RJ Professional

We're back with a new In-Development update for our RJ Professional! This time we take a look at the brand new passenger cabins.

We have modelled the passenger cabin in a common 3+3 layout with grey leather seats, a stark contrast to the 1980’s style blue fabric seats that could be found in our 146 Professional. The cabins are custom modelled for each of the three RJ variants, taking into account the nuances of each variant such as blanked out windows, smaller overhead stowage bins in the centre of the cabin where the wing structure and centre fuel tank are located and a reduction in seats per row at the rear of the cabin as the fuselage sharply begins to narrow.

Although we haven’t tried to replicate one particular airline’s cabin 1:1, we feel the cabin perfectly serves its purpose of acting as a generic cabin that can be realistically used whatever the livery you choose to fly. For the talented painters in the community, the cabin will be included in the paint kit should you wish to customise it with your liveries.

Like our other airliners in MSFS, we have gone all-out with the functionality in the cabin, from simulated controls in the forward and rear galleys, cabin to cockpit communications and of course a return of the ‘study level’ coffeemaker!

Although the 146 and RJ may visually look similar from the exterior, upon entering the cabin users of our 146 Professional will notice some significant changes in the galleys which have been modernised. Gone is the bulky communications panel on the rear wall of the forward galley, this has now been replaced with a handset. The handset can be removed from it's cradle via a single click and rotates out towards you as if you are making a call. Using a mixture of the buttons on the handset and the annunciators on the cradle, calls can be made between the forward and aft galley, passenger cabin and cockpit. All of these communications are accurately simulated with the correct annunciators and chimes simulated at each station as well as in the cockpit.

Above the service door in the forward galley we have the attendant panel. This panel is used for controlling the cabin lighting and can also be used to view the status of the cabin doors, crew call lights and fasten seatbelt/no smoking signs. If a Ground Power Unit (GPU) is connected to the aircraft, electrical power can also be applied to the cabin via the ground service power switch. With a GPU connected to the aircraft and the switch set to the ON position, the ground service bus will be energised providing electrical power to the cabin’s systems. This is a useful tool for any non-cockpit crew as it allows electrical power to be applied to the passenger cabin without the need for a pilot or engineer in the cockpit. Users of the 146 Professional will also notice that there is a slightly different layout on this panel in the RJ Professional and that is due to the addition of two BRT/DIM switches for the cabin ceiling and side wall lighting.

If you are the type of person that just enjoys flying the aircraft and doesn’t want to get too involved with the passenger cabin simulation, we have catered for you too. With the “Auto Cabin Crew” option enabled on the EFB, the cabin crew will perform all of the cabin duties for you, without you ever having to leave the cockpit. You will even hear noises from the cabin such as passenger boarding/deboarding the aircraft, chimes from passenger and crew calls, coffee brewing and even music during boarding and after landing. That’s right, the digital music player also makes a return in the RJ Professional allowing you to play one of up to seven included songs or you can import some custom music of your own! If you do wish to have a peak into the cabin whilst your flying, you can take a look through the viewing window on the newly modelled enhanced security door. The door which opens outwards into the galley features two large blow-out panels on its lower half which are used to equalise the pressure between the cockpit and cabin in the case of a rapid depressurisation. The door also features an electronic lock with controls located on the pedestal. The passenger cabin can also be disabled entirely via an option on the EFB, which may benefit users who wish to slightly increase their FPS via a reduction in VRAM usage.

An interesting fact you may not have known about the aircraft is despite the difference in fuselage length between the RJ85 and RJ100, both variants actually have the same maximum occupancy limit of 118 people (including passengers and crew). This is due to both aircraft sharing the same emergency exit arrangement and therefore are both limited by the number of exits rather than the physical space available in the aircraft. This limitation is less impactful to mainline operators of these variants who can make up for the lost revenue by selling seats in a business class cabin.

Also some great news, the rest of the product is effectively feature complete now and we are beginning to enter the “polishing” phase which includes a lot of intensive testing as we attempt to break the product prior to release, just so you don’t have to! We’ll be sure to keep you posted on the progress of the RJ Professional and you can expect to see some preview videos of the product in the near future.  Enjoy the pics!

In this latest development update for our upcoming RJ Professional we highlight some of the brand new features that will be included with the EFB. 

Headlining the list of new features is the addition of Navigraph Enroute Charts. When opening the Charts app on the EFB, there is now an option to display Airport Charts or Enroute Charts. The Enroute Charts page has four options to toggle the type of chart shown: IFR High Altitude, IFR Low Altitude, VFR, and World Map, meaning that there is a chart available regardless of the type of flight or location. These maps can be centred on the aircraft’s present position and can move with the aircraft as it navigates airways, or they can be moved freely to view airways and navaids that may not be in the immediate vicinity. A dark mode toggle is also available to preserve that all important night vision during those late night flights.

