A Microsoft Flight Simulator Cinderella Story: Building the A220 Airliner

Synaptic Simulations has launched the A220 Airliner on the Microsoft Flight Simulator Marketplace for $64.99, turning a community freeware effort into a full commercial release. The team is tiny by industry standards: eight developers, with leadership split across systems programming, avionics programming, and art management.

That matters because the A220 is not a starter aircraft. It’s a modern, highly integrated airliner with deep electrical, avionics, and flight-planning complexity, and the team says the project forced multiple rebuilds as their standards and understanding improved. They rebuilt the 3D model from scratch and rewrote major parts of the systems and avionics to get closer to the real aircraft and to keep the codebase maintainable.

iniBuilds is now the publishing partner and contributed a large chunk of the production work: texturing, passenger cabin, liveries, animations, cockpit refinements, custom sound, and a bespoke EFB. For developers, this is a useful example of how a small specialist team can get a technically ambitious aircraft across the finish line by pairing with a larger production house.

The A220 also highlights a broader trend in sim development: niche, high-fidelity aircraft can still find an audience if they offer something distinct. Synaptic is betting on the A220’s unusual systems, route-editing tools, circuit breaker simulation, and signature engine sound to stand out in a crowded airliner market, while planning to expand the product based on community feedback.