Last week, at the close of the Synaptic A220’s developer livestream on the official Microsoft Flight Simulator Twitch channel, Steve from iniBuilds was asked the question everyone had been circling for five years. His answer was “not long,” followed immediately by “I didn’t say soon.”
As it turns out, not long meant about ten days. iniBuilds has now published a 47-minute walkthrough video for the Synaptic A220, and attached to it, a short confirmation that the aircraft will be arriving on the Microsoft Flight Simulator Marketplace next week. After a freeware start in 2021 as the open-source A22X, a change to payware under iniBuilds in early 2024, a missed Q4 2025 target and a summer 2026 window confirmed on the team’s new website two weeks ago, the A220 is about to become something you can actually buy.
A 47-minute video is not a teaser
There is a reason this release is quite different from the last several updates. Developers do not publish three-quarters of an hour of flight deck footage unless the build is locked. During the livestream the team said a deep-dive tutorial video would land before launch, and this is clearly it, which puts the sequencing exactly where you would expect it for a product with a date on the calendar.
The video opens with roughly four minutes on the aircraft’s history, tracing the lineage from Bombardier’s BRJ-X concept in 1996 through the CSeries programme launched in 2008, the design targets around a 20 percent fuel efficiency improvement, the 45 percent composite airframe and the Pratt & Whitney PW1500G geared turbofans, and finally Airbus taking the majority share in 2018 and renaming the thing. It is a good way to start, because a decent chunk of the audience for this aircraft still knows it as the CSeries.
From there it moves to an exterior walkaround at Providence in Breeze Airways colours, with openable engine cowlings showing the GTF internals and FADEC wiring, the tailcone APU inlet, and the landing gear detail.
Five years’ worth of systems
In the cockpit, the team demonstrates a cold-and-dark power-up, including automatic IRS alignment with no overhead knobs to fuss with, and an electronic checklist on the second display unit that senses switch positions on its own rather than requiring you to tick items manually.
Two things stand out for anyone who assumes an Airbus badge means Airbus behaviour. The first is the Speed Trim System, shown via a blue bug on the PFD speed tape, which the presenters use to explain how the A220’s pitch and control logic differs from the fly-by-wire philosophy of the A320 family. That distinction has been the team’s argument for this project all along: the aircraft carries an Airbus name but its systems logic comes from Bombardier, and simulating it properly meant starting from scratch rather than adapting existing work.
The second is the graphical flight planning. The video shows waypoints being deleted, discontinuities cleared, constraints adjusted and holding patterns drawn directly on the navigation display. SimBrief uplink works into both the EFB and the FMS, and takeoff performance calculations run on the EFB before populating V-speeds into the FMS automatically. On the approach into Dubrovnik, the video shows an activate Vertical Glide Path mode for the RNAV 29 and demonstrates radius-to-fix leg tracking, which sits alongside the RNP-AR and LPV capability shown in the FSExpo trailer back in June.
The final section tours the EFB, covering flight plans, ground services, loadsheets, performance calculators, Navigraph and Lido charts, and a keyboard-input toggle for faster FMS entry. There is also customizable cabin lighting colour. The video closes with an explanation of the external program architecture the aircraft uses to feed real-time terrain radar data into the flight deck displays.
What we still do not know
Pricing. That is the whole list, and it has been the whole list since the FAQ went up. The team said it would be announced closer to release, and with a Marketplace launch a week out, that announcement cannot be far behind.
A few launch-scope caveats from the livestream are worth repeating, because a 47-minute highlight reel does not mention them. The weather radar is not in at release, with the team pointing to how the A220’s azimuthal map projection interacts with the simulator’s weather data access. The aircraft ships with a single cabin configuration, with alternative layouts planned afterwards. And the A220-100 and the ACJ corporate variant will come as a separate product after the -300 launches.
The A220 has been one of the more conspicuous absences from the high-fidelity narrowbody category in MSFS. Fenix and FSLabs own the A320 family conversation, PMDG and iFly carry the Boeing side, and the modern regional jet segment has been comparatively thin. Synaptic and iniBuilds will have the segment largely to themselves, and at a moment when the community has been asking loudly for something new to fly that is not another A320 variant.
