F70 Professional: one model instead of four at the same price, and the better aeroplane

Just Flight answered the F70 question by accident, in a roadmap post about engines. On 16 July 2026 the company's development manager explained why the Tay 650-15 upgrade is worth building: the extra 9% of thrust was, in his words, "a modest but useful performance gain for the larger and heavier F100." He was making a case for a future F100 feature. He was also, without meaning to, describing the F70 — the aeroplane that already carries the engine that suits it.

That is the shape of this review. The F70 Professional and the F100 Professional released together on 25 June 2026, share one codebase, one changelog, one support forum category and one price. They are US$69.99 each. For that money the F100 gives you four airframe models — 100-seat with integral airstairs and a small cargo door, the same with a large cargo door, a sliding-door version, and a 98-seat L2-door layout — plus 18 liveries and a 3.7GB download. The F70 gives you one model, 11 liveries and 2.4GB. Just Flight's defence is prototypical and it is a good one: airlines only ever operated the F70 in a single configuration. The invoice does not care.

So the buying question is not "is the F70 good". It is good, in exactly the ways the F100 is good, because it is the same aeroplane with 4.62m taken out of the fuselage. The question is whether there is any reason to pay F100 money for less of it, and there are two honest answers hiding in the record: one about how the aircraft flies, and one about which simulator you fly it in.

The second of those turned out to be the story. The autoflight complaints that have followed these Fokkers since release do not sort by aircraft. They sort by simulator version — and a current-line F70/F100 pilot posting on Just Flight's own forum says a chunk of what is being reported as a bug is the real aeroplane behaving as designed. That complicates a lot of what has been written about this pair, including by us.

Twenty-three sources, read between 25 June and 20 August 2026: Just Flight's product pages and support changelog, eleven threads across the developer's own community forum, two AVSIM threads, the Microsoft Flight Simulator forum hub, three written reviews, two store listings and four videos. Reddit, which would normally be the fastest read on sentiment, is unreachable from where this was written, so treat the absence of r/flightsim below as a gap in method rather than a thin record.

What you are actually buying

One Fokker 70, in one configuration, for MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024. A single purchase covers both simulators — that part of the marketing is straightforwardly true, and it is worth saying because it is not true of every airliner at this price.

	F70 Professional	F100 Professional
Airframe models	1	4 (98/100 pax, three door and cargo-door fits)
Liveries	11	18
Engines	Tay 620-15, 13,850 lbf	Tay 620-15, 13,850 lbf
Max passengers	80	100
Length vs sibling	4.62m (15.2ft) shorter	—
Download	2.4GB	3.7GB
Just Flight price	US$69.99	US$69.99
simMarket price	€49.95	€49.95

The bundle is the only discount that exists. Just Flight sells both aircraft together for US$84.99, simMarket for €29.99 each in a single order — a genuine 40% off in both cases. There is no upgrade path, and both stores say so before you pay: simMarket's listing carries the line in capitals, "THE SAVING WILL APPLY IF BOTH AIRCRAFT ARE PURCHASED AT THE SAME TIME IN THE SAME ORDER. IT WILL NOT APPLY IF BOTH AIRCRAFT ARE PURCHASED SEPARATELY." Buy the F70 today and decide in October that you want the F100 as well, and you will pay full price twice. That is unfriendly, and it is also disclosed in advance in larger type than most stores would use, which counts for something.

On the two stores, and on not being fooled by the numbers

€49.95 looks like less than US$69.99, and simMarket's own converter cheerfully renders it as US$57.97. Do not act on that. simMarket's terms say displayed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax" — which for an unresolved browsing session means 0%, and the listing gives itself away by printing the bundle price as "29.99€ incl. VAT (29.99€ excl. VAT)". Add German VAT at 19% and the F70 comes to €59.44. Just Flight, quoting into the same market, showed €61.54 at launch. The two stores are within a couple of euros of each other once tax is resolved, and which one is cheaper depends on where you live. Anyone telling you simMarket undercuts Just Flight by twelve dollars is reading a pre-tax number.

Two more things that are not on the product page. The F70 was not available from third-party retailers on day one — initial sales were exclusive to justflight.com, and simMarket only listed it on 17 July 2026, three weeks after release. And on 19 August 2026 a Just Flight developer confirmed on the official MSFS forum that the in-sim Marketplace PC release is targeted for August, with Xbox "ASAP next month", timed to land alongside the v1.3 update. If you are on Xbox, you are not buying this yet; you are waiting for September, and the cabin's presence on Series S is still described as conditional on performance testing.

What the community consistently praises

The modelling and the texture work are not in dispute anywhere. Threshold's Petar Radovic, writing on 26 July 2026, and Stormbirds on 15 August 2026 both land in the same place: this is the best-looking work Just Flight has shipped, cockpit and exterior, and it holds up at pilot eye level in MSFS 2024's walkaround mode. The F70 gets the same 8K asset pipeline as its sibling, including decals for the exterior lettering rather than baked text, and the same 11 custom cabin interiors.

