FlightOne Piper Meridian

By Andrew Herd (14 February 2003)

ny airplane is interesting, but some are more interesting than others, like the man said. Some are so interesting that you have to guard them with electric fences - the Piper Meridian being a case in point. A thoroughbred through and through, Piper's flagship is not only stunning to look at, it has performance to match; and now we can all enjoy it, thanks to FlightOne.

The Meridian has its roots in the Malibu, a high performance six seater turbocharged single designed to compete with the Cessna Centurion. The Malibu was certified in the early eighties and remains a popular aircraft today, with over 900 hulls sold, mostly as the powerful 350 hp Mirage version; which can be wound up to 196 kias for long range cruise at FL250. However, this still isn't fast or high enough for some, so Piper designed the Meridian to fly all the way up to FL300 at 262 kias.

Buy Piper's newest toy and you get one hell of a lot of airplane for your money: a flat rated 500 hp P&W Canada PT6A-42A turboprop, driving a four bladed constant speed Hartzell prop; an rate of climb that is sustained at over 1700 feet per minute; and state of the art Meggitt digit avionics. Apart from the engine and the avionics, there are other external differences between the Meridian and a cooking Malibu. The first is a much bigger tail, which increases lateral stability in order to cope with the extra power, but the Meridian also has wing root extensions which keep the stalling speed down to 61 knots. The cost is a cool $1.4 million or so, but it gets you a single which outperforms many regional passenger twins and if you can't stretch to a real one this month, FlightOne will sell you a sim for only $29.95.

Part of the reason for my interest in the Meridian is the avionics, which are built by Meggitt. This company is an extraordinary success story and is sweeping the board with its innovative digital display systems; and it also markets the very popular S-Tec series of avionics. Meggitt instrumentation is fitted to more than thirty aircraft types, ranging from Boeing 737s all the way up to the U2. The Meridian has the MAGIC® (Meggitt Avionics next Generation Integrated Cockpit), which is an outstanding fully-certified solution providing a Primary Flight Display, Navigation Display, Engine Display Unit, and Air Data Attitude Heading Reference System. MAGIC interfaces with most new GPS systems and autopilots and has the major advantage of allowing provision of integrated avionics and flight information to a standard normally only found on commercial or military panels. In addition to the flight displays, the Meridian system comes with the MAGIC® 2100 DFCS - a digital attitude based flight control system in an avionics stack-mounted case, which contains a mode selector/programmer, annunciator, roll, pitch & yaw computers and servo amplifiers. This, along with integrated altitude selector and alerter modes, amounts to the most sophisticated avionics suite available for GA planes.

Just taking a quick look at the engine, the benefit of flat rating the PT6A is that it allows the Meridian to cruise high and fast at relatively low operating temperatures and without any noticeable power loss. Although this approach sacrifices lower level performance to a certain extent, it massively extends engine life and greatly eases maintenance cycles. The over-riding philosophy of Meridian flight is therefore to get into an airway and stay there, but in doing so many pilots must reflect on the one weakness of the aircraft, which is that its load carrying capability isn't huge and the fuselage is relatively tight. Despite all the advanced avionics and a state-of-the-art engine, the Meridian is based on a twenty year old airframe and if Piper were designing it from scratch it would probably look very different indeed. But what a plane, huh?

If the Meridian itself is a real one-off, the FlightOne development team that brought us the sim must be one of the most impressive ever assembled to tackle an FS project. The visual model is by Roger Dial, the flight dynamics by Steve Small, sound by Mike Hambly and panel graphics, photography and documentation by Jim Rhoads, who was also team lead. Ben Beverly led the test and Dave Schofield wrote the tutorials and assisted with testing.

The documentation is impressive, not least because of its somewhat unconventional origins, at least by FS standards. A 117 page manual is included, but even so, this only just has enough space to cover the checklists and the details of how to get airborne (as with all FS planes, you can just firewall the throttles and fly, but that ain't the point with an add-on like this one). By and large any detail on how to use the avionics is absent and I leafed through the printout with increasing frustration until it dawned on me that I was looking at something quite different to the ordinary run of flightsim add-ons.

