F-35 Lightning II: the warning label on every store page is four years out of date

Somewhere in the 2,000-odd lines of the F-35's user manual there is a paragraph in capital letters telling you that the aeroplane's sensors are not simulated. "RADAR, EOTS, DAS, TWR AND ECM ARE NOT OPERATIONAL IN THE SIM," it says. Forty pages later, the same manual documents the ASR page, the DAS page, the TFLIR page and the Threat Warning Display page, explains how to change their camera pitch with the mouse wheel, and lists the local variables a third-party developer can use to drive them.

Both statements are in the same PDF. Neither is a lie, exactly. The disclaimer was written in December 2021 and the pages were built over the four years that followed, and nobody ever went back and reconciled the two. Every shop that sells this aeroplane — simMarket, Just Flight, Orbx, the in-sim Marketplace — still prints the December 2021 version, in a bold NOT SIMULATED block, above a screenshot of a cockpit displaying the things it says are not there.

That is the strange shape of IndiaFoxtEcho's F-35 in 2026. It launched on 3 January 2022 at roughly thirty dollars, into a crash-to-desktop storm that was mostly the simulator's fault and entirely the developer's problem. It has since taken more than forty numbered updates, all of them free, and it has quietly grown a stores management system, a fifty-track air-to-air radar module, a draft radar warning receiver, weapon symbology on the helmet display, a rewritten navigation suite and a sound package by Echo19. The aircraft is substantially bigger than its own advertising. The advertising has not moved.

We have reviewed one IndiaFoxtEcho product before — the MB-339 — and found exactly this pattern, so we went looking for evidence that it was not true here rather than assuming it was. It is true here, and worse: the F-35's disclaimer is not merely stale, it actively hides the single fact a buyer most needs, which is that what you get depends on which shop you buy it from.

This review reads 22 sources: four store listings, the developer's own blog and manual, the full public changelog, five forum threads on AVSIM, the official MSFS forums and Sim Outhouse, five press posts, and three video reviews. Reddit, the usual place to take the temperature of a release like this, is unreachable from where we work, so the sentiment-at-a-glance check that would normally sit alongside the forum record is missing from this one.

What you are actually buying

One SKU, three aeroplanes, both simulators. The briefing that sent us here said MSFS 2020 only; that is wrong, and it has been wrong since 13 January 2025, when v1.3.9 rewrote the radar presentation code specifically "to get rid of fs9gps API as it is not supported by MSFS2024". Every store now badges it for both sims, existing owners paid nothing, and there is no separate 2024 SKU. What there also is not is a native 2024 build — this is a 2020 package that has been made to work in 2024, and simMarket's own requirements block still reads "DESIGNED FOR MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR (MSFS2020) VERSION 1.21.13.0 OR LATER".

Store	Price	Notes
Orbx Direct	US$27.77 / £20.36 / AU$38.99	Cheapest verified PC copy
simMarket	€25.00	Publisher's own channel; see VAT note below
In-sim Marketplace	US$29.99	Xbox and PC — no weapon models at all
Just Flight	US$35.99	Same build, 30% more money
America-class LHA ships	€5.00	Separate purchase
Ford-class carriers	€7.00	Separate purchase

The €25.00 on simMarket is the headline, not the total. Our MB-339 research found simMarket quotes net of VAT, and the F-35's own release-day AVSIM thread corroborates it: on 3 January 2022, with the listing showing €25, a poster reported the price as "30 Euro. About where I expected it to be" — which is €25 plus 22%, near enough exactly. An EU buyer is not getting the cheapest copy here. A US buyer paying $27.77 at Orbx is.

The three variants are genuinely three aeroplanes and not three paint jobs: the A has the internal gun and a refuel receptacle, the B has the lift fan and a smaller weapons bay, the C has the big wing, the launch bar and the longest range. The B is the one that hovers, and it is the only one that hovers — a point the developer had to put in the FAQ because so many people tried it in an A.

Two things the store page does not tell you, and should. First: the Marketplace and Xbox copy has no weapons on it. The manual is explicit — "The weapon models will only we available on copies purchased outside the Microsoft Marketplace, as weapons are not allowed on that platform" — and the changelog is littered with entries marked "non-Marketplace versions only" going back to early 2023. You can pay $29.99 in the Marketplace for a version that is missing content you would get for $27.77 at Orbx. Second: no carrier is included. The store copy's phrase is "special code to perform assisted take-off and landing from any static surface", which is literally accurate and reliably misread. The launch and arrest code works on any surface between 50 and 100 feet altitude; the ships to put under it are separate purchases at €5.00 and €7.00, and both release threads we read contain someone asking whether the carrier in the trailer comes in the box.

