Good news for flight simulation enthousiasts! Those who had stopped looking for a virtual MD-11 will have an opportunity to fly this legendary aircraft.
The Rotate company, which makes virtual aircrafts for the X-Plane flight simulation platform, has decided to make a virtual MD-11. It is quite a challenge but the progress is steady.
A few years ago, another company, PMDG, created a virtual MD-11 but decided to drop the product and let down the customers who had bought their excellent aircraft. They stopped providing updates and eventually erased the MD-11 from their list of products.
Since then, many flight simmers have been wondering if they could one day learn to fly the MD-11. Numerous crashes of MD-11s have happened in real life since its creation by Mc Donnell Douglas. They were mostly due to pilots unable to master the aircraft, except in the case of Swissair 111.
The Rotate’s staff have recently published a new photo (see above) on their WEB page to show that the virtual aircraft is slowly taking shape. The graphic quality is really superb.
In an interview given to PC Pilot in the March/April edition, Rotate said that they want to achieve a high level of simulation with the MD-11, but that they still have a long way to go. They stated that the MD-11 is much bigger and much more complex than the MD-80 (that they are already offering) and that they want the MD-11 to reflect those characteristics.
Those who fly using FSX will now be able to add X-Plane as another flight simulator to their computer and thus use the MD-11 when it will be ready (probably around the end of 2019).
The beauty with X-plane is that the 64 bits platform uses all six cores of the new CPUs on the market. The FPS (frame per second) number is thus very high, which will allow users of the MD-11 to fly around huge virtual airports when the weather is complex without having to compromise.
Another positive aspect is that ORBX now offers products for X-Plane, which will greatly increase the choice of quality virtual sceneries.