If you want to understand more about how the sim works, there are links in the manual to the equipment manufacturers' websites, which allow you to download the real world manuals as PDFs. Oh, yeah, I can hear you thinking, 'For what? Why should I read a 70 page manual on the S-Tec 550X, or a 200 page guide to a GPS, just so I can play with a sim?' Well, the news is that the Meridian is a just a little out of the ordinary as FS add-ons go, because the vast majority of the avionics work exactly the way their real life counterparts do, and the best way to find out what you need to know is to... read the real manuals. Yep. It is a little bit jaw-dropping, but that is how it is, and while I am sure that some users will be a little shocked to discover that the main manual only has, for example, enough got enough space to detail how the hotspots work on the altitude preselector, leaving you to read the manufacturer's literature to figure out the rest; others are going to be in seventh heaven when they make the discovery. This is the most ambitions GA add-on for Flight Simulator I have ever seen. If you want to know how a Meridian is flown, the only way of doing better would be to start talking to a Piper dealer, and I am as certain as I can be that this add-on will be a huge hit with PPLs as well as simmers, because as usual, Jim Rhoads has designed it to sing to pilots.

The package is available as a 52 Mb download from the FlightOne website and installs using FlightOne's standard key system. After your credit card is processed, a software key is sent to you and this must be validated online before installation can proceed. The package costs $29.95 and there is an option to buy a real Piper Meridian POH for $39.95. Quite how FlightOne have managed to keep prices so low, I have no idea, because the Meridian is two or three times more complex than the average thirty dollar FS add-on and could have retailed for twice the cost and still been a bargain. I had no problems with download and setup - although it is a little unusual by FlightOne's standards, since once the main package has installed, there is a second stage in which the Garmin interactive trainer for the GNS530 GPS is loaded. Once the installation was finished, I found the plane, panel and sound set installed in FS2002, a folder containing documents and links, a copy of Text-o-Matic (FlightOne's livery installation program), and a configuration manager for the sim.

System requirements are:

Minimum: CPU 1.0, 256 MB RAM, video card with 32 MB 1024x768x16
(Compatibility Check for Win98/WinMe)

Recommended: CPU 1.4, 384 MB RAM, video card with 64 MB 1024x768x16, Win XP/2000 (Compatibility Check for Win98/WinMe)

Best: CPU 1.7 and above 512 MB RAM, video card with 128 MB 1024x768x32, Win XP/2000 (Compatibility Check for Win98/WinMe)

The reason for the compatibility check is that the Garmin 530 relies on an a separate 16 bit Windows application to run and FlightOne have sensibly made it possible to check if this will work before paying for the sim. You can download the software to do this at the bottom of the website page here.

Having used the package, I would say the specs are remarkably honest, and I definitely would not try running the sim on anything less than a one gig Pentium or eqivalent. The package stresses FS2002 to its absolute limit and while it ran fine on my home system - which coincidentally lies right on the 'best' spec - I had to change my FS setup to get it to do so. Normally I hate doing this, but on this occasion it was worth it, believe me.

The plane itself is a Gmax model and the configuration manager allows you to install it either with frame-saving DX3 textures, or with more detailed, but inevitably more processor intensive 32-bit ones. While the visual model isn't quite in the class of FlightOne's Cessna 421, it is very good indeed, and it looks outstanding with the 32 bit texture set applied. Roger Dial is well known for his artistry in Gmax and he has captured the flowing lines of the original perfectly - and if the sim lacks the very fine detail we have come to expect from Roger, this is because the Meridian is an exceptionally clean aircraft. There is a full house of animation, some of it very clever indeed; for example, you can't open the doors when the cabin is pressurised, which is neat. FlightOne only provide a single livery, but unless I am wrong the Meridian will go on to become one of the best selling FS packages of all time and there will be hundreds of repaints to choose from. Text-o-Matic will make it very easy to distribute alternatives and if Roger can be encouraged to do some more of his outstanding liveries, I would be really glad to see them.

The flight model is an absolutely stunning achievement, squaring the difficult circle of keeping the performance on or near the numbers while providing the feel of a plane in this class. Not only is it the best thing Steve Small has ever done; it also has the distinction of being the best FS2002 flight model I have ever used; capturing the sheer power of the Meridian as well as showing off its maneuverability.

