SSW A310-200/300

The Airbus A310 is a medium to long-range widebody airliner based on the larger A300. The A310, referred to as A300B10 in the early design stage, can seat about 200-220 passengers and was the second aircraft type developed by Airbus. The A310 program was launched in July 1978 and the first flight of the A310 occurred on April 3 1982. The first A310 entered commercial service with Lufthansa in April 1983. The A310 officially ceased production in July 2007, though five orders from Iraqi Airways remained on the books until July 2008.

SSW's Airbus A310 is the most advanced A310 package right now. Although the exterior model is HNAC's A310 (not a bad choice), the advanced panel is developed by SSW. Almost all onboard systems are modeled like the fuel/electrical/pneumatic/hydraulic systems, fully functional FMS (Flight Management System) and IRS (Inertial Reference System) and much more.

This aircraft is not for people who are new to MS Flight Simulator, but virtual pilots who want to experience the real thing on their desktop (and do like Airbus) will be pleased. Working through 14 manuals will take some time, but it is absolutely necessary to read at least a few of them in order to fly this aircraft. The manuals are written in a professional style and are meant to be informative, so don't expect a step-by-step explanation on how to operate this aircraft. Die hard realism freaks however, will figure it out.

The virtual cockpit is quite simple and can not be used to operate the aircraft because none of the buttons and handles are clickable and the displays do not show the current status of the displays in the 2d panel. The vc textures are in high quality, but unfortunately, the texture files are huge and it takes too long to load them while switching between view modes. There is also a wingview in the vc mode, although you can only see the wings, the engines are not visible!

The flight dynamics are quite all right, although the climb performance seems a bit too high. The autopilot is doing it's job and the aircraft is stable on the ILS. Good thing to mention: if you want to set the ILS frequency on the VOR/ILS panel, use the right mouse button to change the frequency before the dot (not mentioned in the manuals as far as I know). Another thing, the stabilizer trim is a bit too enthusiastic, a single click on the trim button on your joystick or keyboard causes a large step of pitch trim which is not realistic and can be very annoying. Of course, you can try to decrease the 'repeats' of the the trim button in the controls/assignment settings.

Despite all the positive things about this package, there have been many complains about the customer service going around on FS forums here and there. I'm sure not every customer is negative about SSW's service, but fact is that the downloads section of the SSW website is offline most of the time (so service updates, tutorials, liveries, etc. are not available to download) and their forum is empty for some time now.

We have to keep in mind that this package was originally developed for FS2002 and the first version came out just before FS2004 was released. Now, a few years later, the newest FS version FSX has been released and is about to become the new standard. Most bugs of earlier versions are fixed now and the package is functioning quite well in FS2004. Unfortunately, the gauges are too old to be compatible with FSX.

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