Having already released the piston version of the BN-2 Islander for X-Plane, TorqueSim's head of Islander development, Ulrich Oetzel always had the BN-2T - the turbine variant of the aircraft - on his mind, even at the very beginning of his time with the aircraft developer. Today, that plan has become reality with the official announcement of TorqueSim's BN-2T Turbine Islander.

"I grew tired of waiting. Tired of waiting for Flight1 to move their old model to X-Plane; tired of waiting for somebody to make it. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that “if you want something done, you should do it yourself” – or something along those lines. The end result of that was the TorqueSim Islander," he said, speaking to the developer blog.

"Even when I first joined T(orqueSim), I knew that the Turbine Islander was somewhere in the future."

But to say that the conversion from piston to turbine was easy is another thing entirely, as Oetzel maintains that "extensive and intense reworks of the 3D model, the flight model, paint kit, interior, and myriad other items" were needed to successfully model the -2T variant.

"The 2T is essentially a completely new aircraft," he says. "It shares some minor features with our original model, in some places uses bits and pieces of the old textures, but it’s a whole different plane. Even the flight characteristics are much improved over the previous iterations."

Though there are some aspects in common between the two. The interior, for example, can be matched 'almost 1:1' between the piston and turbine and thus new cabin textures, models and UV work can also benefit the existing BN-2 Islander from TorqueSim, which is currently awaiting the upgrade to v1.2.

"All this is a rather long winded way of saying we have a BN-2T Turbine Islander coming very soon™ alongside a huge update 1.2 for the BN-2B."

The developer has confirmed to Threshold that the product will be sold separately to the piston-powered Islander, although customers of that aircraft can expect a 'hefty discount.'