Fly the Maddog 20th Anniversary: Leonardo can no longer find an MD-80 to record

In December 2025, explaining why the twentieth-anniversary rebuild of the most exacting MD-80 in flight simulation would not ship with new engine recordings, Leonardo Software House told FSElite that the aeroplane "has effectively disappeared from European skies". They pointed customers at third-party sound packs instead.

Read that again. A studio that has spent twenty years modelling every circuit breaker on the Super 80 can no longer find one to point a microphone at. The MD-80 they are simulating has become a historical object, and the simulation is now the artefact.

That sentence explains most of what follows. Fly the Maddog 20th Anniversary Edition went on sale through simMarket on 20 December 2025 at €64.99, rising to €69.99 on 1 January 2026, and it bundled the MD-82, MD-83 and MD-88 — previously a base pack plus a paid expansion, roughly €100 together — into one purchase covering both Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 and 2024. It was sold, loudly, on its looks: a "completely redesigned virtual cockpit", an "all-new external model", a "significant visual upgrade".

The looks are the weakest thing about it. That is the argument of this review, and it survived eight months of reading. What is not weak is everything Leonardo did not put on the poster — the systems, which nobody in eight months of forum argument has seriously disputed; the flight model, which real airline pilots keep independently describing as heavy and correct; and the fact that on 25 July 2026 the fully native MSFS 2024 build landed as a free upgrade for everyone who had already paid, with MSFS 2020 owners getting the same release minus the 2024-only technology.

We read twenty sources for this review: both store listings and their rating spreads, the developer's own product page and release announcements, three written outlets, three video reviews including two by serving airline pilots, and four forum threads running from December 2025 to 8 August 2026.

What you are actually buying

One purchase, three aeroplanes, two simulators.

	simMarket	Contrail
Full package	€69.99	$82.64
Upgrade from Fly the Maddog X (MSFS edition only)	€24.99	$29.51, awarded automatically to the buying account
Current version	2.1b283	v2.1.283
MSFS 2024 native	Yes, since 25 July 2026	Yes

Leonardo does not sell direct — the developer's own page lists no price and links out to both stores. Contrail arrived as a second outlet on 25 July 2026, and simMarket and in-sim Marketplace buyers were offered a free transfer to it, which several AVSIM posters took up the same day. If you have no attachment to either store, Contrail's app handles installation and updates for you.

In the box: MD-82 with JT8D-217A/C, MD-83 and MD-88 with JT8D-219. Two independent EFB tablets carrying performance, weight and balance, an electronic tech log, the operating manuals, GSX control and Navigraph Charts. Selectable avionics — the Honeywell 4052504 FMS with full LNAV and VNAV, or the Canadian Marconi CMA-900 with LNAV plus a separate performance management system — along with switchable RMI types, altimeters, EFIS options and a head-up flight display. CPDLC through Hoppie for VATSIM and IVAO, plus BeyondATC and SayIntentions.AI.

The one thing worth flagging before you buy: there is no cheaper sensible version any more. Fly the Maddog X still has its own support forum and its own 1.2b228 build, but it is the previous generation, and the 20th Anniversary Edition is where the development is. If you own X, the €24.99 upgrade is the single best-value transaction in this review.

What the community consistently praises

The systems, first, and by a distance that makes the rest of the discussion feel like haggling.

Threshold's Anders Lunde, reviewing on 18 March 2026, described the FMS, hydraulic and fuel modelling as study-level in the strict sense and admitted the fidelity ran past his own ability to check it. simMarket's reviewers say the same thing in less careful language — Cesar, 28 December 2025: "this isn't just an add-on, it's a full-on study-level experience". Contrail's silverbird, 31 July 2026, on the native build: outstanding system depth, and credit to a developer that "doesn't just release a product and move on". Twenty years of accumulated systems work does not evaporate when the 3D model changes, and it did not.

Second, the flight model, and this is the finding with the best sourcing behind it because the people making it fly for a living. flightdeck2sim streamed the aircraft as a serving 737 captain on 1 January 2026. A330 Driver reviewed it on 22 December 2025 to 22,000 views. On AVSIM, ahsmatt7 — an ATP-rated 737 captain — flew it in January 2026 and narrowed his entire criticism to the modelling of the thrust-lever tension, calling it a "great jet as always". The MD-80 in this simulation is heavy, trims slowly, and punishes an early autopilot engagement; Self-Loading Cargo's developer FPVSteve described exactly that failure mode on 10 January 2026, and treated it as the aeroplane behaving correctly rather than as a bug.

