> “All aircraft have been reviewed with professional pilots who have many hours flying these aircraft or test pilots from the manufacturers to make sure they are controlled exactly like they should.” … In other words, when sim-pilots try to yank-and-bank an A320, they will get the exact same response as if they were flying the real thing.
For contrast read some takes by professional pilots, here’s one[0]:
> I’ll confess that I don’t know that type of modelling FS2020 is using. But given how it feels, and how it’s the child of FSX, I’m inclined to think it’s using a lookup table. This isn’t necessarily a problem — a good lookup table with many data points could be just as good, if not better than, a blade-element model. Unfortunately, FS2020 doesn’t seem to have a good lookup table. The the linear behaviour unrealistic and the non-linear modelling is terrible.
> Maneuvering is laughably easy — and not because the aircraft handles nicely. It’s easy because the aircraft feels like it has no inertia. Yes, the real plane is very maneuverable and responsive, but there’s a “weight” to direction changes which is completely missing. In FS2020, you can instantly pull 60 degree or more turns, and exit them just as quickly. In XP11, there’s a residual tendency to turn that you have to arrest when exiting a maneuver.
If you care about how the world looks, get MSFS. If you care about the physics of flying, get X-Plane—it’s an excellent project developed by a smaller company and sold for a fraction of the cost of Microsoft’s product. XP strives to provide the actual fine-grained simulation of flight surface behavior based on weight, shape, etc. (Yes, this means your computer will spend most of its resources simulating rather than painting a pretty picture.)
If I had to draw a parallel, X-Plane is more or less the iRacing of flight sims, while MSFS2020 is closer to something like F1 2019.
[0] https://medium.com/swlh/microsoft-flight-simulator-2020-no-c...
Bias statement: I own a copy of XP11, otherwise not affiliated.