New Wilco A320

[Michael Blakely]

I've been flying my new Wilco A320 on some charters around the Mediterranean. These are from LEPA (Palma de Mallorca) to LICJ (Palermo, Sicily).

[Michael Blakely]

Lots of puffy clouds, but no thunderstorms.

Now.....who put this airport in the shadow of a mountain? Seems we could have found some nice flat land somewhere else.

[Theodore Martin]

Mike, what do you think of the Wilco A320? Do you have other Airbus from different developer?

[Michael Blakely]

I had the PSS airbus for FS9. The Wilco is slightly better due to:
- Start-up with aircraft already selected (PSS required the "default Cessna" approach)
- VC
- FMC (I think they call it the MCDU) is a bit more sophisticated

It doesn't model many of the non-essential systems. It seems simpler than the PMDG 737, but I think it's because the A320 is designed to be simpler to fly. The 737 requires a lot of switch throwing on start-up, while the A320 seem to start with things in the right place by default.

One thing that's a little sloppy is loading a flight plan. You have to use the FSX "load flightplan" feature, then in the MCDU you can select the pre-loaded plan.

Overall, I like it. I think it's the best you can get for FSX right now. I'll probably add the A330/340 soon.

[Harold Henderson]

The Wilco is "ok". The only real problem I had with it was in managed descents - it was really lousy there. Ended up having to set V/S in one of the descents on the Euro II checkride. That was before the "Evolution" versions/upgrade came out. Don't know if the managed descent issue is better with that.