I’m a software developer with more than 30 years in the craft, and a slightly obsessive flight-sim fan who keeps trying to understand aircraft that were never meant to be “casual.”
Sadly, I don’t have endless time to fly my favourite birds - but I do have endless curiosity. Every time I sit down in the cockpit, I end up reading manuals, forums, and watching hours of tutorials just to understand the role of a switch or instrument.
Maybe that’s just the developer in me.
Everything goes perfectly when I focus on one aircraft.
I watch the hours-long tutorials, take clever notes, connect them to checklist items, think through the conditions - and before I know it, the week is gone, and I still haven’t actually flown the damned thing!
When I finally do, it’s wonderful - like with Just Flight’s brilliant old-timer, the Fokker F28, but then I buy another aircraft, like iFly’s 737 MAX. Yes: repeat, rinse.
And that’s where the real problem starts.
When I come back to the Fokker after a few weeks, the familiar feeling is gone. My handwriting looks like it belongs to someone else. I struggle to find once-familiar switches, and my extended checklist feels like a huge, useless mess.
This project grew out of that loop - a personal attempt to learn, understand, and eventually enjoy the experience of truly flying complex add-ons.
I’m trying to find a better way to go beyond checklists — to spend less time figuring things out, and more time actually flying. Apparently, I need that not only for the first flight...
I want to bring every phase of understanding and flying of the aircraft into a single app.
The learning phase, full of information and hints — but still with good screen economy, because I never liked floating windows covering the cockpit. Perfect for re-familiarizing myself after a longer break.
The normal phase, when I already know the aircraft, but still want to check myself step by step.
And the casual phase, when I just want to fly from memory, enjoy the experience, and make it through a light flight after a long day — because it’s a simulator, after all.
I don’t aim to create perfect checklists. I just want to make sure I understand each aircraft enough to truly fly it.
I’m one of those simmers who genuinely enjoy both X-Plane and MSFS. I don’t see them as rivals, but as two great takes on the same passion. Each has its strengths, each has its flaws.
For this project, I started with MSFS for practical reasons. I enjoy working on it, and I want to keep developing it for years — which means I need to make it sustainable. MSFS has the larger paying community, a console ecosystem that’s less affected by piracy, and a marketplace where a small independent developer like me can actually keep going.
Of course, the aircraft are the same in the real world. So the configuration files I build here can easily work elsewhere.
If there’s enough community interest, I’d love to see this project reach X-Plane too.
I don’t plan to use a subscription model, at least not for this version of the application. My hope is that this project will be good enough for people to feel it’s worth its single price.
Still, as I dive deeper into MSFS (and later X-Plane) development, I’m discovering new possibilities. Some of them rely on third-party services that come with their own costs, and those may have to live under a different, subscription-based product. If that happens, it will stay separate from the main app, especially since consoles can’t connect to companion apps.