After months of screenshots and a reveal trailer, we finally got to watch the iniBuilds A380 fly. The two-hour developer deep dive on the official Microsoft Flight Simulator Twitch channel, was the first time the community has seen the aircraft flown end to end, a short hop from Cardiff to Heathrow with the team narrating the whole thing as they went.
Cameron, iniBuilds’ lead technical developer, and Mike, its head of production, flew a British Airways A380 along a route the real aircraft has used after heavy maintenance, on the World Update 17 Cardiff scenery into iniBuilds’ own Heathrow. Along the way they opened up the cabin, the engines, the failure systems and the new EFB, and got to the practical questions people have been asking since the June reveal, the main one being: how does it perform?
The performance question
Mike explained that on top of the sim’s default level-of-detail system, iniBuilds unloads parts of the aircraft to reduce CPU and GPU load. The clearest example he gave: with the doors closed, the cabin is not rendered at all, and it reappears the moment you open a door. It’s a cool trick, especially from the cockpit. The developers were careful about what this does and does not do. It will not hand you extra frames, they said. What it targets is smoothness, cutting the stutters and the frame timing when you pan around the flight deck. For anyone who wants nothing to do with the cabin, there is a no-cabin option as well.
Mike said the goal with performance mode on is to sit around where the A350 currently performs, with the team trying to improve on that. On console, the developers said the Xbox build is already in testing and running fine, and that Chaseplane works with the aircraft, which most of their testers run with performance mode enabled. PlayStation 5 got a softer answer: iniBuilds said it would like to bring the aircraft there but has “a few hoops to jump through” first.
Those performance choices run through the whole cabin. There are no evacuation slides, which the developers put down to their sheer size on a double-deck aircraft, though the door arming and disarming logic is still in place and will show a failed deployment if you open an armed door. Overhead bins do not open, most window blinds are fixed with only a few operable, and the EFB carries an option to randomly open and close window shades rather than animate every one. The point iniBuilds kept returning to was consistency: model the things people use often, and skip the ones that cost performance for little return.
Two of almost everything
One thing the stream cleared up is that the A380 ships with two cabin styles, not one. Alongside the Emirates-style four-class cabin iniBuilds has shown before, there is a more neutral “basic” cabin, which is what the British Airways aircraft used on stream. The developers said the reasoning is practical: most A380s ever delivered went to Emirates, so an Emirates-style cabin covers the majority of real routes, while the neutral cabin suits every other operator. The onboard shower is still there, with a running timer that counts down as you use it, and it draws from the same water system that feeds the lavatories, so neglecting water and waste through the Flight Attendant Panel can leave washrooms inoperative.
The engines are a bigger split than a simple visual swap. The A380 will model both the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 and the Engine Alliance GP7200, and iniBuilds says the two behave differently rather than just looking different. The Rolls-Royce version shows N1, N2 and N3 for its triple-spool arrangement and uses an automatic de-rate for climb thrust based on weight, plus a modified takeoff thrust setting. The Engine Alliance version runs on N1 and N2 and uses manual de-rate steps instead. iniBuilds first confirmed both variants would be separate models back when it shared its Trent-powered Qantas shots in June.
Then there is the software. iniBuilds has simulated two avionics standards, an older “batch 2” from around 2010 and a newer “batch 7,” and you can switch between them. The developers said this lets you match older operators still running earlier software, and the two produce visible differences across the FMS pages. Between the cabins, the engines and the software batches, the main effect is that a single purchase covers a fairly wide spread of real-world A380 configurations.
Systems, failures and the new EFB
Under the hood, much of the A380 inherits from iniBuilds’ A350. The new EFB handles SimBrief import, ground operations and GSX loading, and now calculates intersection takeoff performance directly, so you no longer have to shorten the runway manually. Takeoff and landing performance is worked out on the OIS, with speeds sent through to the FMS. The aircraft carries Hoppie CPDLC, weather radar, a terrain and vertical display, Brake to Vacate with runway overrun protection, modelled fuel dump, and a dynamic checklist system that catches items it can detect as incomplete.
The failure system is where the stream got into detail. Failures can be set to trigger instantly or dynamically, which the developers described as a random chance of the failure occurring at some point in the flight. Separately, “situations” model less deterministic events: a fuel leak that behaves unpredictably, engine high-vibration that can pick any engine and threshold, GPS jamming, and a bird strike that fails an engine and visibly damages the exterior. iniBuilds says the ECAM logic is far more involved than an A320’s, with procedures that defer into the checklist menu and abnormal drills that run several pages long. In one detail the developers pointed out, discharging a fire bottle does not guarantee the fire goes out.
How it flies
Cameron described a retuned and largely rebuilt fly-by-wire system specific to the A380, including a rotation law that expects a single pull on takeoff rather than continued back pressure. Taxiing is its own skill. The nose wheel steers at a maximum of 14 degrees per second, so inputs need feeding in and out smoothly, and the body landing gear steers too, which the developers said the real aircraft needs so the nose wheel does not simply skid under all that weight. On the ground the aircraft rolls at idle at lighter weights, though heavier loads call for breakaway thrust. iniBuilds also showed a jump-ahead feature that skips to any waypoint or phase of flight, alongside the usual time acceleration, auto step climbs, pause at top of descent and autosave.
The Cardiff to Heathrow leg finished with a manual landing, and multiple jetways connected to the aircraft at the gate through iniBuilds’ own jetway manager, the multi-jetway system it announced in June that lets several bridges dock to one aircraft.
Still no date
For all that detail, the two things most people wanted were held back. iniBuilds did not confirm a release date, saying only that it will be “soon.” Sounds were handled in-house this time rather than through Echo 19, and the studio plans a “Welcome to the A380” video series, possibly in two parts, before release. If you want to see the aircraft in person, iniBuilds will be at the Flight Sim UK show at Bristol Aerospace on 10 and 11 October as a platinum sponsor.
The A380 has been a long time coming, first announced in 2019 and, by Cameron’s account, one of the aircraft iniBuilds set out to build when the studio started. He said he first got in touch with the company to help make it. After a road that ran through X-Plane, a shelving, and a full rebuild for MSFS, seeing it fly a complete leg on stream puts the finish line in sight. The date, when it comes, should not be far behind!