While there is a definite limit to what can be achieved where handling is concerned in FS, Steve is one of the few people who can reliably pull off the trick of transforming a collection of random values into what feels like a credible plane. The Meridian flight model is impressive on several counts: first, it works like a turboprop should, which is easier said than done, given the buggy state of the FS2002 TP; second, it combines book performance at altitude with realistic handling on the approach; and third, it is one of the few FS air files I have used recently which wasn't cursed with unrealistically twitchy pitch. I don't know what it is about FS aircraft, but in general they are much harder to fly down a glideslope than the real thing, chiefly because of poor pitch modelling. This behaviour has been carried over from the default planes to many add-ons, possibly because that is what simmers have grown to expect, but in general it simply isn't true of today's non-aerobatic GA planes, because they have had that kind of deficiency bred out of them.

The sound set is by Mike Hambly and it captures the bass whine of a turboprop well, although I wonder if it is actually a recording of a Meridian PT6-A. The wav files are long enough that there is hardly any noticeable cycling and there aren't any artefacts either, but something about it isn't quite right. One thing you will notice is the trim operating, which is annoyingly loud - I have never been in a real Meridian, but I would be amazed if it was true that a million dollars doesn't buy you a quiet trim. However, these are small gripes and in general the package sounds good.

And now for the panel... just take a peek at the screen shot for a little while first. Yep, it really is as good as it looks and the most extraordinary thing about it is that on my 1.7 Ghz PIV it ran at 15-16 fps all the way, which is amazing considering how finely detailed the gauges are and how much code there is driving them. The 2D panel is, without question, the best I have ever seen, in any sim, whatever, and it is just a feast for the eyes, with the sharpest panel edits around and great visuals. Given that the Meridian has just about the most sophisticated set of flight instruments available for a GA plane, I guess we had better move on quickly, before my drool starts gumming up the keyboard.

The four instruments which make up the heart of the panel are the three MAGIC displays and the Garmin GNS 530. Just do not ask what these cost in real life - the 530 alone is beyond the pocket of most owners. At the top, above the center of the yoke, is the Meggitt Primary Flight Display or PFD; below that is the Navigation Display (ND); then going to the right of them, at top, you find the Primary Engine Display Unit or EDU; and below that is the GNS 530. Above the left handle of the yoke, top to bottom, are the autopilot annunciator; the S-Tec Altitude Selector/Alerter; and (believe it or not, but steam instruments are darned useful when the all lights go out inside a cloud) a common or garden turn and bank indicator. Next row to the left has a very sophisticated clock/cockpit voice recorder, a cooking VOR/glideslope indicator, and the cabin pressure display. If you work it right, the clock will even go through the checklists for you.

Now take a look up on the right of the glareshield is a set of gleaming red icons which variously pan the viewpoint up and down and let you extend the view over to the right. You can also use them to display an IFR view which brings the electrical subsystems and the flap gauge into view. If you hit the right hand button, it lets you access the functions of the autopilot stack, which sits above a tantalisingly non-working Bendix King Multi-function display (I guess FlightOne had to stop somewhere, but maybe one day we will see it light up). At the top of the stack is a Garmin audio selector, below which is the autopilot itself. Above this stack are a set of backup analog gauges and above that are the annunciators. No problems here, though I wish the developers had chosen a slightly less strident red for the icons, which positively hurts the eyes. If you look top left, there is yet another icon stack which lets you select the overhead and pop up the pedestal.

Now we have taken a look around our new toy, it is time to do some homework. I confess I haven't actually measured the manuals, but I would guess that printed out double-sided, the whole lot is a daunting two inches high. While it isn't necessary to learn the contents by heart, a little background reading definitely pays off if you want to use the sim to the max - and this is a package that is designed to be tried to the absolute limits.

If you want to fly the Meridian right, the first thing you will need to do is get your head around is engine management, though if you choose to ignore it, you won't get into trouble beyond a few irritating bleeps now and again. In a real plane, ignoring too many bleeps is followed by systems shutting down, bits falling off and huge bills, but fortunately no-one has worked out how to do that to us in FS yet. If you should want to do things by the book, then you are gonna have to learn some numbers - don't worry, it isn't too tough. On top of the sort of figures you need to remember for normally aspirated engines - best rate of climb, cruise climb, flap limit speed and so forth - there is an additional layer of complexity, because of the sort of powerplant the Meridian uses. Turboprops have to be flown within a limited range of torque, ITT, Ng and fuel flow settings to get the best out of the aircraft and to preserve engine life; which is why very few of them are certified for single pilot operation. Unusually, the Meridian is - chiefly because the cockpit is a triumph of ergonomic design, but also because of those mouth wateringly MAGIC instruments. With practice, it is possible for flying this bird to become second nature, and in FS, as in life, you may discover that you don't ever want to use anything else. Normally I don't go back to an add-on for a long time after doing a review, but I have found it hard to keep my hands off this one.