Third — and this one is about the developer rather than the product — Leonardo kept a promise most studios have broken during the 2020-to-2024 transition. The native MSFS 2024 version was free. Stefano's 25 July 2026 announcement is unambiguous: "provided as a free upgrade for all owners of the Fly the Maddog 20th Anniversary Edition, no additional purchase required". MSFS 2020 owners got a corresponding update carrying, in his words, "the vast majority of the improvements, bug fixes, and new features". The AVSIM thread that morning reads like a small celebration. Republic DC9: "Woo hoo a free upgrade to install!"

Fourth, and unexpectedly, performance. Study-level airliners are usually where frame rates go to die. Threshold held above 30 fps at busy airports in March 2026, and Republic DC9 called it "silky smooth on my modest rig" on 25 July 2026. Nobody in eight months of threads raised performance as a complaint.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The exterior model — still open

This is the awkward one, because it is the thing the anniversary edition was sold on. Threshold's March 2026 review is the most specific: the landing gear wheels are not round, the wing and nose textures are low resolution, and the nose geometry is visibly jagged for want of polygons. Users on the official MSFS forums had already called the textures "sub standard in places" and reported wheel rendering problems. Leonardo has been working on it — the 25 July 2026 native release listed "numerous improvements to the external model, animations, and level of detail", and the 2.1b283 patch of 8 August 2026 still had a line reading "fixed various issues in external model". That is a developer actively repairing something, eight months after launch, which is both the good news and the point.

Audio — still open, and structurally so

Threshold found the audio static and lacking spatial realism, and the cabin "eerily quiet". simMarket's only low rating — two stars, Ganes, 8 April 2026 — asks for exactly one thing among its three complaints: "Improve sound balance."

Here the record complicates itself, and it is worth saying so. On AVSIM on 11 January 2026, Bigmack, who worked final testing for McDonnell Douglas at Long Beach, said the real MD-80 flight deck was genuinely quiet — "like riding in a Cadillac" — and that you barely heard the engines at idle from inside a hangar. So the "eerily quiet" criticism may be a criticism of the aeroplane rather than the simulation of it. What is not contested is the balance and the lack of spatial depth, and neither is Leonardo's own admission that new recordings are not obtainable.

The usual remedy is not currently available. Immersive Audio's MaddogX Sound Immersion NG — 235 sounds from 48 kHz field recordings, the pack Leonardo effectively pointed people towards — still describes itself on its Orbx store page as compatible with "Leonardo Fly The MaddogX MD-82, and Extension - MD-83 and MD-88", the previous product line. On AVSIM on 11 January 2026, micstatic wrote: "I really hope immersive doesn't take too much longer on their soundpack update." Seven months later the store page has not changed. That is not Leonardo's fault, but it is the buyer's problem.

Livery management — mitigated, repeatedly, still fragile

The longest-running complaint in the record is the Maddog Manager. On the official MSFS forums, a thread opened on 12 January 2026 collected liveries appearing in the wrong categories, liveries not appearing at all, and the manager crashing when users clicked browse. On 26 February 2026 the thread's most helpful contributor conceded: "This process seems pretty unreliable." It was still going on 18 March 2026.

Then the native release made it worse before it made it better. Leonardo warned plainly that the new installer "will remove all previously installed liveries and reset the settings stored by the Maddog Manager", and that the move to the KTX2 texture format meant every third-party repaint needed converting by its author. Owners hit exactly that on 25 July 2026. Two AVSIM posters then spent several exchanges discovering that the official liveries were present all along, behind an unlabelled source selector — Ron Lefebvre, finding them: "That was not obvious." The 8 August 2026 patch fixed another Livery Manager bug, this time in the MSFS 2020 build.

Small cockpit omissions — still open

The compass mirror has been inoperative for years and remains so; sd_flyer raised it on 9 January 2026, the day the anniversary thread opened. On 13 January 2026 cavaricooper reported lighting and sound faults in the virtual cockpit when using custom viewpoints, in what he otherwise called "a superb experience". Ganes's two-star review flags over-reflective glass cockpit surfaces specifically in MSFS 2020. None of these is fatal; all of them are the sort of thing a €69.99 product is judged on.

