After years of development and a week of daily teasers that had the community watching the clock, today is the day. FSReborn’s Phenom 300E has been released on the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Marketplace, priced at $39.99 US dollars.
The Phenom 300E, Embraer’s best-selling business jet, is a natural fit for MSFS. It’s fast, single-pilot certified, and brings a kind of flying that sits in a different category from airliners or GA propellers. But Raul’s ambition with this project has always been to build something around the experience of operating the aircraft, not just flying it.
Ground operations are fully interactive. You request a fuel truck, walk out to the fueling panel, open the cap, open the valve, and watch the quantity tick up in real time. Passengers arrive by vehicle, board with their own simulated preferences and reactions, and will comment on the temperature, the cleanliness of the cabin, and the quality of the landing.
The maintenance system is modelled in similar depth. Tire pressures, brake pad wear, battery voltage, hydraulic pump hours, and the vapor cycle system that drives the air conditioning all degrade with use and misuse. Leave the air conditioning running at full blast on GPU power before engine start, and you’ll stress the compressor. Forget to remove your engine covers before startup, and you’ll ingest one into the engine, which would be very costly in the real world. Forget the gear pin and your landing gear won’t retract. All of this can be toggled off for those who just want to fly.
The FADEC system handles most of the engine start sequence, monitoring ITT and N1, though it won’t catch a hung start or high oil pressure, so you’re not entirely off the hook. There’s no autothrottle yet, as there simply hasn’t been enough real-world data on the recently added system to model it with confidence, and he wasn’t prepared to guess.
The FBO system is totally new territory
The headline feature that no other flight sim product has done quite like this is the FBO system. Each copy of the Phenom 300E comes with the ability to place custom Fixed-Base Operator buildings at any airport in the world, directly from an in-sim map interface. There are three sizes of FBO and a hangar, all fully modelled inside, with ambient sounds, working elevators, opening doors, a pilot’s lounge, a bar, even functioning restrooms. The hangar doors animate and make noise. The lights work. At night, the buildings light up, including your custom logo.
Because yes, you can apply your own logo. It requires dabbling a bit in dev mode and editing a file, but the result will be your branding on every surface in the building, from the entrance canopy to the drink coasters.
The buildings are saved to the aircraft package, so they persist between sessions and appear at whichever airports you placed them. They’re also shareable, so virtual airline communities can distribute a single file and have the same FBO visible to every Phenom pilot on their roster. The feature is locked to the Phenom 300E specifically, so it only renders if you’re flying that aircraft.
Built entirely on the native SDK
One detail Raul has been consistent about throughout the project is that everything, the FBO system, the passenger simulation, the maintenance modelling, all of it, has been built using the standard Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 SDK, with no workarounds or external frameworks. That’s the reason the aircraft is a 2024 exclusive and won’t be backported to MSFS 2020. The trade-off was always depth over compatibility, and from what Sunday’s stream showed, it was the right call.
The aircraft ships with 27 liveries, supports custom tail registration numbers, and includes Navigraph integration on the EFB with Lido charts as a default fallback for those without a subscription. SimBrief integration is included, with a custom FSReborn airframe profile available from the Discord. A 133-page manual is expected to be available from today as well, as well as video tutorials.
A deep-dive interview with Raul is scheduled for Wednesday at 1900 Zulu on TwoToneMurphy’s stream, which should fill in everything the preview left unanswered, including the full details of the systems modelling and what’s planned for post-launch.
The FSReborn Phenom 300E is available exclusively on the Microsoft Flight Simulator in-game Marketplace. A console release is planned but will follow the PC launch.