What the community consistently praises

The hover. This is the reason most people buy it and it is the most consistently positive finding in the record. Engage STOVL below 220 knots, engage HOVER below 40,600 lb, and the aeroplane decelerates to a stationary hover with the throttle under automatic control and the wind compensated for you; push the stick forward to land. AVSIM's release thread called it "crazy easy" within hours of launch, one poster spent a whole day on the B and called it the most fun he had had with a fighter in years, and a simMarket reviewer in November 2023 summed the appeal up better than the marketing does: the B "can do 1200 MPH and still land like a chopper". cgaviator, a real-world pilot channel, has 51,000 views on a video that does nothing but land the B on a boat.

The Primary Control Display. The single wide panoramic touchscreen is the cockpit, and it is far deeper than a €25 aeroplane has any business being. Checklists, ICAWS caution and warning messages with acknowledgement, a fuel page with per-tank quantities and refuel consent prompts, a flight control page, an autopilot that mimics the real interface, three independent tactical situation displays, identification and communication pop-ups. The July 2024 rework (v1.3.4, 12 July 2024) rebuilt the whole mouse interface and the portal proportions; the August 2025 update (v1.4.3) went the other way and removed the ability to show the same page twice, because the real aircraft cannot.

The sound, since October 2023. The launch afterburner was the loudest complaint of 2022 — the July 2022 MSFS forum write-up called it "artificial" and "extremely loud" next to the Asobo F/A-18 — and v1.2.7 on 16 October 2023 replaced the whole package with one by Echo19. It has been iterated on since, and the complaint has not come back.

The external model, at normal distances. Sim Outhouse's release thread called it a huge upgrade over the already-good P3D version; a simMarket reviewer in August 2024 noted there are no cartoonish textures, plenty of small details, and that even the ordnance looks right. The praise is consistent enough that the developer's own April 2026 admission that it is starting to show its age lands as a surprise.

The update cadence. More than forty numbered releases between January 2022 and April 2026 — roughly one every five weeks for four and a half years — every one of them free. That is the fact that does most of the work in the value column.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The flight model has been argued about since week one, and still is. Still open. The complaint mutates but does not go away. July 2022: "stiff", fly-by-wire that felt like "negotiating with an autopilot", a G limit that felt wrong for a fighter. December 2023: v1.2.9 landed a major engine and flight model rework in the transonic regime, which fixed one class of complaint. November 2024 through May 2025 on the main MSFS forum thread: angle of attack climbing while the aircraft sits pinned at Mach 0.99, uncommanded pitch-up from thrust, a post-update tendency to veer right on the takeoff roll. v1.4.3 in August 2025 tweaked roll rates again for pilots who override the limiters. Four years of iteration on the same surface is a compliment and a criticism at once.

The autopilot. Mitigated, not fixed. "Very very funky" in a December 2022 simMarket review; a route-hold problem raised on the developer's own blog in July 2023 and raised again, in almost identical words, in April 2025. v1.3.4 rewrote the autopilot interface and added realistic limits, and by March 2026 the developer was pointing users at a separate NoAPGuidanceSubSystem add-on for autopilot behaviour — which is a workaround, not a fix.

Xbox is the second-class citizen. Still open. The Series S in particular: a user reported on the developer's blog in September 2024 that the aircraft had to be deleted and reinstalled before every single flight, and a parent wrote in on 30 September 2024 about a thirteen-year-old who had saved $35 for a plane that would not load. When v1.4.3 shipped on 13 August 2025 it was PC-only, with the Series S release held back "due to memory usage concerns". As late as 22 April 2026 someone on Xbox Series X was reporting they could not rotate for takeoff.

Marketplace divergence. Still open, and by design. No weapons, and a changelog full of features flagged for non-Marketplace copies only. Microsoft's platform rules cause it; the store listing's silence about it does not.

