to go with this set, because that is a seriously dinky little plane.

The way of the marketing is that you must purchase the base package at the very least, which is a 29.85 Mb download. If you want extra liveries, then you must buy these at a cost of £5.00 each, although a clever discount scheme means that you would only pay the full amount if you purchased liveries one at a time. For example, 3 additional liveries can be purchased for £7.65, which hardly constitutes daylight robbery. A total of 94 liveries were available at the time of writing, averaging around 1.6 megs each. Inevitable comparisons are going to be made with the, and while it is true that part of the incredible popularity of the latter package must be down to the availability of a couple of hundred free paint schemes; unless you are a livery junkie, the base Airbus package and six or ten additional schemes won't exactly break the bank. The discount scheme is a great idea.

What will raise a lot of eyebrows is the download system. It is no secret that commercial flight simulation development is being bled to death by piracy, which has already led to a number of developers withdrawing hurt.

All I can say is that PSS clearly don't plan to become part of FS history and they have adopted what must be the most complex system of download registration I have yet seen. Purchase of the Airbus package begins with a visit to the web site, where you must register your name and details - don't forget, because if you don't do it now, you will just have to do it later anyway. And write your password down, because if you need to do a reinstall and you have lost it, you have had it. Manual De Pcb Wizard En Español Pdf. Then you can select your chosen combination of base package and liveries. The electronic 'basket' calculates your potential spend and it is easy to delete or add items, but do bear in mind that when you buy a livery it only applies to one variant of the plane - in other words, if you choose an A320 British Airways scheme, you won't see the A319 and A321 in that livery too. Once you have paid, you are presented with a links page from which you can download one or two files - the first being for the base package, the other for livery packs. I was surprised how fast these came down my single-channel ISDN until it dawned on me that what I had bought was no more than the keys to a fully automated install process.

Yep, you don't get to have an install file on your hard disk, because as each file in the main package downloads, it installs directly into Flight Simulator. What the file you have bought does is to trigger the download/installation process, by launching an applet which logs onto the PSS site and asking for your email address and password.

Without any particular reason, but this left me a little apprehensive, although I suppose anyone who is used to operating system updates from Microsoft should be used to this kind of thing, but fortunately you aren't left without any means of backing the product up. In response to user feedback, PSS have posted instructions on how to do this in their support forum. According to the web site, if a download fails for any reason, then it can be sorted out by simply double clicking the install file again. This would have been of entirely theoretical interest as far as I was concerned, had it not been for the fact that we had a power cut when my installation was 90% through the last file of the base pack download.

I sat looking at the point where I last saw the little white dot on the screen for quite some time, thinking bad thoughts. When we got the power back, it was clear that the installation hadn't completed, and I had to do the whole thing over. Sitting through an incredibly tedious download at one in the morning is hardly my idea of fun and it didn't help that I discovered that the reason the first download failed to install was my failure to get as far as a five second routine which generates the aircraft.cfg files. Had it not been for the PSS security system, I would have had one 4.5 Mb file to download, rather than 30 Mb.

Don't speak to me about it. Thank you for sharing. Anyway, I have got over it now and at least it proves that the system works. Had I been smart, I would probably have worked out how to selectively download the one missing file.

PSS' manuals have always been at the leading edge where flight simulation is concerned and the Airbus set are among the best I have ever seen. There are five, available as a separate download which totals nearly 13.5 megs. The zips decompress to reveal a 13 page flight manual; an 86 page aircraft operating manual; 26 pages of charts and tables for the dedicated Airbus nerd; an excellent 30 page tutorial flight, which is essential reading; and wait for it, an 89 page systems manual.

All are in pdf format, are copiously illustrated, and pretty much demand to be read. Well read on. Since real flight simmers never read manuals, we will load the plane, so we can gloat at our new acquisition.

Hoooold on there - where did the runway go? My first reaction when I looked up and focussed on the forward view, or rather lack of it, was that there had been some kind of mistake. I have seen some IFR panels in my time, but this one blots out the sun. But don't panic, there is method in PSS' madness; the way the default 2D panel fills the screen is partly the result of trying to fit a pilot's eye view into the 4:3 aspect ratio which current monitors offer, and partly because it is just about the only way to show all the glass in an Airbus primary panel. Without the big panel, PSS would have had to shoehorn in another view to fit in the System Display and the ECAM control panel - but there is a way to see out in 2D view.