One of the things that will dawn on you after doing the first couple of flights is that in order to get time to check out the ITT and all that other stuff, it follows that you are going to have to have some help with flying the plane, and that is where the S-Tec gear comes in. The reason with something as quick as the Meridian is that it is really easy to 'get behind' the plane, and that is when mistakes are made. I normally get to fly a plane which cruises at 90 knots, but I did my complex type rating in a 177RG with a constant speed prop which cruised 50% faster and that was a whole different ball game. Whereas in the Rallye there is always time to think, in the 177 it seemed like you had arrived before you left - I can't imagine what it is like adjusting to an aircraft which is fifty per cent faster again, yet that is exactly what the Meridian does. So learn everything you can about the S-Tec.

The autopilot setup will be familiar to users of the FlightOne Cessna 421, but the developers have taken the code a stage further and its function appears to be an exact duplicate of the original, as far as I can tell. The S-Tec system has three parts: a conventional mode selector, which anyone who has used the default Cessnas will recognise; a remote unit, mounted in front of the pilot, which allows preselection of altitude and pitch, as well as performing various other functions; and a mode annunciator, which lets you know what you did wrong.

There is also a Flight Director/Autopilot (FD/AP) switch, which is a superb piece of kit. First press arms it and switches on the FD - this not only lets you fly the bars, it means that you can set up your cleared altitude and rate of climb on the ground, with the correct modes pre-engaged on the autopilot. Then, once you have the Meridian cleaned up and stable in the climb, all you have to do is press the FD/AP fully home and the autopilot takes over, though you still have to look after the power settings. This is one of the places where the philosophy of the manuals becomes a little challenging - you have to read the S-Tec manuals to understand that you have to pre-engage ALT and VS modes in order to climb to the figure set in the selector/alerter... and the FlightOne manual to figure out that the way to press both keys simultaneously is to left-click between them. It works - like everything else in the sim - like a dream, but it can take a little time to figure out what needs doing.

I won't spend long on the S-Tec, but rest assured you can do all kinds of clever stuff with it, including using it to fly the plane under command of the Garmin. Sure, it is more complicated than the default autopilots, but it also does a darn sight more. Once you get your head around the way the units interface, using the S-Tec becomes second nature in a reasonable length of time. For example, to fly an approach, you set the localiser frequency on the GNS 530, set the heading bug to the inbound course, press the CDI key on the 530 to engage VLOC, hit the NAV key on the autopilot and sit back and watch the S-Tec automatically engage APR mode and fly the beam.

The trouble with MAGIC is that once you have got a taste for it, it is kind of hard to leave it alone, especially when you don't have to rob a bank to pay for it. I have to say that if this is as near as I ever get to a real MAGIC panel, then I am going to pine away, because not only are the originals fantastic, the gauges are exceptional. I simply cannot recall seeing a better set in an add-on - and the good news is that not only are they pin-sharp, and duplicate all the real world modes, but the code is so tight that I didn't observe any jerkiness or hesitation in the instruments at all, which is really unusual with gauges of this complexity. Normally there is a trade-off between complexity and speed where FS gauges are concerned, but the FlightOne team seem to have done the impossible. Maybe it really is magic. Having used the sim, I could believe anything.

The ND has no less than four modes, accessed via the page key and the Meridian being the kind of plane it is, you will find yourself using them all. The most useful page shows TQ, ITT, Np and Ng together, which saves you from developing a kink in your neck trying to scan all the data. Paging was instantaneous on my system and the images were sharp, bright and faultlessly animated. You can use the ND to illustrate one of the neatest bits of coding in the sim, which is the automatic fuel balancing - in a real Meridian, if more than a 40 pound imbalance builds up between the tanks, surplus fuel is automatically pumped from the fullest tank to the other side and the sim does that too.

As you will have noticed, the panel is night lit, with various combinations of lighting available via the overhead. While I was playing around, I discovered that the sim even has ice lights, which are essential when you are flying IFR at night. Without them, the only way of working out whether there is any ice on the leading edges, unless you use a torch, which looks kind of unprofessional when you are driving around in one of the most expensive singles on the planet.

