AVNX started with a clear intention. Bring together people with a shared desire to build high-quality, touch-enabled content for Sim Innovation’s Air Manager.
We are a small team based in Western Europe. When we aren’t in the sim ourselves, we dedicate our time to building enhanced, touch-friendly cockpit tools for the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 community.
While our project is a hobby, our vision is professional.
For us, it’s about combining curiousity for development with years of design experience to see how far we can push the immersion of a home sim setup. Currently led by founding members Flight Engineer (F.E.) and Pete, the prioritization of quality over quantity is key. Our focus is on building tools that raise the bar for how a virtual cockpit experience feels.
We are easy to find and always open to a conversation. If you want to say hello, ask a question, or share feedback, feel free to join us in our Discord.
PRIORITIZATION OF QUALITY
About AVNX
Building fancy fluff without an actual need or a significant improvement in usability, is nothing more than wasted time and energy. We are two pairs of hands with a limited amount of time at our disposal. Therefore, it's important to us that we put our limited resources into things that matter. We identify a need based on our own flight simulator, design, and usability experience. Next to that, the best tool to define a need is to read and listen to the complaints and daily struggles of users.
1. IDENTIFY THE NEED
2. DO THE RESEARCH
One of the most important parts of the process is the research behind it. After watching hundreds of hours of real-world aviation videos and reading countless real-world aviation manuals (this is particularly true for Flight Engineer), we can say with confidence that there is a lot of room for progression. While it's always difficult to find the exact information needed to build a real-life experience, and there will always be errors just by being bound to the limitations of a simulation platform, we strive to get things more accurate and will keep striving for that. Quality is always a passion, never an end goal.
3. CONCEPT AND BUILD
While our projects usually focus on the requirement of having a dual side-by-side monitor (pilot/co-pilot side), airplanes were never really built to fit on a dual Full HD touch monitor setup. Therefore, it's important to make a suitable blend between looks, real-world accuracy, and logical functionality and flow. Doing all of this within the technical limitations of both Air Manager and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 can be a challenge by itself. While this process happens with an occasional stumble, we always keep our eyes on the goal.
4. TEST AND DEPLOY
It's important for us that we use our own products. This is the only way we can guarantee to stumble upon usability issues and potential bugs that slipped into the project. Even while still in the early steps of a project, we start using the result so we can detect problems early.
While we do our utmost best to eliminate friction, we are limited by our own set of eyes. Because we provide you with improved tools as a part of the flight simulator community, we also count on your feedback. If we want a better tomorrow, community is an important cornerstone that we should invest in heavily.
5. MAINTAIN
A poorly maintained airplane eventually becomes nothing more than a piece of scrap metal. As mentioned before, this is where we count on user feedback. While we build with the utmost care and test with a deep interest in delivering high quality, it's impossible for us to find every minor simulator change ourselves.
Therefore, it is important that you report problems with any of our products. There is a dedicated support channel for this in our Discord server. For people who don't want a Discord account, feel free to send us a message via our website contact form.