If you press the '2' key on the numeric keypad, or press 2 and hold down ctrl, you are rewarded with what PSS describe as a compact panel view. This displays a cut down version of the panel, glareshield and flight control unit (FCU), which allows a conventional (for FS, anyway) forward view and lets you take off; but the one trouble with this is that because it isn't the default view it doesn't 'stick' and every time you 'look away' you lose it and have to set it up again. Pressing 8 on the numeric keypad takes you back to the expanded panel view, and various other key combinations let you access the other 2D views, or which more anon. A few words about the panel graphics might be in order here. One of the reasons that developers have stayed away from the Airbus is immediately apparent when you look at the panel; it doesn't exactly knock your eye out. This is entirely in keeping with real A320 series cockpits, which had serious attention from psychologists, designers and ergonomicists at the design stage. The result is restful to the point of being bland, the whole objective being to allow you to concentrate on the instruments, but on the downside, it siphons off any personality these cockpits might have had.

The graphical style which PSS adopted for their Boeing panels is repeated here, a sort of semi-photorealism that flattens perspective. Interesting, it ain't, but it is pretty much true to life. I'll deal with the panel in detail later on. The planes have been modelled using gmax and, in contrast to the panel, definitely raise the pulse rate. Design credit is given to Graham Waterfield of AVSIM/PSS and there is no doubt that he has done a very good job.

I didn't get a chance to look at more than a few of the liveries (if you go absolutely crazy, you can have them all for £100), but the basic visuals are excellent. If I was going to be hypercritical, I would say that PSS have gone slightly overboard with the reflective texturing, because this must be the cleanest set of aircraft in existence: the fuselages are so shiny it almost hurts to look at them, but on the whole I like the effect. I have a feeling that once we have gotten used to seeing gmax visuals, reflective mapping is going to fall out of favor, but for now, I am giving it the thumbs up.

Looking around the planes, everything that should be transparent is transparent - some neat glass effects - and if it moves, you can move it. The flap and slat animation is very neat and someone has even gone to the trouble of adding detail under the spoilers if you care to look. The oleos flex, the wheels revolve and the gear and bays are fully detailed, so I am sure that these planes are going to be watched as much in spot view as they will be used in cockpit mode. There is a flip side to all this and it is worth bearing in mind that reflective texturing is very power hungry.

Gorgeous though the planes are, my 1.7 Ghz Pentium, with 512 Mb of RAM and a GeForce 3, was subject to stuttering and delayed skinning at times. I lock my frame rates down to 20 using Lago's FSAssist, which I am currently evaluating, and this helped a great deal, by freeing up processor cycles for the display overheads, but it didn't cure the problem completely.

FS2002 is very different to FS2000 in this respect and when you are running a fully featured aircraft/panel in an airport with dense scenery, it pays dividends to use the lowest frame rate lock you can get away with. Nonetheless, I still got some single figure dips, particularly on approach to more complex sceneries like Gary Summons' Stansted, which features in some of the screen shots. The frame rate issue is known to PSS and at the time the review was being written, they were working on a fix. The flight models are in the ball park for this class of airliner, though the take off runs seemed rather long in the versions I tested.

Teesside has a 2200 meter runway and I used the whole of it up getting airborne in the 319, which didn't feel right. However, at the time of testing, PSS were actively upgrading the flight dynamics and it is possible that this will have been fixed by the time you read this and also the problems with bank angles. Given that the flight envelope is controlled to a large extent by interaction with the panel code, this may be a tough one to get right. PSS give the minimum specs to run the package as a 600 MHz Pentium III with 128 Mb RAM, 1.6 Gb hard disk space and an SVGA video card, but using this type of setup would mean turning a lot of the effects off, which would be an awful shame. Their preferred spec is a 1 Ghz Pentium III with 256 Mb Ram and a 3D graphics card. Judging from my own experience and from feedback in the forums, this is probably the minimum config that it is logical to install the package on if you want to enjoy it to the full. OK, so now we will fly it.