Next, there is the GNS 530. Garmin kit is rapidly becoming the most simulated avionics in flight simulation, and not without reason, because they do make the most outstanding gear. The 530 is the top of the range GA set Garmin have available, a far cry from the GPSIII that most of us carry around in our bags. The best way of learning what the 530 can do is to download the manual (all 200 pages of it) but basically it combines the function of a fully featured, approach-capable GPS with dual NAV/COM radios and an autopilot interface. This means that you can slave the 530 to the S-Tec and use it to fly the Meridian right around an approach procedure if you need to - and guess what? The 530 has a worldwide database of procedures preloaded.

To begin with, I played around with the basic GPS functions of the 530, using it to tune a VOR and fly a radial selected on the ND, but after I discovered just how much FlightOne had put into it, I really put it through its paces and I am seriously impressed.

There are two small problems with the 530 implementation in the FlightOne Meridian. The first is that if you use either the UK2000 scenery, or the recently released UK VFR scenery, you had better have a really powerful machine to run them. I have both packages and had no real problems with frame rates until I punched in a goto on the Garmin and was treated to intermittent single figure frame rates and seriously bad stuttering. After endless fiddling with the FS settings, I finally bit the bullet and deactivated both my UK2000 scenery and the VFR scenery, which shows how much I like the plane, because these are two of my favorite sceneries. The problem seems to occur because the Meridian is knocking right at the boundaries of what FS will do and even on a 1.7 Ghz machine, the processor can run out of options if certain scenery behaviors occur while the Garmin is in use. The problem isn't a generic effect caused by all complex sceneries, by the way - the 530 did gotos quite happily with other sceneries like German Airports loaded, for example. The second problem is that the Garmin display is nowhere near as good as the MAGIC units, to the extent that it can be hard to read at times, but that being said, it is far better than the gauges on the default planes.

As far as I can see, the FlightOne GNS 530 emulates every single mode found on the real instrument. The secret behind this presumably lies in the way Garmin's GNS 530 trainer loads with the Meridian and runs minimised on the task bar - if you kill this app the 530 screen goes blank in the add-on. Given that the 530 is probably the most complex piece of GA avionics available anywhere, I didn't manage to test all the modes, but I ran through as many as I could and they all behaved as the book said they should, which is incredible, given that this is just one gauge in a very complex panel. In common with the MAGIC instruments, the 530 can be enlarged by clicking on the upper face and this helps a great deal with programming it, which would otherwise be fiddly in the extreme.

The Meggitt displays and the Garmin were developed with Jean-Luc Dupiot at Reality-XP. Jean-Luc's previous projects have included the UPS stack we reviewed a while back, and his partership with FlightOne has clearly been a fortuitous, because rarely have I seen two talents combine to produce such an outstanding result. Good though the UPS stack is, its popularity has been limited by the fact that it doesn't mesh with FS planes quite as well as custom gauges made to fit a specific panel, and the Meridian makes a dream partner for Jean-Luc's Meggitt set. Let's hope we see some more packages from the same team, because they really seem to work well together. The screen shot above shows a close up of the 530 in map mode on approach to 27L at KORD - as does the shot two above that, which shows the PFD and the ND operating in CDI mode. While I think of it, using the MNU key on the right of the display, the ND can be configured to display just about anything you want, including traffic advisories, adjustments being made via an onscreen drop down menu link.

The 530 is a seriously powerful piece of kit and I am only going to be able to skim the very surface of what it can do. FlightOne seem to have implemented every feature of the real thing and one of the few criticisms I have of the Meridian is that the enlarged view of the Garmin in the sim could really do with being about double the size (it can be dragged to a larger size, but the bitmap suffers) but I guess you can't have everything. The most powerful key on the unit is probably the CDI button, which is used to couple the 530's GPS or VLOC receiver to the aircraft's CDI or HSI; you just keep pressing the button to select which type of navigation you want, and then you can let the autopilot do the rest for you.

One of the best features of the Garmin is that you get a view of all the airspace boundaries, which will be educational for simmers who fly the default FS installation without using sectionals - in many countries, the amount of uncontrolled airspace is less than you would think and in a fast plane like the Meridian you really have to pay attention in order to avoid entering controlled airspace accidentally. The good news is that it is possible to select airspace with the 530 and review its classification and upper and lower limits before there is any chance of a bust. With all the options enabled, this can produce a rather busy screen, but the 530 allows you not only to declutter it, but also gives you the option to select the range at which particular features will be displayed.

