The International X-Plane Engineering Group's Tom Kyler has broken a multiple-month long silence from the team with a status update posted on the X-Aviation product forum, X-Pilot.

IXEG, although quiet over recent months, produced one of the most popular X-Plane aircraft of all time with the release of the 737 Classic in April 2016, simulating the -300 variant of Boeing's short- to medium-haul airliner.

On an old thread from March 2019, Kyler provided a short life update, the first on the thread since April. He said that his work at NASA has reduced somewhat, allowing him to relocate from Houston to his home in San Antonio, giving him some much needed stability in his daily schedule.

Now that Kyler is able to commit more time to development, the first job is to start looking into coding for the FMS, which will be brought over to X-Plane's newer XP1100 dataset. The developer described this move as the "backbone" of FMS performance, and will allow for more efficient VNAV calculations and the additon of the notorious "hold" function.

Route editing is another aspect up for improvement according to Tom - this includes 'building' the route data used by the FMS for LNAV and VNAV, obviously a critical function of the entire system.

The changes will bring the flight management system up to more modern standards, in an effort to futureproof this aspect of the aircraft. This means that less changes will be required in the future to make the FMS compatible with new X-Plane updates.

You can see the full thread over on the X-Pilot forums. Alternatively, check out IXEG's previous status update from March this year.