Los Angeles (KLAX) to Sydney (YSSY) | Boeing 787-900 | X-Plane 11

Time for a (very) long-haul, we fly United Airlines flight 839 that goes direct from LA to Sydney this averages 15 hours of flight usually fighting agains the wind as we travel to the west over the Pacific Ocean.

We have a very interesting departure from a busy LA airport, with several planes landing and departing together and a great job by ATC handling the LA tower. We got delayed at the gate a little because of planes taxiing around our 787. Weather was foggy in LA for departure.

The arrival to Sydney was beautiful, we got quite strong winds on arrival with guts up to 27kts so we were forced to use runway25 which is not Sydney's largest runway, it is about 8500ft long, enough for a light Dreamliner but doesn't have a lot of room for error. Considering the shortish runway and the wind the landing was very acceptable.

We are flying version 1.8.2 of the Magknight 787, a plane that has received as many updates as criticism over the last years. Truth is the plane is now acceptable and we must admit could be fun to fly but it still has a lot of things undone which is hard to swallow after all these years in development.

The good things are that the plane integrates with simbrief to load the weights and fuel, it has ACARs and can request weather, clearance and ATIS. It has a very nice PA system customizable per airline. The external model is quite good and now we have both the 787-800 and 787-900 available to choose. Some of the liveries are really very nice.

On the minus side the FMC is still default XP which is a real pity, there is no VSD, no way to make the ND display use the whole screen as in the real 787 and there is no HUD.

It seems some of these features might be coming in future updates hopefully for XP12. We find strange that the team focused in things like a hatch that you can open when you can't have a full screen ND but we have no voice in what are the priorities. With some patience this video might help you see what the plane is up to this version and make your own conclusions.

A large portion of the cruise section was trimmed from the video before uploading to reduce upload time and processing in Youtube, you are not missing anything except a 787 cruising over the ocean, if you are careful you will notice we step climbed from FL340 to 360 then 380 and finally 400 until the approach. The whole flight was done on real time and weather as we always do in the channel and flying online on Vatsim, we got lucky and got ATC on both departure and arrival, a blessing for a long hauler.

Hope all long-haulers enjoy it!

From: Los Angeles International (KLAX).
To: Kingsford Smith, Sydney (YSSY).
Flight: United Airlines 839.
Aircraft: Magknight B787-900.