F100 Professional: the doubt raised in 2022 was about the autopilot, and it was right

In June 2022, four days after Just Flight announced it was building the Fokker 70 and 100, an AVSIM poster called mikealpha put the objection in three sentences. Good memories of the old Digital Aviation Fokker, he said, but he was sceptical — for the F70/F100, Just Flight had to prove they could build a modern AP and FMS with complete LNAV and VNAV. They had never done one.

Martyn, Just Flight's development manager, replied in the same thread on 28 June 2022. The Fokkers, he wrote, had more advanced LNAV/VNAV capabilities than the BAe 146 and "those will be properly simulated."

Four years, one scrapped-and-rebuilt vertical navigation system and a five-month slip later, the F100 Professional shipped on 25 June 2026 at US$69.99. Everything you can see, hear and touch in it is as good as anything in the category — the textures, the cockpit lighting, the sound recorded off a real Tay 620-15, the systems logic that holds up when someone opens a real Fokker AOM alongside it. And the part mikealpha worried about is the part Just Flight is still writing.

That is not a gotcha. It is the entire buying decision. Read the reviews from late July and you will be told the aircraft arrived in unusually good shape; read the developer's own support forum from the same fortnight and you will find the development manager offering a customer a refund and confirming that holds and missed approaches are not yet in the build. Both are true. Which one describes your purchase depends on whether you fly the thing or file IFR with it.

We read 24 sources for this review: the developer's product page, changelog and roadmap, nine threads on Just Flight's own support forum, three AVSIM threads including the 2022 announcement argument, the 500-post thread on the official MSFS forums, four written reviews, three video reviews, two store listings and the trade coverage of the delay.

What you are actually buying

A single aircraft type, sold on its own, with a stablemate sold separately and no path between them.

F100 Professional	US$69.99 direct from Just Flight
F70 & F100 Professional Bundle	US$84.99 — the F70 for $15 if bought at the same time
simMarket	€49.95, listed 17 July 2026
Simulators	MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024, both included; Xbox and PS5 confirmed as planned
In the box	Four F100 variants (door, cargo-door and cabin configurations differ), 18 liveries with livery-specific cabin textures, EFB, Operations and EFB manuals, PSD paint kit as a separate 12GB download
Download	3.7GB; 9GB of disk asked for

Two things worth knowing before you click. First, Just Flight prints this on the product page in capitals: "THE SAVING WILL NOT APPLY IF BOTH AIRCRAFT ARE PURCHASED SEPARATELY." Buy the F100 now and the F70 in October and you pay $139.98 for two aircraft that Stormbirds, having flown both, described as basically the same aeroplane with different operators. Decide up front.

Second, the price is not the same everywhere. At release on 25 June the aircraft was a Just Flight exclusive; simMarket listed it on 17 July at €49.95, against the €61.54 that Just Flight's own $69.99 converts to. Do not assume the saving, though: simMarket's terms say its prices include "the respectively applicable value added tax", so the number you are shown depends on where it thinks you are, and an EU buyer's checkout figure is not the one on the page. Price both baskets to the end before choosing.

For context on where $69.99 sits: Stormbirds noted on 15 August that Fenix undercuts it by about $2 for the A320 and throws in a full failure model, while PMDG asks roughly $12 more for a 737-800 and also models failures. The F100 has neither failures nor pullable circuit breakers.

What the community consistently praises

The systems are the thing people keep coming back to, and the most convincing praise is the most specific. On 4 July an AVSIM poster went through the aircraft with real Fokker 100 Aircraft Operating Manuals open beside him and reported that the APU page auto-presents when the start selector moves from OFF to ON, that bleed air arrives roughly two minutes after operating speed, that the AFCS nomenclature sits somewhere between the A300-600 and the MD-11, and that the FMA's IAS_E and IAS_T subscripts correctly tell you whether speed is being held by the elevator or by thrust. None of that is in Just Flight's manual. It is in the aeroplane because somebody put it there.