Third-party mods are a common cause of "bugs". A cluster of dead-touchscreen reports in July 2024 traced back to the Lord Frites F-35 Improvement Mod, which its own author had deactivated pending an update. Worth knowing before you email support.

The disclaimer itself. It is now doing active harm: it tells prospective buyers there is nothing on the sensor pages, and there is quite a lot.

Performance and stability

The launch was ugly. Through January 2022 the F-35 was the most reliable way to crash Microsoft Flight Simulator's Sim Update 7 build, and the developer's public account of it, quoted by Stormbirds on 25 January 2022, is worth reading in full because so few developers write like this: Microsoft's report on build 1.0.1 was that "it is a very solid build […] with no CTDs", to which IndiaFoxtEcho replied that this is "CLEARLY NOT THE CASE in reality" and that it was not acceptable "that a user has to fiddle with his/her configurations for hours in order to get it to work". The published FAQ offered a PayPal refund to anyone who wanted one, "beyond the rights granted by your distributors and purchase contract, and even the applicable law". DirectX 12 turned out to be the main culprit; users reported the CTDs gone by v1.0.2 in early February 2022.

Four years on, the crash reports have essentially stopped on PC and moved to Xbox. Nobody in the record complains about frame rate, which for a single-engine fighter with one large screen is what you would expect — the published requirement is still a GTX 1060 with 4 GB, and the aircraft is a 3.67 GB download. The real performance question is memory on the Series S, which is what held v1.4.3 back.

The MSFS 2024 situation is the honest weak spot. Support was retrofitted rather than rebuilt: v1.3.9 in January 2025 replaced the deprecated radar API, v1.4.5 in April 2026 fixed a canopy that would not open in 2024's walkaround mode, and in between users have reported flight-plan import and EFB integration behaving worse than a native 2024 aircraft would. The PCD still cannot be popped out to a second monitor — the developer's stated reason is that MSFS does not support 2D windows in XML, an answer written in January 2022 and questioned by a commenter in February 2026 who points out that MSFS 2024 may now allow it.

Who should buy it

If you want to hover a jet, buy it today, from Orbx. It is the cheapest verified copy, it includes the weapon models the Marketplace version does not, and the F-35B's STOVL implementation is the best-liked single feature in four years of public discussion.

If you fly on Xbox, think hard. You will pay $29.99 for a copy with no weapons, updates that arrive later than the PC build, and a Series S track record that includes a version being withheld for memory reasons. It is still the most interesting fast jet on the platform. It is not the same product.

If you have been putting off the upgrade to MSFS 2024, this is not a reason to wait. One purchase covers both, retroactively and for free, and it has done since January 2025.

If you want a combat aircraft, do not buy this. No weapon employment, no working radar in the sense a DCS pilot means it, no threat that can shoot at you. The SMS page arms and selects; nothing comes off the rails. The sensor pages are Bing synthetic imagery dressed as an F-35 display, and the air-to-air tracks come from sim traffic through a WASM module, not from a radar model. It is an excellent aeroplane in a simulator that has no war in it.

If you are buying this month, factor in the 2.0 risk. On 21 April 2026 the developer confirmed the 1.x line is ending and that F-35 2.0 will rebuild the model, textures and avionics code, with "release timing and upgrade policy remain undecided". Four and a half years of free updates is a strong precedent for a free upgrade. It is not a promise, and the developer has pointedly not made one.

Where it stands today

The F-35 sits at v1.4.5, last touched in April 2026, and the numbers agree with the forums: 4.6 out of 5 across 2,980 in-sim Marketplace ratings, and 4 out of 5 across 90 on simMarket, where the spread is 51 five-star, 21 four, 11 three, 4 two and 3 one — an arithmetic average of 4.26, and a shape that says "very good with a real minority of people it did not work for", which is precisely what four years of Xbox threads describe.

The interesting question is not whether it is good. It is why a product that has been rebuilt this thoroughly is still being sold on a description written before any of the rebuilding happened. Some of that is structural — Microsoft will not let weapons onto the Marketplace, so the developer has to ship two configurations and describe one — but most of it is simply that nobody updates store copy. The result is a listing that undersells the aircraft on sensors and oversells it on carriers, in the same paragraph, on four different websites.

Buy it from Orbx, ignore the NOT SIMULATED block, budget another €7 for a boat if you want the C variant to mean anything, and expect the flight model argument to still be running when 2.0 arrives.