Simubuild A340-500

The Airbus A340 is a four-engined, long haul wide-body commercial passenger jet aircraft. Airbus launched the A340 in June 1987 in parallel with the A330, as a single aircraft program. Both aircraft share the same wing and similar fuselage structure, and borrow heavily from the advanced avionics and composite structure technology developed for the A320. The A340-300 first flew in 1991 and entered service with Lufthansa and Air France in March 1993. The A340 is a competitor of the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 and the Boeing 777. It seats between 261 and 380 passengers, and has a range between 6,700 and 9,000 NM. The CFM International CFM56-5C4 engines are the only engine choice for the -200 and -300 variants.

The -500 and -600 variants are powered by the Rolls-Royce Trent 500 engines. The A340-500 is the longest-range variant and can fly 313 passengers in a three-class cabin layout over 8,650 nm (16,020 km). The A340-600 is with a length of 75,30 meter almost 5 meter longer than the Boeing 747-400 and with that the longest passenger aircraft in the world. It was designed as an early generation 747 replacement. The A340-600 flies 380 passengers in a three-class cabin layout (419 in 2 class) over 7,500 nautical miles (13,900 km).

Simubuild was a developer back in 2002 with only a short lifetime. Their website has been closed for years now. They developed the two longest Airbus A340's: The A340-500 and -600.

Originally developed for FS2002, this A340-500 still looks nice and works in FS2004 and FSX as well. Like many other forgotten products, the number of paints available for this aircraft is limited. The flight dynamics seem ok, but the stabilisator trim animation is unrealistic. The horizontal stabilizer is moving too far up and down and looks really weird. Perhaps this is a result of the fact that this model has been developed for FS2002. Besides the trim problem, the aircraft flies alright.

There is no virtual cockpit included, but a virtual passenger cabin instead. The wings are visible from the virtual cabin, so you can look out a window like a passenger would. The main landing gear is sinking into the runway when landing. This is a common problem in FS2004 for a main landing gear sets with four-wheel bogies or more. In this case the result is realistic behaviour of the landing gear, but the lower wheels sink into the ground first.


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