The systems survive a hostile test. On 4 July 2026 an AVSIM member sat down with real Fokker 100 Aircraft Operating Manuals and went looking for the seams — automatic APU page presentation when the start selector moves from OFF to ON, bleed availability roughly two minutes after operating speed, the in-flight APU restriction. He found behaviour that is not documented in Just Flight's own manual and could only have come from the source books. That work was done on the F100, and the F70 runs the same systems code, which is the one place where sharing a codebase is unambiguously good news for the smaller aeroplane.

The sound is excellent and slightly compromised in an interesting way. It is a native Wwise package recorded during high-power runs of a real aircraft — but the recordings were made on a Fokker 100, and Stormbirds notes that the 100, "and to some extent the 70", is a quieter and more refined machine than the F28 that came before, so you hear less of it than you might want. From outside it is still a loud jet.

And the F70 flies. The most useful first-hand note in the whole record is an AVSIM member's maiden flight on 25 June 2026: KCRQ to KLAS, high on the glideslope, speedbrake out, and the observation that the F70 is "a bit of a handful" compared with a 737 and "a bit floater" on approach. He then said he would try the F100 next "see how slower in climb it is". That is the aeroplane doing what the airframe-and-engine arithmetic says it should. Just Flight models both aircraft with strong low-level performance and a limited high-altitude ceiling — the SimBrief profile caps out at 35,000ft — and the F70 gets there with the same 13,850 lbf in a shorter, lighter body.

Support behaviour deserves a mention too. Three patches inside four weeks, a v1.2 changelog on 16 July 2026 running to several pages of substantive fixes, and Just Flight staff replying under their own names in public. Two of the v1.2 artwork fixes were F70-only: an animation bug that indicated low cabin pressure in the cruise, and a standby compass that did not work. Neither is small, and both were found and fixed inside three weeks.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The Automatic Thrust System, and the argument about whether it is broken. Partly the aeroplane, partly still open. This is where the review turns. On 23 July 2026 a customer opened a thread titled "Very Slow ATS System": thrust levers that move sluggishly, overspeeds in the descent, chasing rates of climb and descent. The next day a poster who says he is currently operating the type answered that the lag is real — "Super slow in real life as well" — and that line crews accept it, taking manual control only in failure cases. That is a genuinely awkward finding for anyone who has written that the ATS is unfinished, and it should be on the page.

What is not prototypical is the rest. Multiple customers report the speed collapsing below Vapp on gear extension and the autothrottle then overshooting — one reported an approach reference speed of 130kt with the system accelerating through 165 before settling, on 21 July 2026, and another described it dropping "well into the stall regime". Just Flight has not defended that behaviour. On 10 August 2026 the development manager listed ATS behaviour first among four current priorities.

Holds and missed approaches. Still open, confirmed by the developer. The most detailed report in the record — a customer flying Brazilian IFR procedures on 16 and 17 July 2026 — found the aircraft ignoring published missed-approach holds entirely, inserting the missed-approach fix as a plain fly-over waypoint, and flying manually entered holds so badly it could not maintain a standard-rate turn or an oval track. Just Flight's answer was unusually direct: missed approaches and holds "are currently being overhauled significantly", those changes were not in v1.2, and they were expected in v1.3. On 10 August the position had firmed and softened at once — a substantial rewrite of the hold and missed-approach logic is with the testing team, and v1.3 "will not contain all the work currently underway".

Localiser capture. Fixed, twice, and then fixed again. The aircraft could roll away from the localiser on capture. Just Flight believed it fixed on 17 July, shipped v1.2a on 21 July, the original reporter confirmed the same day that it was not fixed, and the developer said two days later that the remaining cases had now been addressed. Take that as resolved but young.

The FMS route wipe. Believed fixed, with a safeguard still in build. Re-selecting an approach could clear the entire active flight plan and leave you on raw data. Just Flight reproduced it, said on 17 July it was fixed, and as of 10 August was still building safeguards "intended to prevent an existing route from being lost if an approach or transition cannot be successfully reinserted".

PROF will not engage. Open at the time of writing. Since v1.2a a group of customers on the official MSFS forum have been unable to engage PROF at all. On 18 August 2026 one described his F100 fleet as "grounded" by it; on 19 August another reported it starting in the climb every time. A third replied that he had no such trouble — and added, pointedly, that he flies MSFS 2020.

Lateral drift on long legs. Open, and contested. A thread running from 18 July 2026 argues about whether the aircraft's off-track wander is honest DME/DME and IRS behaviour on a jet with no GPS, or simply not following the computed track. The most credible post in it says the deviation is too large to be navigation degradation.

No RNP, and no plan for it. By design. The F70 is RNAV 1 capable and cannot legally fly RNP approaches, because those need GPS and Just Flight has not simulated a GPS retrofit. That is accurate to the fleet Just Flight has modelled. It is also, as one customer put it plainly on 5 August 2026, the thing this aircraft "absolutely needs", because RNAV and RNP approaches are what modern charts are full of. Expect to fly non-precision approaches on lateral guidance with vertical speed.