If you do what I did, after working out how to see outside, you will hold the bird on the brakes, floor the throttles, let N1 build up and then trickle off the runway, bouncing just on the far side of the threshold lights before you struggle skywards at about 300 feet per minute. After a quick visual check to make sure that I didn't have a comfort truck attached to the back of the plane and another to ensure that really had done the flight dynamics, I went back to school with the manuals. After all, I can't recall ever outclimbing an A320 in a Cessna 150. The answer wasn't so hard to find, and it illustrates just how different this simulation is to other packages that are available.

Unlike other big jets, the thrust levers on the A320 series move through a series of five gates, known as detents. It isn't important to know what these are for the purposes of the review, but manual thrust control of the sim is only possible if you disengage the autothrottle and set the panel thrust levers to idle, or CL, using the + and - keys on the keypad.

Under normal circumstances, this package is designed to be flown using the keypad, rather than the throttle - which makes perfect sense when you understand how the real plane is flown, which is under the control of the flight computers. One thing this is not, is a turn and burn sim, and the plane is designed, like the original, to be flown on autopilot, all the way there and all the way back. The glory of this package isn't in the panel, it is in the glass it contains.

Flying it means keeping a close eye on the four big screens - the Primary Flight Display (PFD); Navigation Display (ND); Engine/Warning Display (E/WD); and the System Display (SD). These display a vast selection of annunciators which will bewilder the novice and delight the expert and their implementation is complete right down to such nuances as a flight path vector bird and an animated display of flap deployment. The seriously large amount of data on these gauges is hard to absorb even when you are looking at them on the expanded panel and the text can be quite hard to read, so PSS have thoughtfully provided larger pop-up versions, which I presume is where the advice of Enrico Schiratti (who is mentioned in the credits) came in. Since the pop-up gauges can be undocked, I would assume that they can be moved onto a second monitor, if you have one, and they can be resized as much as you want, though this inevitably impacts on display capacity. You will need to use the pop-ups, because the text on the panel gauges can be hard to read, especially the ND, even on a nineteen inch monitor. A small bug in the ND meant that I had some trouble with the VOR IDs 'double displaying' but they were still perfectly readable. I shan't describe every function on the panel, as otherwise I might as well just post the pdfs, but suffice it to say that while every single last bitty function of the A320 avionics isn't simulated, PSS have got as near to a complete implementation as it is logical to get.

The gauge programming seems to be reliable and there are some very neat features, like an eleven mode Electronic Centralised Aircraft Monitoring (ECAM) control panel, which is hardly vital to the sim, but at least gives you something to play with on long flights while the computer takes care of the plane. Just for example, on the wheel page, you can monitor the brake temperatures on those days when the braking action isn't as good as it might be (now that would be an interesting enhancement to FS2004. Hal, you reading this?) and while the fans are cooling them down.

No, I am not joking about the fans. The Airbus doesn't have a Mode Control Panel, it has a Flight Control Unit (FCU). To look at, there is no difference between the two and guess what, when you play around with them, they do the same things, but Airbuses have to be different.

The FCU offers all the functionality of an MCP, providing control of the flight directors and autopilots; as well as control of airspeed; climb/descent speed, rate, or angle; and the usual heading and course selection. While it is intimidatingly different to the Boeing standard, the Airbus FCU has to be understood if you want to fly the plane for any more than short hops between airfields - while it only has ten pages allocated to it, they are the most important ones in the manuals.

Mastering the use of the selector controls on the FCU is absolutely vital - these can be 'pushed' as well as 'pulled' and if you don't discover how to do this, you will have to try to fly the plane as best you can by hand. The FCU briefing starts on page 30 of the Systems Manual and I suggest that you read it very thoroughly before you leave the ground.

If you get your head around this section - and it is very well written - then you will have a firm base for understanding how the glass works in the rest of panel, because there are enough annunciators, mode displays and memos to keep the most hardened techno freak interested. The mouse 'capture' areas on one or two of the knobs didn't display properly on my installation, which led to problems a couple of times when I inadvertently 'pushed' the knob when I was trying to set a new speed or flight level limitation. Engaging a new FCU mode at the wrong moment can play havoc with a flight and this area of the panel deserves some extra thought, as accidentally engaging the wrong mode can lead to the loss of a flight. The downside of all this electronic wizardry is that finding out what is going on in flight isn't as easy as you might think and differences from the Boeing panels add up to a serious need to read the documentation and learn some basic procedures before you fly. I can see that some users may find it tough getting to terms with it all, especially if they only use the package occasionally. Like the 767 PIC, this is a simulation with which you must stay 'current', or you will find that your enjoyment of flights is spoiled by having to check through the manual every time you want to do anything.

