Black Square’s King Air Professional has been an open secret for a while now, but beyond the fact that it exists, there’s been very little to go on. That changed today, and the answer arrived alongside something nobody was expecting.
In a long development update published through Just Flight, Cyganski confirmed that the King Air Professional will be a 300, and then closed the whole post with a one-line aside about a Beechcraft 1900D. Wait, what?!
Before getting there, though, the update covers a lot of ground, and most of it concerns two projects that have been sitting in the background while the Caravan Professional took up all the oxygen this spring.
The Twin Commanders came back from Arizona
The Twin Commanders first surfaced in the least formal way possible, as renders playing on a TV at the Just Flight booth during FlightSimExpo 2025 in Providence. They were unannounced at the time. Since then, almost nothing.
Cyganski now explains part of the reason. The pair, which comprises the turbine Turbo Commander 690B and the piston Aero Commander 685, turned out to be far more involved than he expected when he took them on. He says he began regretting the decision until a pilot in Arizona invited him to spend a day with a TC690, recording audio, going through systems, taking reference photos and flying the aircraft before sunset. His host, Tim, runs the Flying Wild AZ YouTube channel, which covers Twin Commander systems in some depth.
These will be Black Square’s first aircraft with the TPE331, a geared turboprop that behaves nothing like the PT6 family the developer has worked with before. Cyganski says he operated the engines from taxi to shutdown, demonstrated the negative torque system in flight, and manually unfeathered the propellers before start. Anyone who has flown the Turbine Duke or the Starship knows how granular this developer gets about engine behaviour, so first-hand time with an NTS system is not a small detail.
There is a production change here too. The Twin Commanders will be the first Black Square aircraft modelled and textured professionally rather than in-house, which the developer says results in more realistic wear and materials inside and out. Cyganski kept the instrument panels and avionics for himself, on the basis that the panel is where the systems live and it needs to feel consistent with the rest of the fleet. One of the shared images shows the inside of the TC690’s main wheel well, including a working nitrogen pressure gauge for the emergency gear extension system.
The piston 685 is where the pair diverges. It uses geared reciprocating engines rather than the direct-drive units in Black Square’s other piston aircraft. The GTSIO-520-F produces 435 HP per side and burns over 50 gallons per hour each on take-off, with a tachometer redline of 3,400 RPM through a 0.667:1 reduction and a maximum manifold pressure of 44.5 inHg. Cyganski says the cockpit layouts, systems and in-flight operation differ greatly between the two despite the shared airframe.
The Commander 114 is probably coming next week
We covered the full product page reveal in June, when Just Flight put up more than 40 screenshots and a feature list that included what Black Square describes as MSFS’s first working stormscope. At that point the sticking point was sound. That is evidently resolved, because the 154-page manual is now public, the First Look video is out, and community partner previews are beginning.
Two things in this update were not on the product page. The first is a new full state saving system, built for the Twin Commanders and then added to the 114 at the last minute. Cyganski says it uses the second of the two state-saving methods available to MSFS developers, which he identified on the Just Flight forums as the JavaScript technique rather than the L:Var one, and that it has proven more consistent across platforms. That confidence translated into persistence for nearly every custom variable: 445 saved parameters on the Twin Commanders including failures, and 220 on the 114. Those figures have crept up since the forum post a few days earlier, which cited 435 and 210.
Crucially, it is optional and phase-aware. Three toggles on the tablet options page control how much persists, and the system checks the phase of flight before loading a state, so ending a flight after shutdown and then starting the next one airborne will not produce something nonsensical. Leave all three off and you get the behaviour you already know from the rest of the fleet.
The second addition is sound. Cyganski says the 114 gets new engine sounds that depict normal and abnormal operating conditions at varying severity, and that he found them convincing enough to trigger recognition he had built up flying in the real world. Airframe vibration and resonance and nose gear shimmy are also modelled.
The package remains two aircraft, a normally aspirated version and a turbo-normalised one with crew and passenger oxygen plus an aftermarket air conditioner. Technical overview videos covering the avionics, the hydraulic gear system and the stormscope are promised in the coming days as release approaches. No date or price yet, though we’re hearing that it might come out next week.
For context on where this fits, the 114 was first announced in November 2024 alongside the Caravan Professional and the wider Professional lineup. The Caravan went on to release in March and, after a substantial v1.1 two weeks later, earned a strong verdict in our review. The 114 has been waiting a long time for its turn.
Why the 300, and what the 1900D would mean
The King Air choice is a considered one. Cyganski explains that the 300 pairs the shorter fuselage of the 200 with the engines of the 350, and that it exploited a temporary certification window to become the fastest and highest performing King Air. He cites a 320 KTAS cruise, climb rates above 3,000 fpm, a 14,000 lb MGTOW and the multi-bus electrical system of the 350, and says he wants the King Air Professional to sit at the top of the Black Square fleet with all his latest features and the new professional artwork.
Then comes the last sentence of the update, where Cyganski suggests a 1900D announcement was inevitable given how much work is going into these systems. The 1900D shares its lineage with the King Air but is a 19-seat regional commuter, which would take Black Square out of general aviation and into a category it has never touched. There is no timeline, no detail, and no product page. But nothing about the way this developer operates suggests it was said carelessly.
You can read Cyganski’s full update, along with the eight-page feature highlights PDF for the Commander 114 and the complete manual, on the Just Flight website. We will bring you the release date for the 114 as soon as it is confirmed.