For non-Navigraph subscribers, the traditional Map app will remain available for use.

On the Airport Charts page, search, view and save any airport chart that is included within Navigraph’s vast database. There are also some much requested additions to this page compared to previous version of the EFB, the most notable being the ability to draw on the airport charts. No more having to remember longwinded taxi instructions, simply draw the taxi path on the chart and enable the aircraft icon to monitor the aircraft’s present position.

In addition to all of this, the RJ Professional will still feature many other customisation options and quality of life features that you have come to be familiar with in our other MSFS aircraft, such as SimBrief integration, boarding and refuelling simulation, failures and more!

Although we anticipate that these new features will debut with the release of the RJ Professional, we will also be integrating them into all of our other MSFS products as free of charge updates. Stay tuned for further developments as we get ever closer to the release of our RJ Professional.

Here are a number of screenshots showing just how the EFB will appear in the aircraft.

After the popular release of the 146 Professional Version 2 update last week, we now take a look at how the next iteration of our regional jet family is progressing, the RJ Professional. Go grab a brew from the ‘study-level’ coffeemaker, there is a lot to cover.

It’s been a few months since we last shared an in-development update on the RJ, but that’s not because we haven’t been working on it, quite the opposite in fact. It just so happens that a lot of the work that has been ongoing is coding related, and therefore, doesn’t lend itself very well to screenshots. Now is a good time to provide a summary of where we are with the RJ and to share some insight into the work that is currently ongoing.

We’ll start with the passenger cabins. Thanks to the similarities between the 146 and RJ fuselage dimensions, we have already integrated the 146s passenger cabins into each of the RJ variants. At a minimum, these cabins will include the same feature set as those in the 146 Professional V2 update, with some changes being made to reflect the differences between the cabins in the real aircraft. One of the areas that differs between the two aircraft is the forward vestibule attendant panel, which in the RJ, has the addition of bright/dim switches for the cabin lighting which also necessitates a reshuffle of some of the other controls on that panel. We want to ensure these little difference between the 146 and RJ cabins are modelled, as they all help show the wider picture of how the real-world 146 was modernised and improved over time, and eventually transitioned into the RJ. These additional features in the passenger cabins are still in-development so we aren’t ready to share any screenshots just yet, but we will share more information on the RJ’s passenger cabins as development progresses.

Other features from the 146 Professional will also be making a return in the RJ Professional. This means the RJ Professional will release with a feature set including, but not limited to: automatic cabin crew simulation, boarding simulation, failures, paper charts and checklists, state saving, Simbrief integration, and Navigraph charts support. We developed a lot of these features to be modular so it allows us to integrate them into other aircraft with relative ease, and that has certainly worked well here. All of these features, plus some additional ones that we haven’t announced yet, will make the RJ Professional our most feature rich aircraft yet!

Meanwhile in the cockpit, significant progress has been made on the RJs systems. Although some of the systems may look similar to those in the 146, there are quite a lot of differences in how they operate. Systems such as pressurisation which were previously semi-automatic in the 146, are now automatic in the RJ, and although a lot of the pressurisation systems code could be ported across directly from the 146 to RJ, we want to continue our trend of pushing ourselves that little bit further with each release, so pressurisation is one of several systems that has been completely recoded from the ground up.

In the last few weeks, our systems coders and flight model developer have been working in unison to simulate the FADEC system, a modern system that we at Just Flight haven’t had to look into for a very long time! The FADEC system provides the RJ with better fuel economy, increased engine reliability, improved engine performance and also allows the RJ to be fitted with an autothrottle system.

Systems-wise, the majority of the RJ’s systems are very close to completion from a coding perspective, and we are getting close to having a build where we can fly fully simulated flights and then start receiving the ever valuable feedback from our QA and testing teams. Some of the final big ticket items on our ‘to-do’ list revolve around the aircraft’s navigation systems, and first and foremost, the integration of the GNLU-910A FMS with the aircraft’s autopilot. This integration is ongoing with our systems coders and FMS coder working together to make sure the integration is as seamless as possible. Once the FMS has been fully integrated, we can then begin work on fine tuning the LNAV and VNAV autopilot modes, the latter being another modern system that is new to us!

