Ever heard of the 80-20 rule? It’s a concept I first heard about in my engineering courses, but it’s applicable to many, many fields. In our particular case it states that when reaching a 80% completion of a project, the remaining 20% require 80% of the work. The more I think I’m “almost finished”, the longer the remaining work takes. I’ve been riveting the Boeing 247D for WEEKS. Admittedly, one reason why it takes so long is the fact that I tend to procrastinate when things become too tedious. The process of placing tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of rivets on the model takes the c ..read more

Hello and Happy New Year everybody! If you come here often, you might wonder why there’s still no Boeing 247D available on the store. And of course the answer is that: “she’s not perfect yet!”. As always, some new idea made it onto the feature list, which caused a big delay – but trust me, it’s worth the extra wait! Towards the end of last year, I had the honor of being featured on the livestream of “The Flying Fabio”. After talking about the radio on the stream, I was lucky to meet Eric van der Veen and we got talking about vintage radio navigation. Long story short, I contracted him to help ..read more

If you follow the development, you probably noticed that I haven’t posted many pictures of the cockpit until now. The reason is obvious: it wasn’t ready yet. In this blog post I want to share with you why it took so long and give you further insight on the research and development process for this aircraft. First draft of the Wing42 livery for the Boeing 247-D. When researching an aircraft, we need as many drawings, photographs and documents as we can get our greedy hands on. The development process of any add-on is accompanied with countless hours of digging through archives, communicating wi ..read more

We launched our Boeing 247D, and what a launch this was… We’ve been working on the add-on until the last minute with some of us getting only very little sleep the days leading up to the 2nd of April. Everything was pretty much on track, although I did have to push some of my want-to-dos down the road to be finished in a future update. Namely interactive checklists and the write-up of a more detailed explanation of the damage model we use in our Boeing. To me, it felt that it was more important to deliver on time than postponing yet again for only some minor QoL improvements. Installer-trouble ..read more

We are getting ready for release and I have some things to share with all of you. Launch date will be the 2nd of April 2022. It goes without saying that if we run into major issues in the next few weeks, we might need to push the date a bit back, but I’m confident that we can wrap up development rather quickly from here on out. What’s the plan? The Wing42 Boeing 247D is an incredible add-on! The depth of the systems and the meticulous detail is currently hard to find on the MSFS market and if this was still the time of FSX and P3D, I would probably set a price at around 60 USD for it. Let’s no ..read more

It’s time to have a talk about the clipboard of the Wing42 Boeing 247D. In previous installments of the Microsoft Flight Simulator, it was common for 3rd party aircraft developers to utilize 2D panels as a user interface for any sim-related interactions. An example for that is the payload manager of our P3D/FSX Lockheed Vega. MSFS completely removed 2D panels with no alternative way for us to generate a custom user interface. Before we dive into the fascinating world of clipboards, let me put a disclaimer: all the features shown here a still subject to change! I think that they're great addit ..read more

Work on the Boeing 247 keeps progressing. The 3D model is in its final stages, so shortly I’ll be able to move on to the next stage when the coding is done. One thing I found incredibly tedious is placing the rivets and panel lines of the aircraft. 3D objects in MSFS make heavy use of a new material type called “decal”. It is used to draw a high-detail object on top of lower-detail geometry. For aircraft, this technology can be used to draw high-resolution rivet heads on top of your fuselage, wings and engine nacelles. For FSX and P3D, we used to simply draw those rivets directly on our textur ..read more