Everybody loves a landing analysis tool, apparently, judging by how many have popped up in this category lately. In the last eighteen months alone we’ve written about Arc, BeatMyLanding and SQWK Flight Review, and they all make the same case: vertical speed alone is a crude way to judge an arrival. TouchdownFX agrees, but it goes a step further than a scorecard. It records what you did with the stick and pedals, and plays it back to you.
That happens in two ways. The 2D approach replay draws the runway to scale using geometry from SimConnect and puts your aircraft on it as a top-down silhouette, with a centreline deviation readout and crosswind bars. Alongside it sits a joystick and rudder visualiser showing raw stick and pedal positions rather than control surface deflections, so you see your own inputs, not the aircraft’s response to them. If a landing fell apart because you were correcting late in a crosswind, it shows up on screen.
The second replay runs inside MSFS. TouchdownFX records full aircraft state at 50 Hz and plays the approach back in the sim, with a ghost mode that spawns an AI clone of your aircraft while you watch from the drone camera. There are five scenic camera presets, playback from one-eighth speed up to 4x, and time-of-day sync so the lighting matches when you actually landed.
The score
Each landing gets a 0 to 100 result across seven components. Vertical speed carries 30 per cent, G-force and touchdown zone 15 per cent each, and centreline deviation, crab, bank and pitch 10 per cent apiece. Worth noting that vertical speed used to account for 45 per cent and touchdown zone wasn’t scored at all, so the tool has moved away from the metric the whole category was built on. Thresholds adjust by aircraft category, and the developer states they’re drawn from FAR 25.473 structural limits, Airbus FCTM crab and bank limits, and Boeing operations data.
MSFS 2024 only
This is a 2024 tool by choice. The developer has explained that MSFS 2020 lacks the facilities API 2024 exposes, which breaks the 2D replay, centreline deviation and touchdown zone scoring, and that full 2020 support isn’t planned. If you’re still on the older sim, BeatMyLanding and SQWK both support it.
TouchdownFX is free. It sits in the system tray, connects to the sim automatically, and installs its in-game panel with one click. The current build is 2.1.7 at touchdownfx.com. The site reports 982 active pilots and just over 16,800 landings analysed, and also hosts leaderboards, pilot profiles and a public API.
If you want leaderboards and a quick readout on touchdown, plenty of tools already do that well. If you’ve ever finished an approach knowing something went wrong without being sure what, this one promises to give you a way to find out.
