What happened to the ERJ Family?
It's been so long since I properly talked about the ERJs that I feel like I need to reintroduce them! The Embraer E135, E140, E145, E145XR, and the sleek business jet Legacy 650 were released for X-Plane 11 in May 2019 and they quickly became one of the most popular regional jets for X-Plane for their sports-car-like feel (as described by real pilots) and ease of use.
About a year later and after a few updates of the ERJs, we slowly started working on the E-Jets Family and haven't stopped since. The E-Jets are the newer generation airliners from Embraer, and they are packed with loads of automated systems. This makes them very easy to fly for real pilots and flight sim users alike, but very hard and time-consuming for us to implement, and splitting our time between two different families of aircraft was just not possible. When we work on any products, we need to get deeply familiar with them, to be able to authentically recreate not only the systems but also the feel of the aircraft that the engineers were trying to create.
At this point, after years of working on the E-Jets, my brain is just hardwired to work like the one of a real E-Jet pilot. And given that our team was quite small, and the demand for the E-Jets was huge, we had to prioritize those.
In the meantime, X-Plane 12 came out, and that meant that all aircraft from X-Plane 11 had to be converted to work properly in X-Plane 12. Even though you can load and use the ERJs in X-Plane 12, many things look wrong or do not work properly.
We of course wanted to convert them to X-Plane 12 as soon as possible, but we quickly realized that that wasn't something that could be done over the weekend. For example, the engines can't be started properly in X-Plane 12 anymore, due to the changes in bleed air systems. Many users were upset that we didn't fix at least that (Btw I recently published a workaround for it).
The issue was that in order to address that, we'd need to create new aircraft files specifically for X-Plane 12. However, doing so would require us to make extensive adaptations and changes from the beginning, leading to a cascading series of revisions. It wasn't feasible to simply provide a small patch for X-Plane 12.
The only right way was to create the ERJ Family V2, which would be fully optimized for X-Plane 12. But the plan didn't stop there, we wanted to give the ERJs the much-needed love they deserved, so this was going to be a much more sophisticated upgrade, bringing the aircraft a lot closer to reality and including all the signature features that make our E-Jets extremely easy and fun to operate.
At the start of this year, we've had a few software developers join our team, including Todor, who has been fully focused on updating the ERJ Family, and we've made some amazing progress! While I shared most of this through our Not-A-Newsletter a few months ago, I now want to give everyone an honest update on where we're at right now. The good news is that we're progressing really well and there are loads of things we've already done! So let's get a closer look at all of them.
Flight Model
We started with a brand new and much better flight model, that has been created from scratch by an industry expert, and it's been fully optimized for X-Plane 12. We're currently in the process of getting some feedback from real ERJ Pilots who are validating our flight model's accuracy. It needs to be as accurate as possible!
Custom Aircraft Systems
Todor has already developed custom hydraulic, fuel, and anti-ice systems. The earlier X-Plane 11 version of the ERJs relied mostly on the default X-Plane systems in these areas, so a big improvement there! And we've implemented a new and more accurate FADEC system to control the Thrust Rating.
New Screen Pop-Ups
The widely popular new pop-up screens from the E-Jets Family v1.1.0 have now been implemented also in the ERJ Family! So you can open the PFD, MFD, and EICAS in a 2D pop-up window, that can be moved around the screen or placed on another monitor. Plus you can also manipulate the autopilot settings directly on the PFD by scrolling while hovering over the value on the pop-up.
High-Res Nav Map
Many previous ERJ Family owners will be delighted to hear that we've implemented a brand new, authentic, and high-resolution NAV Map, including the PLAN mode. The Nav Map on the old ERJs was sticking out like a sore thumb!
EFB Tablet
Todor is working on implementing the highly popular EFB from the E-Jets into the ERJs, which will give you access to Ground Objects, Door operation, Performance Calculations like V-Speeds, Weight & Balance page, Checklists, and Avitab. The settings menu will now also be embedded into the EFB and we will add more settings options.
We’re currently working on some very cool features, that have never been seen in an EFB in X-Plane before! This is a secret for now, but if you want to learn more, join our Not-A-Newsletter and you may even get a chance to influence the design of the features.
New Sounds!
Part of the update will also include extensive improvements to the sounds, leveraging all the new tools that X-Plane 12 now provides us.
So.... I'm sure that everyone will want to ask the usual question:
What is the release date? 📅
And my usual answer is that we do not announce the release date, because as you've probably learned by now, all of these projects are like icebergs, and we never know how big a problem is until we get to it, making it impossible to make predictions. If I could predict the future, I would make a fortune in the stock market!
But I can give you the order of things that are going to happen next at X-Crafts. Right now, I’m finishing work on the Ultra-Large Business Jet Lineage 1000, which I’m hoping will come out before the end of February. And that is because in early March, we’re scheduled to have our first delivery from a stork 😁 So I expect that planning anything precisely after that is very difficult, but while I’ll be learning how to change diapers, the rest of the team will be working on the ERJ Family V2, as well as new features and updates of the E-Jets Family.
But don't worry, we're working on the ERJs, and they are gonna be AWESOME!
Will this be a free update? 📈
Now I'd like to be fully transparent about this well in advance. If this was just a conversion from X-Plane 11 to X-Plane 12 that would take a few weeks, it would have likely been a free update. But due to all the time and effort invested into adding all of these new features, we expect that the price of the ERJ Family v2 will increase slightly, and that also means that this will be a paid upgrade for all previous owners of the ERJ Family v1, probably around $20. I believe that will be a very fair price for all the new features and the thousands of hours of our development.
If you choose to support our work by purchasing the ERJ Family v2 or upgrading from the ERJ Family v1, you'll help us continue our mission of crafting the finest Embraer jets for flight simulation.