Wilco/Feelthere 777-200ER

The Boeing 777 is a long haul wide-body commercial passenger jet aircraft. It can carry between 301 and 550 passengers over a distance of max. 17,446 Km. The 777 was launched to fill the gap between the 767-300ER and the 747-400. The first 777 entered service with United Airlines in 1995.

Feelthere is a flightsim developer of many high quality add-on packages for Microsoft's Flight Simulator. Their Boeing 777 is a beautiful modeled aircraft with a lot details on the exterior. The package contains the 777-200ER model with General Electric GE90 engines (unfortunately there are no other engine versions modeled), a soundset and the Boeing house colors livery. Additional liveries can be downloaded from the Wilco Publishing website. Those liveries are free and high in quality.

All the usual animations are present, like realistic movement of ailerons, flaps, spoilers, etc. To increase the performance, there is a 2d panel only version without virtual cockpit. The landing gear is very detailed, but it takes to long for all the wheels to rest completely on the ground despite the deployment of the spoilers. It's not a big deal and perhaps due to the limitations of FS.

Many cockpit systems are modeled, although some systems are somewhat simplified. For example, the overhead panel is not fully functional, not all buttons are clickable. The CDU is also simplified, however the most important pages are available. A nice feature of the CDU is the possibility to load FS IFR flight plans into the CDU with one click. The autopilot is working perfectly, but the auto land function is not modeled. Other cockpit features are a weather radar, GPWS and TCAS. The later works fine, as you can see on screenshot #10, however, no voice warnings are given in a conflict situation. All EFIS displays can be expanded by clicking on them, which also works in the virtual cockpit.

The virtual cockpit looks nice, however the buttons and handles on the overhead panel are 2d textures. Also, the resolution of the vc textures is quite low. The wings/engines are not modeled in the virtual cockpit, so no wingview. The flight dynamics are excellent, although the aircraft climbs too rapidly, even fully loaded. Since only the General Electric powered version is available, you'll expect the typical GE90 sound. Unfortunately, this is not the case, the sounds are nice, but do not represent the GE90 engines at all.

Experienced flight simmers might not need to read the 30 pages PDF manual entirely, most of them shouldn't have any problems starting up and flying the aircraft. For beginners however, there is a lot of useful information within the manual, which is written by a former commercial pilot. Unfortunately, the manual is a bit brief. A configuration utility can be used to set various variables like displays frame rate settings, anti-aliasing of the displays, weather radar etc. A load manager can be used to save the payload data to the aicraft.cfg and there is a fuel planner to calculate the amount of fuel needed.



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