No failure model, no pullable breakers, no terrain display. On the roadmap, undated. The breakers are modelled in 3D but do not pull. Failures and wear-and-tear, a terrain awareness display, EFB navigation database updating and the Tay 650 engines are all listed as intentions with no timescales attached. Note which of those is F100-only: the engines.

Performance and stability

Frame rates are not the problem here. Threshold reported a stable average around 30fps on medium-high settings on a mid-range machine — RTX 3060 12GB, i5-10400, 16GB — and the F70 is the lighter package of the two, with fewer models and a 2.4GB footprint. Nobody in the record is complaining about smoothness.

The simulator you fly it in is the problem, and this is the clearest F70-relevant finding in the whole exercise. On 24 July 2026 a customer drew the distinction that 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". Three days later, in a separate thread about the aircraft failing to follow flight-director commands, the same split appeared again — the problem present on every MSFS 2024 flight, with both F70 and F100 "flying very accurately" in MSFS 2020 with no autopilot path-following issues at all. A third customer had reported the same flight-director fault on both aircraft on 25 July and spent a day chasing it through his add-on list before it came back anyway.

That pattern matters for a buyer in a way that a flat "the autoflight is unfinished" does not. If you fly MSFS 2020, a substantial share of the autoflight complaints in this review are not describing your aeroplane. If you fly MSFS 2024, they very likely are.

The rest of the stability picture is ordinary. Activation failures on release day — AUTHZ_005, duplicate key codes across the two installers, F70 owners locked out — were resolved by support within days. State saving, added in v1.2, was itself implicated in engine-start failures until customers found that disabling it cleared the fault. A cargo-weight entry in the EFB has been flashing back to zero since late July and the thread was still live on 20 August 2026.

Who should buy it

If you want one Fokker and you fly MSFS 2020, buy the F70 — but only if the aeroplane is why. It is the better-matched airframe on current thrust, it is the livelier of the two to hand-fly, and the autoflight behaves for 2020 users in a way it demonstrably does not for everyone. Buy it because you want a KLM Cityhopper or Tyrolean short-haul machine, not because you expect it to be a smaller bargain than the F100. It is not a bargain. It is the same money.

If you fly MSFS 2024 and file real IFR — VATSIM, published procedures, charted missed approaches — do not buy this yet. Wait for v1.3, then wait to read what v1.3 actually contained, because Just Flight has already said it will not contain all of the hold and missed-approach work. This is the profile the current build fails.

If you are building a virtual airline, or you just like liveries, buy the F100 instead. Eighteen schemes against eleven, four airframe configurations against one, several hundred more real-world routes, and the only content item on the roadmap — the Tay 650 engines — goes to the F100. Stormbirds reached the same conclusion from the other direction and expects the F100 to outsell it.

If you already own the F100, do not buy the F70. There is no upgrade price, no discount, and nothing behind the second purchase except eleven liveries and a shorter fuselage on identical systems. You would be paying US$69.99 for a variant. Buy an airport instead.

If you want both, buy both in one order or not at all. US$84.99 from Just Flight, €59.98 from simMarket before tax. Split the purchase across two visits and you have thrown away fifty-five dollars for nothing.

If you are on Xbox, you cannot buy it yet at all. September, per Just Flight, and the cabin is still conditional on Series S performance testing.

Where it stands today

Eight weeks after release the F70 Professional is a beautifully made aeroplane with a flight-guidance system that its developer is publicly, specifically and non-defensively rebuilding. That is a better position than it sounds. Just Flight has published a numbered list of what is wrong — ATS behaviour, ILS intercept from large angles, holds and missed approaches, approach reselection — offered a refund to its angriest customer, and told people in advance that the next update will not finish the job. Developers who are hiding something do not write that post.

What the record has changed is where the blame sits. Our reading of the F100 was that the autoflight system was simply unfinished. Eight more weeks of evidence says something more particular: the sluggish thrust response that so many people report is, according to a pilot currently flying the type, how the real aircraft behaves, while the failures that actually stop a flight cluster heavily on MSFS 2024. Both halves of that matter. The first means some of the criticism is aimed at correctly modelled 1980s automation. The second means the buying advice depends on which simulator is on your drive, which is not a sentence anyone was writing about this aeroplane in June.

Against its sibling, the F70 sits in an awkward place that has nothing to do with quality. It is the same product with less in the box at the same price, and Just Flight's roadmap points its only new content at the other aircraft. That is worth 3.9 rather than the 4.0 the F100 earned, and the gap is entirely value — the flight model, if anything, is the better of the two. Buy the F70 because you want the Fokker 70 specifically. If you are indifferent between them, the F100 is the more aeroplane for the money, and both of you should probably be waiting for v1.3.