PMDG Update Announcement About Boeing 737 For MSFS

As we wrap up this week of development on the PMDG 737 forMicrosoft Flight Simulator, I wanted to share a progress update togive you an idea where we are and how things are going.

This week's primary focus fell into a couple of areas:

• Continued refinement of the Heads Up Guidance System
• Continued work on the flight model
• Further refinement of autoflight control laws
• Refinement of the AFDS Control Wheel Steering mode (aka: How to fly your 737 like an Airbus)
• Problem solving on some issues related to external model textures and the aircraft structure/window interface
• Continued work on fine scale details within the cockpit.
• Chasing down compiler-related code issues.
• The endless game of debugging complex systems.

The airplane is now being flown on complete flight stages as wecontinue to look for issues hiding in the background. The systemslogic is well in place and the issues being identified are gettingresolved one at a time. From a simulation standpoint the software isincredibly stable and well mannered so we are in the process chasingdown things that I would call "platform interface" issues. Forexample, making certain that various keyboard shortcuts and MSFSnative commands are connected properly to the software so that theairplane's systems respond appropriately to the MSFS control set. Itsounds rather obvious to say that we have to go through all of these-but it is actually quite tedious and requires a bunch of minor changesto the code in order to get things behaving properly.

One big change over the past few weeks is that the simulation isfully flyable and usable in a predictably stable manner. This hasallowed us to shift from implementation to refinement as we continueto improve the flying characteristics of the airplane and makeadjustments to the autoflight system control laws in both normal andCWS modes. Since this is our first project working to bring ourentirely customized capabilities into the MSFS platform and it hasbeen interesting as we adapt the handling qualities. Each platform hasit's own set of strengths and weaknesses, so we are likewise adjustingthe 737 software to account for the strengths of the MSFS platform,while also working around some of the weaknesses. We went through thisprocess when initially bringing our products from FSX to P3D, butthose two platforms were alike enough that it wasn't terriblydifficult in the beginning.

This is an order of magnitude more complex than that effort from2015, but we are really pleased with the results!

Checking the performance of the airplane requires a tremendousamount of detail flying work to validate that the pitch/power/draginteractions are correct at all altitudes, configurations andweights. It is exacting work, but it is going mostly well.

All over the airplane we are heavily engaged in cleanup-mode now-and we have chosen a go-to-beta date. Our confidence in hitting thatbeta date is very high, and we are also feeling confident enough inthe project to begin setting a projected release date range on thecalendar. (No, I'm not going to tell you what it is because that wouldbe a sure-fire way create the sort of bad karma that would cause alengthy delay!)

I have begun work on some video segments, but I don't want to saytoo much about those yet.

Overall, we are finally starting to feel good about the progress weare making with this project. The whole kit is finally beginning tolook, act and feel like finished product.

The wait is nearly over!

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