I am no exception to this rule, by the way, much as I enjoy the 767, the less I use it, the less comfortable I am with it. Great sim, nonetheless. The MCDU isn't quite as well specified as the unit on the PSS 747, though, knowing the way PSS develops things, it will no doubt gain functions through incremental upgrades as time goes on. Now you are either a flight computer person or you are not, and I know from email that many simmers think life is too short to be bothered with such things, but failing to use the one provided with this Airbus package would be a bit like buying a racehorse and then tying its back legs together. Real Airbus drivers get most of their flying hours done with this baby in charge and if you don't use it, a high proportion of the features of the sim will be inaccessible - for example, it isn't easy to do an ILS approach without it. The device has an exceptionally sharp vector graphic, which I have shown here dragged about as large as I could manage; as you can see, even allowing for a bit of jpg compression in the screen shot, it remains exceptionally clear and more than anything else, this makes the MCDU easy to use. Experienced sim instrument gladiators (you will know if you are one, if looking at the graphic has made your hands start to shake) are going to love this mother.

It makes some important and sensible departures from reality, like the ability to import FS2002 flight plans, and you can also set the V speeds up just by right clicking the line select keys - neither of which real Airbus pilots can do, but that is their loss. I am just glad that no-one managed to persuade the developers that users should be forced to use printed tables to work that stuff out, like they do in the real world. As I have already pointed out, the Airbus MCDU has significant differences from the Boeing baseline and while the basic principles are transferrable, the most battle hardened big iron drivers are going to need to do a lot of homework. There are several new keys on the main panel and the usage of color takes a bit of getting used to into the bargain. The MCDU is the one part of the panel which has significant gaps in it, but these are in seldom accessed areas and I can't get worked up about it.

The one omission that many will notice is that the hold pages aren't implemented - but though there must be people who actually enjoy flying holds, it beats me why. Doing 360s in a Cessna is bad enough, imagine tramping round and round an aerial racetrack under computer control? This is, I suspect, something that may be addressed in a patch, but most of us will get on fine without it.

Fortunately, rather than force simmers to mouse all the data in, PSS have implemented PC keyboard entry and this can be accessed by holding down the ctrl and windows keys with your left hand while typing with the right - alternatively you can define your own input method using the Panel Configuration Utility supplied with the package. The one problem with this is that it doesn't work at present, but no doubt a fix will appear for it. A worldwide nav database is provided as part of the install, as is a current set of SIDS and STARS. These are a minority interest, I appreciate, but it would have been good to see a SID/STAR preview provided, because otherwise it is all too easy to connect a STAR to a flight plan that results in backtracking and who knows what else. Sure, real pilots do have to look up their own STARS; they even have to carry them out to the plane, but I don't see that we should have to go that far in a sim.

Fortunately it is possible to do a sort of preview using the ND in plan mode, but that is a going the long way around. I found that there were quite a few European airways missing and some of the procedures were broken, but the majority were fine. Bearing in mind the cost of the product, it is reasonable to forgive the odd inaccuracy. Night lighting is supplied in what can only be described as PSS patent brown.

Anyone who bought the 747 and 777 packages will recognise this instantly and though it has nothing to do with the lighting in any real Airbus cockpit I have ever seen (it could be I have just led a sheltered existence; perhaps there are brown lights out there, somewhere), it looks great, though it would be good to see an option to have the panel lit in gray. The Airbus has a virtual cockpit (VC), but as one expects with a project as complex as this, some of the displays don't work. Many users will be unhappy about this, but developers have to face the limitations of Windows and FS2002 in GA planes, let alone commercial jets like this one. Getting every gauge not only to work, but light up at night seems to be an impossible ideal - and the results of overdoing it can be very unpredictible indeed, with apparently random failures occurring in other systems (typically, the first sign of a conflict is subtle misbehavior of gauges as Windows runs out of resources).

