Did Somebody Say “Plug-In”?

Hi!

It’s been a while since I wrote an email to Dhruv related to the 777 project asking for possible interests in a working partnership. I was really happy about the fact I got a positive answer, so here I am!

Oh, you don’t know who I am? I’m sorry. My name is Sven Goericke, and I’m from Leipzig, Germany. What am I doing on the XP Jets team? In short, I’m hard at work on a plugin for the XP Jets 777. That’s it. Expanding on that, in 2007 I started with a 777 for MSFS (FS X). But I was dissatisfied with some its limitations. Maybe you know some successful aircraft addons for FS X and might ask: which limitations? I’ve only one answer: Fly-By-Wire. Hah, FSX has an A321 with FBW by default. There are some very interesting Airbus-Simulations for MSFS 9/X in progress so why is FBW a limitation in MSFS? Well, we’re interested in the 777, not Airbuses. The FBW of the 777 is completely different than the Airbus logic. Also, what about the Aerodynamics? Just Google for differences in the flight model used by X-Plane and MSFS and you’ll know what I mean…

So, what’s the status of the plugin now? Over the last few weeks I have worked on the “basics”. The plugin is written in C++ so i had to setup some nice classes to use. As the 777 has a modern glass cockpit I decided to use a vector-graphics library called “cairo”. The reasoning behind using cairo is that it works on Linux, MacOS and Windows. You can see an early (and incomplete) preview of the PFD here:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G5J218999A

Currently I am working on the electrical system. Yes, the 777 will have almost exclusively custom systems. I have also a “minimum required equipment list” (systems that will be done) for a first release which are almost the major-systems:

• Electrical System
• Hydraulic System
• Fuel and Air Systems
• Fly-by-wire System
• Air Data/Inertial Reference System (ADIRU)
• AFDS (Automatic Flight Director System) and Autopilot(s)
• Flight Management System
• Electronic Checklists

It’s still a long way so I don’t want to give any timeline for the development (of course I have a personal one). But from time to time I’ll post some news about the progress here so it’s a good idea to come back here frequently.