*FIRST LOOK* Winwing A320 FCU Unit - Full Review & Comparison With MiniFCU

Hello friends followers and channel members welcome back to another video here on the channel and I'm really excited in this video today to give you a first look at the recently announced winwing FCU unit for the Airbus A320 now this unit comes hot on the heels of the mini FCU from mini cockpits many of you ordering that over recent months and starting to take delivery of them as well we of course have showcased the mini FCU here on this channel before and I am a happy and proud user of the mini FCU but this new product the winwing A320 FCU is what we're going to be looking at today and of course we will be comparing the two now at the time of making this video the winwing A320 FCU is currently available for pre-order it is not yet shipped and I have been sent this unit by winwing for this video so a thanks to them for supplying me early with one of their units since this unit's release was announced I was inundated by emails and messages on our Discord server asking me what I thought about this so I'm really happy to delve into this product and give you my feedback hopefully answering any questions you may have as I know many of you have already ordered this product without seeing it yet yet up close and working I'm sure there will be pros and cons with this unit and I'd love to hear your feedback as well in the comments section down below as we go through the video now obviously I'm based in the UK and I believe the custom import fees for this were about £11 and you can see that it comes securely packaged with the two brackets and Allen key all the screws needed and also some soft pads for the feet as well if you wish to use them it's not particularly heavy I'd say fraction heavier than the mini FCU but the thing that you really notice when you get your hands on this for the first time is as I have been used to the mini FCU this thing looks absolutely huge of course it's not it's the exact same size as a real FCU found in a real Airbus but because I've been used to the Mini version which is about 80% the size of the real one this full realized FCU unit did look rather large now one of the first things that jumped out of me is obviously that blank button there where you'd normally expect to see the expedite button this is omitted on this unit however it is still a button so you can press it and will presumably be able to assign it to something this unit is obviously cheaper than the mini cockpits FCU and lots of people have been asking me then what I thought about the build bu quality and how that would be reflected due to the lower cost in price well to be fair I'm really happy to tell you that this unit feels really solid the rotary dials are really not stiff but that's definitely not flimsy and so it's not something that you're just going to be able to catch or move without deliberately doing so so I was actually rather impressed with the build quality of this unit looking at the detail of the unit then all of the rotary knobs Etc feel just as they should nice and sturdy so that's good but all of the text I noticed the white text you can see here it is printed on rather than engraved or etched into the unit where it is in the real aircraft and it's also like that on the mini FCU the Box though contains no documentation or at least the version I have been sent hasn't so we're going to have to head online to see what to do next on the winwing website then select the product and you'll see here we've got options for the manual and also Dimensions if you want to check those out as well here is the manual and it's nothing fancy but then to be honest it really doesn't need to be what did concern me at this point is that at the moment no driver for this unit was available but we'll get into that shortly the build instructions are pretty simple simply attach the two side brackets using the provided screws and Allen key and yeah that's it it's pretty much uh simple and a straightforward job there are multiple ways though of actually attaching these brackets depending on how your home cockpit is set this will sit on the desk quite nicely like this but also you can mount it using the other mounting positions on the back explained in the manual so it will slot into any sort of pre-built home cockpit that you currently have going on so with my f CU unit now built it was time to plug it in using the supplied USB cable and see what it looked like and how well it worked but with no driver obviously available on the winwing website it seems that you need to go to the download Center and all of the units run through something called Sim app pro so we'll download this get this installed and have a look how it works works now at this point I've got to be completely honest I started to get a little bit frustrated here just because this doesn't seem to be completely self-explanatory there are lots of different options within this app and for those of you who already use winwing products and are familiar with this that's great but a lot of people will be purchasing this unit having never used winwing before because most of their products are geared to towards DCS and other military kinds of Hardware setups I guess maybe naively I was expecting to be able to find this unit in the software somewhere download a driver and it would all work but actually that was not the case in fact it wasn't until I actually plugged in the device that a option for the device became available and here it is as you can now see on screen and basically all this was is a configuration page this basically is I press the various buttons turn the rotary knobs push the push pull levers Etc they um replicate on screen as you can see I'm I'm doing that here and that was all this page did it wasn't any kind of uh driver installation but at least it meant that it is communicating correctly with the PC