Abacus Fly the Airbus Fleet A350-800

This Abacus package contains six aircraft: Airbus A310-300, A319-100, A320-200, A330-300, A340-600 and the A350-800. The package comes with one sound set, which is used by all six aircraft.

Like the other aircraft in the package, the A350-800 is not a work of art. The exterior model looks more like the A330 than the A350 (which might be due to the new A350 concept proposed in mid-2006, the old concept was more like a improved copy of the A330). The liveries are not very well done. For example, the clearly visible grey lines are not very appealing and there is no registration on the bottom of the wing. Also, some animations are off or are not present at all. The landing gear is floating at touchdown and doesn't have suspension.

The flight dynamics are not bad, it is not very difficult to handle this A350. The 2d panels and the virtual cockpit are simple and don't look like the real A350 cockpit. Instead of typical Airbus systems, flap settings, auto brake, etc, many buttons and handles do look like (and work like) the ones used in the FS2004 default (Boeing) panels. Don't expect systems like TCAS and GPWS, those are simply not modeled. A simple FMC can be used to load FS flight plans and ute them in order to auto navigate on IFR flights.

Some nice features are: A passenger cabin which is fully modeled into the virtual cockpit. The default viewpoint in the virtual cockpit mode is the virtual cockpit itself, but with a small program called 'Cabin Views' you can set other viewpoints in the virtual cockpit, like 'First Class Section' and 'Rear Coach Seating'. Also, the wings and engines are visible from the cabin windows. With the wing fold command, air stairs, a fuel truck and baggage carts show up around the aircraft.

The engine sounds are great, both the internal and external sound, but do (most likely) not resemble the new Rolls-Royce Trent XWB engine sound. The engines sound more like the General Electric CF6-80C2 A310 engines. This aircraft and the A319/A320/A330/A340 in this package would benefit from separate sound sets. The 48 pages pdf manual is well written and covers the features of all six aircraft in a user-friendly way.









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