PSS have taken the understandable step of cutting back some on the VC in order to ensure that the rest of the panel works reliably, so for example, the navigation displays are non-functional, but it is clear that a good deal of work has gone into coding this part of the sim. If you have a hat control, a neat trick is to swap into VC mode once autoland is engaged and watch the fun as the computer flies you in. So what is it like to fly?

If you are still awake, and it looks like Tibor has definitely dropped off at the back there, give him a kick, someone, you will remember that my first flight wasn't an unadulterated success. Fresh from completing all the CAA forms and apologising to the old lady with the dog who had never seen an A320 doing bunny hops before, I read all the manuals and, taking my life in my hands, indulged in some longer flights. My first outing was the tutorial flight, from Bristol (EGGD) to Tenerife (GCTS), a typical A320 flight. The tutorial takes you all the way through from a cold and dark cockpit, so you can enjoy all the switch flicking and startup sounds from excellent Mike Hambly's sound set. The first gotcha in the tutorial is that you must have FS2002 options settings international set to metric feet, or the MCDU won't accept the Zero Fuel Weight of the plane, but you can alter this on the fly. After programming the MCDU, I advanced the thrust levers until I had 50% N1, then hit + twice to move the lever to the FLEX/MCT detente and released the brakes. Under normal circumstances I would have aborted the takeoff, but this being a sim, I hung on grimly as the plane thundered down the runway, went through the fence at the far end, crossed a road, scattered sheep to the four winds and - eventually - began to climb, albeit reluctantly.

This time there weren't any bunny hops, but then again I didn't scare the old lady either. We stayed at 160 kias until about FL60, by which time the 320 had reached twenty degrees nose up and not even the most modern avionics could save it from a stall and subsequent pile up. With the inevitable patch downloaded, I discovered that as long as I ignored the advice to engage the autopilot at a hundred feet, switching it in at around 1000 feet instead, I could make a passable getaway. To be fair, this is not PSS' fault. Microsoft completely changed the autopilot function in FS2002 and the Airbus suffers from many of the problems that derive from this, with large pitch changes as the AP is engaged and smaller pitch oscillations in climbs above FL250. Overall the autopilot is no better and no worse than any other implementation I have seen in FS2002 and until someone figures out what Microsoft have done with the code, some end-user patience is going to be necessary with this and every other addon plane that gets released. Once in the climb I had no further problems, beyond trying to figure out what various memos on the E/WD were trying to tell me (CTR TK FEEDG is a typical one, it means you need to switch off the pumps on the center fuel tank).

I also did a check of the ECAM to see how the brakes were doing and found they were already at -22 c. Fancy that, huh? There were no problems with lateral navigation and while the avionics were reluctant to engage ALT CRZ mode, it didn't seem to cause any problems. I successfully ran the sim at up to 4x speed without any trouble, though the autopilot didn't really like it. The aircraft developed an uncontrollable snake at 16x and wasn't happy about course alterations at 8x. Again, this is an FS2002 problem, rather than an Airbus bug and if you have to turn up the simulation rate, my advice is to keep an eye on the meatball. Cross wind is a real test of any package like this and I am pleased to report that the autopilot coped exceedingly well with a gusting 45 knot wind with moderate turbulence, though it must have played havoc with the refreshments trolley.

While we were running through the wave I took the opportunity to take a look in back and PSS haven't chosen to model a virtual interior - there isn't anything behind the rear cabin wall. Yeah, I know you can't have everything.

I didn't really expect there to be seats and stewardesses, but after seeing, you never know. Mentally requesting a lower flight level to get out of the turbulence, I reset the altitude on the FCU, yanked the knob, as we Airbus pilots say, and went down. The autopilot responded by retarding the throttles to idle and we lost height with an immaculate FL capture and perfect throttle advance. This is where the Airbus really shines, because you don't have to think about power, you just let the computer figure it all out. Incidentally, I don't know who wrote the ATC stuff in the tutorial, but it certainly wasn't the person who wrote the rest of the flight. Xbox Live Gold Free Scrapbook. The CAA would crush the nuts of a controller who issued a takeoff clearance like the example given, though it may well have been taken from the slightly mongrel ATC that comes with FS2002. Just to give you an idea of what can be done with the expanded gauges, I have included a screen shot of the PFD.

If you click the thumbnail here, you can have a look at the original, just as it was captured, at nearly 900x900 pixels. I could have dragged it even bigger, but as it was it was filling most of the screen.

