PMDG’s Robert Randazzo took to the PMDG forums to share a small development update regarding the Boeing 737 and the UFT. Whilst the update seems very small and shares only some changes to the two products mentioned, Randazzo also shared a single image in one of the comments, which marks the first official preview of the Boeing 777 for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
First Preview of Boeing 777
This week, there already were rumours about the Boeing 777 for Microsoft Flight Simulator development moving quite forward, as a product page for the 777 already made its appearance, showing only Prepar3D images and a price tag set at over five million dollars. Whilst Mathijs Kok mentioned that there’s nothing to be excited about with this, as this is a part of internal testing, the community was thriving to see more of the Boeing 777.
As of today, the product page is already down after the PMDG team seemed to have tested it enough for now. Robert mentions that they haven’t put together proper previews but the work on first official previews is now ongoing. This may mean that we might see the Boeing 777 in proper development update soon.
In the comment, Robert mentions a call with his mother, who told him that after all the busy days he is certainly “tired”. This jokingly led to previews of the main landing gear tires on the Boeing 777 in Microsoft Flight Simulator.
As we can see from the single preview, there are modelled wheel chocks, detailed tires, and even the engine behind. The plane is still a deep work in progress, so a lot of things we saw today is a subject to change.
Lastly, in the development post, Robert from PMDG indirectly mentions that we might see the 777 previews before Christmas, as he wants to “welcome us in the hangar with a glass of egg-nog in hand.” This was mentioned on projects that are approaching their critical stages of development and release cycles.
Updates for The 737 and UFT
The new update for these two products was pushed to the public on Thursday, 7th of December 2023. This brings the Tablet to the version 1.5.0 and the 737 to the version 3.00.0086.
In the Navigraph Charts functions, the day/night mode should be persistent now, METARs with imperial units will now be properly handled by the tablet and the 0-degree temperature bug is no longer present. Speaking of performance and computations, the conversion of METAR with imperial units should be working correctly now.
The update was also pushed to the Microsoft Flight Simulator Marketplace and should be available to these users soon, too. Speaking of Xbox users, though, this is not quite certain when they might expect the UFT update for the 737, as there are some critical issues in communication between the aircraft and the tablet on this version of the aircraft. “The communications work perfectly on the PC version, but on Xbox, they appear not to work at all,” Robert mentions.
If you would like to read more about PMDG’s work, you can take a look at our article covering the previous development update here. Or, if you are a bit more interested in seeing Boeings and their landing gears, take a look at the recently published preview of the Boeing 737 MAX for Microsoft Flight Simulator.
