Abacus Fly the Airbus Fleet A340-600

The Airbus A340 is a four-engined, long haul wide-body commercial passenger jet aircraft. Airbus launched the A340 in June 1987 in parallel with the A330, as a single aircraft program. Both aircraft share the same wing and similar fuselage structure, and borrow heavily from the advanced avionics and composite structure technology developed for the A320. The A340-300 first flew in 1991 and entered service with Lufthansa and Air France in March 1993. The A340 is a competitor of the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 and the Boeing 777. It seats between 261 and 380 passengers, and has a range between 6,700 and 9,000 NM. The CFM International CFM56-5C4 engines are the only engine choice for the -200 and -300 variants.

The -500 and -600 variants are powered by the Rolls-Royce Trent 500 engines. The A340-500 is the longest-range variant and can fly 313 passengers in a three-class cabin layout over 8,650 nm (16,020 km). The A340-600 is with a length of 75,30 meter almost 5 meter longer than the Boeing 747-400 and with that the longest passenger aircraft in the world. It was designed as an early generation 747 replacement. The A340-600 flies 380 passengers in a three-class cabin layout (419 in 2 class) over 7,500 nautical miles (13,900 km).

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 A340-600 is not a work of art. The exterior model does not represent it's real world counterpart very well (just compare the screenshots with a photo of a real A340-600). 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 A340. The 2d panels and the virtual cockpit are simple and don't look like the real A340 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 'Middle Business Class'. 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 not resemble the A340-600 Rolls-Royce Trent 556 engine sound. The engines sound more like the General Electric CF6-80C2 A310 engines. This aircraft and the A319/A320/A330/A350 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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