Previously, only users of Enrico Schiratti's Project Magenta have been able to enjoy gauges that look like this and I am certain that they are going to capture the imaginations of many simmers. At this point in the flight, I accidentally hit the wrong key and lowered the undercarriage. Now I know why they give the pilots in these tubes so much training.

In most FS planes, doing something stupid like that has few ill effects and in a real aircraft, the only inconvenience you would suffer would be the gear ripping off; but in the PSS Airbus, the avionics takes over. In no time at all, the Airbus had lowered its flaps, cut the throttle and done everything it possibly could to put things right except eject me from the cockpit. Needless to say, none of this helped any, but it was an excellent demonstration of how the aircraft likes to take after you, given the chance. Fortunately there aren't any old ladies to scare in mid-ocean. Should PSS choose to do a version on floats I will be first in line.

Despite my attempts to sabotage it, the code seems to be mostly stable. I had a few problems with autothrottle and autopilot behavior after resetting flights, but in the course of writing the review I did everything you are not supposed to do in FS, like changing planes in mid-flight, pausing the sim for long periods, swapping views around endlessly, altering the view options distance and so forth and the Airbus took it all in its stride.

I found it quite impressive, because many of the more complex packages will not tolerate being treated like that. At the TOD mark, I set a new altitude and pressed the selector, putting the A320 into a managed descent. The throttles retarded to idle and two magenta speed marks appeared on the PFD, after one excursion, the autopilot locked onto target IAS quite quickly. At FL200, I engaged ILS mode on the EFIS, resetting the descent to 8000 feet as we plunged into the cloud. The autopilot managed a tight descending turn at the ARACO intersection without trouble and we were inbound.

The thing that had me spellbound was the localiser capture performance. The documentation isn't clear on the point, but manual tuning of the ILS isn't possible due to the fact that not all the radio switching keys are enabled, but you can do the job very well using the MCDU. Once you have got around the problem getting the aircraft set up right - which means that you need to access the NAV/RAD page; enter the ILS frequency in the correct slot (ensuring that NAV1 is autotuned); type in the course; then visit the PERF page and activate approach mode; setup the FCU and then, and only then press the LOC button; you are in for a treat. Microsoft's 'improvements' to the autopilot mean that very few sim aircraft perform well on autoland, and some won't even intercept a localiser reliably, but the moment LOC mode armed on the PFD, I knew that I was looking at something very different. The screen shot on the UA plane below was taken during the first full autoland approach I made with the Airbus - the plane performed so well that I just followed it all the way down in spot plane view.

By the time I had gotten around to switching back into cockpit view, the airliner was stationary on the pavement. Although there is a bug in the ILS autotune mode, I got the Airbus to land and roll to a stop without any intervention from myself (after engaging autoland) time after time. Now that is a neat trick. Should you buy this sim? My advice is that it depends on your personality and experience. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a novice or GA fan, any more than I would recommend the Wilco 767; much of the appeal of this package lies in the opportunities it gives to play around with high tech gear and the focus is turned away from the turn and burn school of simming.

It testifies to PSS' design skills that it is almost impossible to fly this plane completely by hand, just like the original, and casual users may be intimidated by the fact that it is necessary to use the FCU and MCDU for even the shortest flights. But this is how the real thing works - once the autopilot is engaged, the pilots pull out work tables from under the panel and spend the remainder of the flight minding the computers. This one is for keyboard fans, big time. The sim is complex, but once you get the hang of the panel, it works well.

It took several evenings' work before I was even moderately happy with flying the plane and even now, I am still finding stuff out. But the visual models are gorgeous and there is no way to deny that the package is enjoyable and does cast a kind of spell over you. There is a definite fascination in rising to the challenge of programming the MCDU and getting the FCU management right so that the plane just flies itself all the way home. If there is a problem with the Airbus it is that it has its share of bugs, but then so does almost every package of this degree of complexity. PSS released a slew of fixes via their support forum in the first few days after release and I am reasonably confident, given their track record, that they will get the remaining bugs sorted, given time. If you like the technical aspects of flight simulation, then at £15 the Airbus represents good value for money - so if you reckon you can take on a challenge, this one is for you.

Andrew Herd Phoenix Simulation Software.