The visuals are the second consistent note. The 8K textures are the sharpest exterior and cockpit work Just Flight has shipped, and every reviewer who mentioned the night cockpit called it superb — the backlighting, the spotlights, the CRT glow bleeding into the cabin. Stormbirds, who has been reviewing this developer for years, rated the model and texture work a clear step up on the F28. The one caveat is technical rather than aesthetic: Just Flight has not adopted detail textures or decal-based text, so placards and instrument legends still soften when you put your nose against them.

Sound gets a near-clean sweep. It is a native Wwise package recorded from a real Fokker 100, with proper 3D attenuation as the camera moves aft through the cabin. The only complaint anyone raised is that the F100 is a quieter, more refined aeroplane than the F28, so the cockpit is less visceral — which is a fact about Fokker's engineering, not about Just Flight's.

And the EFB does the tedious parts quickly. One button takes it from cold and dark to ready, SimBrief pushes the flight plan and the performance figures through to the CDU, and a five-minute boarding option gives you the sense of a turnaround happening behind you without a real turnaround's wait.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Nearly everything on this list is the automatic flight system. That is not a coincidence.

Automatic Thrust System hunting — still open. From 26 June, four days after release, the ATS and landing behaviour thread on Just Flight's forum filled with reports of large continuous thrust variations in the descent, speed wandering 20 to 30 knots either side of the selected value, and one approach where an aircraft bugged to 121 knots accelerated to 160. Mark of Just Flight replied that slow throttle response and some throttle hunting are traits of the real aircraft, and that tuning the AFCAS and ATS modes "is something that we anticipate will be a continual ongoing effort." Version 1.2 on 16 July explicitly improved "ATS response in level flight to reduce hunting tendency." On 4 July, and again through August, AVSIM and the support forum were still describing constant over- and undershoot of the selected speed. Better, not fixed.

The record then splits it two ways, and both halves matter. On 23–25 July a poster who says he is "currently operating the aircraft" told the Very Slow ATS System thread that the sluggishness is authentic — the system "is fully capable of handling day to day operations in normal conditions", and "we accept the lag as operators". Some of what customers filed as a defect is 1980s automation modelled correctly. But in the same thread another owner drew the line the rest of the record keeps confirming: there is "a naturally lazy ATS, that is very well modelled on MSFS2020 version of Fokker F70 and F100, and a completely borked ATS, that some of us experience in MSFS 2024". The excursions that ruin an approach cluster on MSFS 2024. On MSFS 2020 the same code is being described as well modelled.

Localiser capture turning the wrong way — fixed 20 July 2026. For the first five weeks the aircraft could roll away from the localiser on capture, and the autopilot could drop out during an ILS. Both were fixed in v1.2a. It is a serious bug to have shipped and a fast, clean fix once it was reproduced.

Holds and missed approaches — still open, by the developer's own account. The sharpest thread on the support forum is titled "V1.2 Update: Honest Review", opened on 16 July by a customer who listed altitude constraints ignored on arrivals, holds ignored on a missed approach, and an autothrottle he called chaotic. Martyn's reply is the single most useful sentence in the whole record: missed approaches and holds "are currently being overhauled significantly, but... those changes are not included yet." He offered a refund. On 11 August he confirmed the work was going into v1.3 and called these systems fundamental to IFR and online operations. They are. As of 19 August 2026 they are not in the shipping build.

FMS route wipe — confirmed 16 July, deferred to v1.3. Re-selecting an approach could delete the loaded route. Just Flight reproduced it and logged it.

Speed brake lever behaviour — logged 19 August, unfixed. Reported on 16 August: since v1.2, when the speed brakes retract automatically on thrust advance, the lever stays OUT, so they re-extend at idle. Mark checked the flight manual, agreed the lever should return to IN, and logged it. Three days from report to confirmed bug, which is a good number.

EFB weight entry — open since 25 July. Cargo weight fields flashing to zero on manual entry and on SimBrief import. Ticket #98305 was raised around 27 July and the thread was still live on 19 August. Just Flight's position is that weights must be set through their EFB and that the default MSFS weight and balance panel and the SimBrief dispatch app "aren't supported and are likely to cause incorrect weights."

Activation — fixed, twice. AUTHZ_005 access-denied errors hit buyers trying to activate through the EFB on launch day. Just Flight had it working in about fourteen hours. It recurred for at least one user on 4 August, resolved by a clean reinstall with the code entered through the installer instead.