so let's first of all now go and have a look to see what the unit looks like when it's all turned on so here it is um on first impressions of course looks uh great the thing that stuck out for me is the fact that the lights the LCD displays are not quite as accurate as the mini cockpit FCU in that you can see that they're basically just a normal uh quartz digital display where AOS do have kind of their own little font going on so that's uh that's a small difference but of course not a major deal breaker the big thing for me though and I'm not sure it comes across quite as well in this video as it would do perhaps in real life is these values are very orange now this has the intensity of these lights turned up to fall so it's even more orange than normal here you can see comparison with a real photo from a real A320 FCU and it's a little bit more tailored back perhaps even a touch yellow maybe splitting hairs but I do think that the color of this isn't quite right and when you compare it to the mini FCU which is a little bit paler I do prefer the mini FCU colorization of the display but again I'd love to hear your thoughts on uh on that as well down below and funnily enough looking at the two pictures to compare them notice the expedite button or lack thereof yes some of the newer a320s don't actually have this function so to be fair to winwing they've actually modeled this quite well on a newer version of the A320 FCU so a burning question I know many of you have got is how does this unit compare with the mini cockpit FCU obviously as you can see here are both of them sat side by side now one of the things I really do like about the windwing is the angle that it actually sits at it sits at a 71° angle which actually mimics the real Airbus FCU in it the real aircraft where of course the mini FCU just basically at the moment certainly as I've got it here is just sat on my desk and not mounted at all it does mean that the display is facing you head on which is really nice the tactile feel of the winwing FCU compared to the mini cockpit FCU is pretty similar to to be honest so I'm not going to split hairs over those two they both work really well I do like the fact that I think there's more detail in the mini cockpits mini FCU than there is the winwing FCU the etching of the text on the unit itself and on the buttons I just like that but again that is splitting hairs and probably won't be the same for everybody let's have a look then at the difference in size we've already said obviously the mini f U is smaller but it is a lot deeper now this will obviously depend upon your own personal setup I'd love to hear from you guys again down in the comments below which of those would work best for you for me at the moment my mini FCU just slides neatly underneath my monitors whereas the windwing would not be able to do that so I would have to have that sat in front I guess it all depends on how much space you've got as to which unit is going going to be better for you if we have a look at the fonts then you might just be able to see what I was talking about earlier in that the mini FCU the font is much more accurate to the real Airbus compared to the winwing FCU but again it is a minor detail that I'll leave you to decide whether it's something that would actually bother you so getting back into the simulator then what about actually using the winwing FCU unit in Microsoft flight simulator well unfortunately I was left rather disappointed at this point and that is simply because at the time of filming this video the driver for this unit and its compatibility with Microsoft flight simulator isn't currently available now don't worry too much because according to their website this month that driver should be released and then I will be able to revisit the unit and showcase this unit off to you again hopefully in the very near future with it actually working so after showing you everything in this video I would love you guys to leave a comment down below letting me know on your initial thoughts of this unit the pros and cons for me the winwing over the mini FCU obviously it is bigger it is full scale a one-on-one replica and actually I really do like that it does look huge when you've been used to the uh mini FC CU you but you get used to it very quickly and I do like the fact that it is real size I think it is very very well built so the fact that it is half the price of the mini FCU which of course is another big plus the fact that it is half the price it doesn't seem like the quality of it has been compromised however there are a couple of cons number one for me is the installation process I do prefer the much simpler Plug and Play version that the mini FCU has that was just very very easy to do this I suppose we're going to have to wait and see until its full compatibility with Microsoft flight simulator is released but it's definitely at the moment looks more complicated than its smaller counterpart the detail that you get in the mini FCU is I think better than that of the winwing FCU but they are small details as I highlighted in this video so it's going to be up to you whether that is much of a deal breaker for you until then of course we're just sat on the ground and we're going to have to wait before we can take to the skies with this new unit and I look forward to doing that with you watching very soon thanks so much for watching I do hope you've enjoyed this video if you have please don't forget to leave a like and of course if you are new to the channel don't forget to hit that subscribe button and turn on the notification Bell so you don't miss any future videos and of course our live stream fly thanks for watching I'll see you all again very soon bye-bye for now

Channel: Easyjetsimpilot

Views: 16,277

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Id: enwctecF4OI

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2024