Winch launch and self launch gliders

Heideflieger · July 22, 2022 at 4:37 PM

Hello IPACS, thank you very much for your new AF4! As an Aerofly-User from the beginning I see the progress, but also incomprehensible things.

For example:

It's very sad, that there are not new planes for general aviation, instead of this fewer because of the missing third party planes. I'm missing modern planes with glass cockpit (Diamond, Cirrus...) und also gliders with engine or winch-start. In my opinion the Aerofly FS has been a fantastic possibility for doing vfr-flight. In this regard the step from the AF 1 to AF 2 was a disappointment, because the winch-start was not possible any more, und there were no more glider with engine for selfstarting.

My question: Do you have plans to add such planes and possibilities in the future?

Jet-Pack (IPACS) · July 22, 2022 at 8:51 PM Official Post

The old winch launch system caused a lot of issues for the developers at the time and had to be removed in order to create the new Aerofly FS core that now runs super fast on many platforms. As a glider pilot myself I'd love to see the winch launch coming back at some point.

The self launch glider used a model with lower quality textures which unfortunately was deemed not worth the effort of updating to meet the quality requirements. The physics for retractable propellers should still work though, so any third party developer could implement that. Same concept as tilt rotors or thrust vectoring, that's all possible just not used to full potential at the moment.

Regarding modern glass cockpits: They are not too easy to implement, a lot of time goes into these complex avionics systems. But I think it's viable to implement them in Aerofly FS 4 over time.