One entry deserves the opposite treatment. A thread opened on 14 August reporting that the aircraft would not hold trim turned out to be an MSFS update that had quietly enabled AI Auto Trim on the user's install. Not Just Flight's bug. The reporter said so himself.

Performance and stability

Nobody is reporting crashes to desktop, and for a five-year systems project on two simulator versions that is worth saying out loud.

What people are reporting is VRAM. The 8K textures are heavy enough that Stormbirds had to retune his texture settings to get the aircraft running smoothly, and there is no in-aircraft texture-quality option to fall back on. One of the more-watched video reviews is titled "GPU-Melting REALISM", which tells you where the load lands. The CPU cost is more modest — lighter than an iniBuilds A350, by the same reviewer's reckoning — so this is a graphics-memory problem, not a simulation-rate one. Threshold, testing over ten-plus hours, saw frame dips exactly twice in heavy areas, and found the optional cabin rendering toggle worth only two or three frames.

Handling notes cluster rather than scatter. Threshold found the control surfaces remarkably light and easy to overcontrol, and the aircraft floaty on landing at flaps 42. Stormbirds found the F70/F100 slow to climb to profile — short sectors can spend only a few minutes at cruise — and warns that SimBrief will often plan you too high. Both describe an aeroplane that wants to be flown by the numbers rather than by feel, and both are clear that this is Fokker's aeroplane rather than Just Flight's flight model misbehaving.

The patch cadence has been genuinely good: v1.1 on 26 June, v1.2 on 16 July running to three A4 pages of fixes, v1.2a on 20 July. The roadmap adds Tay 650-15 engines with 9% more thrust, an optional failures and wear-and-tear system, terrain awareness display, and EFB navdata updating for console players. It carries no dates, and Martyn says so plainly: the team is prioritising fixes over new features and is "not yet in a position to provide timescales."

Who should buy it

The hand-flying short-haul pilot who wants a beautiful classic-modern jet. Buy it. You are getting the best-looking, best-sounding Fokker anyone has made, with systems that reward reading the real manuals, and the open bugs mostly live in automation you will be overriding anyway.

The systems reader. Buy it. The AFCAS nomenclature, the standby engine and warning panels, the FMA subscripts and the two independent CDUs will keep you busy for months. Be clear-eyed that there are no circuit breakers and no failure model, and that the failure system is a roadmap item without a date.

The full-procedure IFR flyer — VATSIM, PilotEdge, published holds, real missed approaches. Do not buy it yet. This is the profile the product currently does not serve, and you do not have to take our word for it: the development manager confirmed on 11 August 2026 that holds and missed approaches are being overhauled and are not in the build. Wait for v1.3, then read that changelog before you spend $69.99.

The buyer who wants both Fokkers. Buy the bundle on day one or accept paying twice. There is no upgrade path, Just Flight says so on the page, and the two aircraft are close enough that most people should simply take the F100 and stop.

The F28 Professional owner expecting more of the same. Read carefully first. Stormbirds, who loves the F28, is blunt that the magic does not carry over — the F70/F100 are bigger, more automated, more bus-like, and the seat-of-the-pants quality that made the F28 special is largely gone. It is a better-built aeroplane and a different experience.

Where it stands today

Eight weeks after release, the F100 Professional is an aircraft with an unusually clean separation between what is finished and what is not. The model, the textures, the lighting, the sound, the cabin, the EFB and the underlying systems logic are done, and done at the top of the market. The autoflight is a live project with a public bug list and a development manager answering threads under his own name.

Just Flight's conduct through this has been better than the product's launch state. They reproduced the localiser bug and shipped a fix in four days. They confirmed the speed brake bug against the flight manual in three. They told a furious customer the truth about what was missing and offered his money back rather than manage him. That is a materially different posture from a developer who goes quiet, and it is the main reason to believe v1.3 will land where they say it will.

The honest verdict, as of 19 August 2026, is that this aeroplane is about one substantial patch away from the score its visuals and systems deserve. If you fly it, you will have a very good time now. If you file with it, give it until v1.3.