One thing we could not check

Leonardo's own support forums — where the real bug reports and the developer's replies live, and where the 20th Anniversary MSFS 2024 section alone holds around 1,300 posts against 141 for the 2020 section — are closed to non-customers. An AVSIM poster ran into the same wall on 11 January 2026 while trying to answer a pre-purchase question. The fullest record of this aircraft's faults is behind the paywall for the aircraft.

Performance and stability

Better than the price bracket suggests, with one dated exception.

Nobody in the sources treats frame rate as a problem, which for a study-level airliner is a finding in itself. Threshold measured 30+ fps at busy airports in March 2026 on a build that was still running through MSFS 2024's compatibility layer; the native build released on 25 July 2026 drew "silky smooth" reports the same day.

The exception is ground handling on the native version. Two weeks after release, the 2.1b283 changelog of 8 August 2026 carried two entries: "increased nose gear side-friction (MSFS 2024)" and "increased yaw stability (MSFS 2024)". On AVSIM, micstatic's reaction — "The nose gear friction was very much needed" — tells you it had been a real problem for those two weeks, not a refinement. If you bought on 25 July and found the aeroplane skating on the taxiway, that was the product, and it is fixed.

The other stability note is procedural rather than technical. Several reports that read like bugs turn out to be the aeroplane. A user reporting an engine start failure on 11 January 2026 was traced by another owner to a leftover engine-control binding from a different aircraft. The takeoff sequence — TO/GA armed before the roll, throttles to 1.4 EPR, then autothrottle — catches enough experienced simmers that the thread's author wrote a taxonomy of the three ways people get it wrong. Expect to be wrong before the aircraft is.

Who should buy it

If you already own Fly the Maddog X for MSFS: buy the upgrade, today. €24.99 for a rebuilt cockpit, a rebuilt exterior, a native MSFS 2024 build and twenty years of systems work is not a close decision. Check which Maddog you own first: simMarket awards the upgrade price only to accounts that bought the MSFS edition, and it is applied automatically when you are logged into that account. Owners of the Prepar3D Maddog X get nothing — there is no P3D-to-MSFS bridge, and Leonardo announced none.

If you want the deepest classic airliner in MSFS and you do not own one: buy it at full price. Nothing else in the simulator asks this much of you, and the people who fly for a living say the asking is accurate. Budget an evening for the takeoff procedure alone.

If you are still on MSFS 2020 and expect to stay there: buy it. Leonardo has been explicit and, so far, truthful about carrying improvements across, and the 8 August 2026 patch fixed a 2020-only bug. You are not the afterthought here.

If you fly online, on VATSIM or IVAO or with BeyondATC: buy it. The CPDLC and ACARS integration is current, and the EFB and SimBrief workflow is genuinely modern in a way the aeroplane around it is not.

If you buy aircraft for how they look — if you are the simmer who takes screenshots, flies external views, and cares about PBR on the wings: do not buy this. Not at €69.99. Just Flight's 146 and RJ Professional sell for less on Contrail, carry 4.88 and 4.89 user ratings, and are native. You will spend the whole flight looking at the wheels.

If the sound is what you are buying: wait, or at least go in knowing. Leonardo has said new recordings are not coming, and the third-party pack that would fix it has not been updated for this product line.

Where it stands today

Eight months on, the 20th Anniversary Edition is the best MD-80 anyone has made and it is not the best-looking aeroplane in its price bracket, and both of those things are permanently true. Leonardo cannot buy their way out of the second one — the polygon budget and the texture work are a resourcing problem for a small Italian studio, and the audio is a problem that no amount of money solves, because the source material no longer flies.

What has changed since December is the trust position. The compatibility-mode launch could have been the end of it; a great many developers took the 2020-to-2024 transition as an opportunity to charge twice. Leonardo shipped the native build on 25 July 2026, gave it away to existing owners, opened a second store, kept MSFS 2020 in the same release, and was still patching nose gear friction and livery manager faults on 8 August 2026. The store record backs this up, if you do the arithmetic rather than reading the headline: simMarket displays a flat "5" average, but nine reviews split 8 five-star and 1 two-star average 4.67, and Contrail shows 5 across 17 votes. The room is very positive and slightly less positive than the store badge suggests.

Our 4.0 is a real average of a wide spread — 4.9 for systems, 3.0 for sound — and you should buy or skip this aircraft on which end of that spread you actually care about. If you want to work, it is superb. If you want to look, it is not.