Latest News
A summary of the latest big picture things going on here at Blackbird Simulations. For the very latest in up-to-the-minute happenings, sneak peeks at upcoming projects, or just to take part in the conversation, you can also head on over to our facebook page. If you're not a Zuckerberg fan, come over to our forum; we'd be pleased to meet you!
Want more toys without breaking the bank? We got you!
04 May 2023

From the guys and gals at Blackbird Simulations, comes our new lovechild: Shrike!
A special, hand picked, budget friendly, collection of some of our favorite airplanes from our previous releases.
Shrike aircraft look great, fly true, easy on the wallet, and refreshed for Microsoft Flight Simulator!
Our legendary Twinkie & 530F are coming your way soon with many more in development from our immense hangar of aircraft.
ICYMI - State of the Sim
26 February 2023
State of the Sim
17 February 2023
Happy New Year!
31 December 2022
The Team at Blackbird Sims would like to wish you & yours a very Happy New Year!
Hopefully 2023 will bring a ton of new & cool avgeek joy to MSFS!
Sadly, it also brings an end to our work in P3D, and Blackbird will not be carrying Prepar3D products forward into 2023.
Statement regarding 3rd party avionics
21 December 2022
Blackbird Simulations has always been committed to providing the highest quality simulations to our customers. We are also a strong proponent of user choice.
However, with the highly dynamic and ever-improving environment that Microsoft Flight Simulator has become, we've found that it is out of our wheelhouse for us to ship our products with full support for 3rd party avionics products. Most, if not all, of these, are highly susceptible to compatibility issues that have little to nothing to do with our products. And yet, we're EXPECTED to provide support and fixes for these products.
These issues cost us valuable development time, as the sim continues to evolve from month to month and update to update. This, in turn, prevents us from working on new and exciting products that we would like to share with our customers. It's hard enough dealing with our own fixes, let alone having to deal with problems with other devs products...
While we'd love for our customers to have the freedom to use any and all 3rd party applications that they choose, we believe there is a better path than what has been followed to date. As such, going forward, we will not be enabling native support for 3rd party avionics in our products. The fact is that, we can no longer be responsible for the coding practices (good or bad) of other developers. We make aircraft. Good ones. That's where our focus must, and will, be from this point forwards.
We have looked at the strong modification community that exists in MSFS, as well as current examples of the extensive aircraft modifications that have been done by enterprising groups and individuals. With MSFS, we have a simulator platform where aircraft modifications can exist without directly editing a single file of the aircraft in question. Because of that, we've realized that it would be entirely possible for every aspect of nearly any desired component to be added via modification; thus, we feel that the responsibility to add and support 3rd party avionics packages should fall to the developers or publishers of those products. This will ultimately benefit users of those products far better than aircraft developers trying to continually play 'catch-up' as various situations emerge.
As such, we will commit ourselves to providing 'modification-friendly' aircraft when it's possible to do so without exposing our intellectual property. The means of doing so may vary from aircraft to aircraft; it may mean that we allow for blank areas where 3D meshes may be added, it may mean that we include the 3D meshes and textures directly while giving mod authors the documentation to use them effectively. We will do our best but, our concentration must, and will remain, making the best aircraft we can.
We hope that this path will eventually provide a situation where everyone benefits. We realize that this may not be initially desirable for everyone, but the current environment has become unsustainable and a new path was needed. We hope that our customers understand and continue forward with us to the exciting projects we have upcoming in 2023.
C310 Service Pack 1
10 December 2022

If you bought the 310 from us directly you should receive a link to the updated installler via email.
Marketplace customers will be updated shortly.
Changelog & release notes