To briefly touch on the sound set, the critically acclaimed sound set of our 146 Professional will be making a return and will serve as the foundation for which the additional RJ-specific sounds will be built upon. The sound set in the 146 Professional was already one of our most highly regarded sound sets in MSFS (second only to our Avro Vulcan, of course…) so we have no doubt the RJ will live up to the high expectations set.

Finally, one area that has continued to see progress in the last few months is the liveries. We have almost 30 high quality liveries created across the three RJ variants, ranging from some of the oldest operators of the RJ’s, through to some of the type’s present day operators, as well test aircraft, and even some special liveries. One special livery that is synonymous with the RJ, is the Swiss ‘Shopping Paradise Zurich Airport’ livery, which has been lovingly created by community user ‘SeventhMoon’ for the RJ100 variant. We have recently updated the RJ Professional’s product page with a list of liveries that have already been created, and the list can be viewed by expanding the ‘Detailed Description’ box above.

Well we hope your coffee hasn’t gone cold after reading all that! Lots of work continues in the background with the RJ, despite not being able to show suitable screenshots on a regular basis. We hope you are as excited as we are to see the RJ approach the end of its development, and we can’t wait to start showing off some of the RJ’s systems in greater detail. Stay tuned!

The RJ Professional remains on track to be our next airliner release! After a delay over the summer months where we focused the crux of development resources on the F28 Professional, a dedicated coding team is now assigned to this project and significant progress is being made at good pace.

A large number of systems are already complete, including air conditioning, fuel, and hydraulics, all of which have been overhauled to ensure they match the differences of the more modern RJ compared to the older 146. As work nears completion on the traditional systems, focus is now beginning to turn to the autopilot and navigation systems, two areas that differ significantly from the 146.

One system that has seen a lot of attention recently is the IRS system, with all modes now simulated and fully functional in the simulator, and work is now ongoing on the ADC system (including ADC1 and ADC2 computers) to properly integrate them with the various autopilot modes, the FMS and EFIS signal generators. It’s difficult to show off systems coding in text-based in-development updates, so we typically try and ensure there’s a lot to show before we can make public further interesting and meaningful updates. As we get closer to release, we’ll be in a position to bring you an increasing amount of in-development updates on the RJ Professional as system coding draws to a close.

We are though excited to show you the brand new virtual cabin that we have modelled. The cabin features a high density 3+3 layout for all three RJ variants, a standard configuration for many RJ operators, and also features animated doors that can be opened and closed from the forward galley, as well as the retractable airstairs, controllable cabin lighting and chimes from controls on the cabin crew panels. This cabin will be included at release and a paint kit will be provided so you can customise the cabin’s colour scheme to match a specific operator.

Here's a small but key dev update on our RJ Professional.  As promised previously, the team have put together a video giving a tour of the RJ’s aft centre console, which features all-new avionics versus the 146. Martyn will talk you through the functionality of each panel, from radios to flight deck door controls.   Enjoy the video!

Since our the last RJ In Dev entry, the development team have been busy working on all areas of the aircraft, from the artwork to systems coding and flight models.

The interior and cockpit modelling and texturing has been undergoing extensive testing in recent weeks, with every rivet, screw and label being compared to its real-life counterpart, to ensure 100% accuracy. After spending many months developing the 146, it’s been interesting to see just how much was improved and upgraded in the later RJ, and how all comes together to reduce pilot workload without losing the appeal of the aircraft. More details on those differences can be found here: https://www.justflight.com/articles/rj-professional-and-146-professional-differences-msfs

Work on the 30 liveries, covering the RJ70, 85 and 100 variants, is also complete and we’ve included screenshots here of just a handful of the stunning schemes. Thanks to the commonality of the 146 and RJ exteriors, you’ll be able to share your liveries between both types, like many airlines did in service.

Moving into the cockpit, all of the over 20 digital displays are now ‘alive’, from the PFD and ND to the radios and MCP. Last week we finished work on the aft centre console, which is entirely different to the 146, with more modern VHF COM radio and ADF controllers (the VHF NAV controllers remain on the glareshield), a different style of transponder and brake temperature indicator, and the addition of flight data recorder, emergency location transmitter and flight deck door controls. Next up are the Inertial Reference System (IRS) and fully-automatic pressurisation controller, and we’re aiming to share some preview videos of these new systems in the coming weeks.

We hope you've enjoyed this latest update.

We're excited to get underway with the first of a number of development entries we hope to be able to bring you for the RJ Professional.

For this first entry, we have included some screenshots of the RJ cockpit, showing the more modern and capable avionics compared to the 146, and a preview of some of the RJ liveries. Work is still very much on-going with further cockpit and exterior changes to come, and we’ll bring you more updates soon!