Another really neat feature of the real 530 - and therefore the sim - is that it allows you to quickly select the frequency you need for any nearby airport and transfer it to the stand-by slot. This is a real life-saver, particularly at night, when the internal lighting has failed, you have dropped your torch and the snake has escaped from its cage. It is also possible to pull up a frequency list for all the airports along the route of an active flight plan, which is a must have in the Meridian, which demands forward planning. The waypoint pages (see the combined shot above) allow you to view everything from a plan of the field to approach procedures and it is also possible to review navaid data. The runway page is particularly useful because it allows you to view designations, length, lighting and surface type, letting you avoid those embarassing moments when you break cloud to discover you have a million dollar plane lined up on three hundred yards of waterlogged grass. It is also possible to create user waypoints, which will be popular with simmers who have discovered the art of using such niceties as center fixes.

Flight planning with the 530 is pretty easy and reduces workload immensely once the Meridian is airborne. Waypoints can be added, edited and deleted without any problems; and plans can be saved, reactivated and even inverted, so that you can return home without creating a new one. If at any time an emergency develops, such as the doorbell ringing, or an urgent need to return to work and earn enough money to keep on simming, you can activate the NRST page and select from a list of airports and navaids within 200 nm of your present position.

Instrument gladiators will be delighted to hear that whether a flight plan is active or not, approaches and transitions can be selected directly from the database - although the Garmin database only appeared to be partially populated in the version I reviewed. Though GPS approaches are beginning to be certified in the US, there aren't any in Europe, as far as I know, mainly because of the oft repeated caveat that GPS might be de-tuned without warning (a European system is being designed to replace GPS as I write). This doesn't stop pilots using 530s to fly procedures and I am told ATC can always tell because the track on the radar is far too exact - the real giveaway being a plane that flies a non-precision NDB approach absolutely flawlessly in a cross-wind, because that kind of thing just doesn't happen when you are using an ADF! The technique for using a procedure in the Garmin is to select and load the approach into the flight plan and only activate it when you need to - the system will even allow you to fly vectors to the localiser until the aircraft is established. If you choose to do this, at a couple of miles from the final approach fix the 530 switches to approach mode and the CDI scaling tightens in automatically to fly the needles. Like I said, this is a complex piece of avionics - I frequently think of selling the house to buy one, but Barbara won't let me.

The VC is, yeah, I know the adjective is beginning to sound a bit tired now, but here goes, is among the best I have seen for flight simulator. The graphics are focussed, the gauges - with the exception of the Bendix King panel - all seem to work, and the bitmaps are bright. Quite how the development team managed to code a VC (and a virtual cabin) that didn't kill the frame rates stone cold dead, especially when the 2D cockpit is so incredibly detailed, I have no idea, but they have somehow gotten away with it. Having seen the Meridian, I would have little trouble believing it if I saw Jim Rhoads walk on water, because he has managed to do just about everything else and the package sets new standards in almost every area. The one limitation of the VC is that it is passive and so it isn't possible to alter the control settings without using 2D windows, but having only seen one plane with an active VC so far, I can't really criticise FlightOne for it.

Do I really have to sum up? I guess that if you haven't realised by now that this is the best, most comprehensive, most realistic GA add-on ever released for Flight Simulator, you must have skipped straight to this paragraph. If you only buy one add-on this year, the Meridian should be it.

Every release of Flight Simulator has spawned a package which stood out head and shoulders above the competition. For FS2000, it was Wilco's 767 PIC; for FS2002, I reckon it will be FlightOne's Meridian, because I find it hard to imagine that another team could be assembled and managed to deliver such an outstanding and so bug-free a project. In fact, I have my doubts about whether another developer could even equal the Meridian, because it is rare to come across such a well balanced package - there is almost always some glitch that lets add-ons down - blurred panel graphics, poor instrumentation, or a lousy flight model. As users, we get used to making allowances for such things; but with this project, there is no need. It will be interesting to see how other developers respond, because if there is any justice in the world, the Meridian will become the top FS sale and I would really like to see other sims like it.

So I ain't going to say any more, except for one thing.

I want a real one.

Visit avionics maker Reality XP