Fly the Maddog X for P3D: still on sale eight months after Leonardo retired it

Leonardo's own support forum has a category header on it that reads, in plain text, "P3Dv4 - P3Dv5: Discontinued Fly the Maddog X products". Under it sit two sub-forums, and both carry "(discontinued)" in their names. The last post in the Prepar3D v4.4–v4.5 one is dated 1 July 2025. Open simMarket in the next tab and the same aeroplane has a working Add to cart button and a price of €80.00.

On 19 December 2025, the day before the 20th Anniversary Edition went on sale, Leonardo's Stefano wrote the release announcement himself and included this line: "Fly the Maddog X has been removed from sale a few days ago, but existing owners retain full access and support." That was true of the Microsoft Flight Simulator SKU — simMarket now stamps it Inactive Product — and it was not true of the two Prepar3D ones. Eight months on, they are still on the shelf, still unmarked, at €80.00 for Prepar3D v4 and €95.00 for Prepar3D v5.

None of which is an argument that the aeroplane is bad. It is not. The record between 2018 and 2023 is one of the strongest any Prepar3D airliner has: owners who also fly PMDG, FSLabs and Majestic aircraft repeatedly put the Maddog in that bracket, and a few of them put it above. AVSIM's own root admin called it "definitely right up there on the top shelf" in February 2023 and said he had heard "nary a negative word about it".

So this review is not really about whether the Maddog X is good. It is about whether €80.00 is a defensible thing to hand over in August 2026 for an MD-82 that installs into two point releases of a simulator generation Lockheed Martin superseded three years ago, whose final build is dated 28 October 2023, and whose developer has publicly moved the whole project somewhere else. The answer turns out to be sharper than we expected, and it turns on a number Leonardo published themselves.

We read 28 sources for this: the four live simMarket listings and two archived ones, Leonardo's own site and support forum, five AVSIM threads running from February 2018 to August 2025, the full changelog of the last build ever shipped, trade coverage from FSElite, simFlight and PC Pilot, and the third-party ecosystem that grew up around the aircraft. Reddit is structurally unreachable from where we work, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing; on a product this old that matters less than it would on a new release, but it is worth saying.

What you are actually buying

An MD-82. One aircraft type, one engine variant, for Prepar3D v4.4 and v4.5 only. That last part is easy to miss because the store page buries it under a fold, and the product name says "P3D4" rather than "P3D v4.4–v4.5".

Here is Leonardo's full Prepar3D shelf at simMarket as it stands on 21 August 2026, with the Microsoft Flight Simulator products alongside for the comparison that matters:

Product	Simulator	Price	Status
Fly the Maddog X 64 Bit P3D4	Prepar3D v4.4–v4.5	€80.00	On sale; discontinued by developer
Fly the Maddog X 64 Bit P3D5	Prepar3D v5.0–v5.4	€95.00	On sale; discontinued by developer
Fly the Maddog X MD-83 and MD-88 P3D4-5	Both of the above	€25.00	On sale; requires a base pack
Fly the Maddog X Instructor Panel P3D	v4/v5	€25.00	On sale
Fly the Maddog X MSFS24/20	MSFS 2020 & 2024	€75.00	Inactive Product — withdrawn
Fly the Maddog 20th Anniversary	MSFS 2020 & 2024	€69.99	Current product, MD-82/83/88 in one box

Read the bottom two rows against the top one and the value question answers itself. A Prepar3D v4 buyer who wants the same three variants the current Microsoft Flight Simulator package ships with pays €80.00 plus €25.00 — €105.00 — for a build frozen in October 2023. The same three variants on the simulator Leonardo is actually developing for cost €69.99.

There is also an upgrade ladder, and it is worth understanding before you click. simMarket will sell a P3D4 owner the P3D5 version for €15.00, so the two-step route to Prepar3D v5 costs exactly what buying the v5 SKU outright does. What does not exist, anywhere, is a bridge from Prepar3D to the 20th Anniversary Edition. The €24.99 upgrade price on that listing is awarded only to accounts that bought Fly the Maddog X MSFS24/20. Owning the €80.00 Prepar3D product for eight years earns you nothing.

One more thing about the price itself. simMarket's terms state that displayed prices include the applicable value added tax, and an unresolved session resolves that to zero — so €80.00 is the net figure, not the checkout figure. Leonardo quote their own numbers the same way; the 20th Anniversary announcement lists the package as "€69.99 + VAT". A German buyer at 19% is looking at about €95.20, an Italian buyer at 22% about €97.60. Leonardo do not run a store of their own — flythemaddog.com's PURCHASE menu item goes to a page whose only two buttons say "Buy now on Simmarket" and "Buy now on Contrail" — so there is no developer-direct price to check this against, and no cheaper channel to find. simMarket is the price.

Which Prepar3D versions it actually installs into

v4.4 and v4.5. That is the whole list for this SKU, and it is not a technicality — Leonardo built and sold a separate v5 product with its own product ID and its own €95.00 price, and the v5 store page carries a note telling anyone who owns both to update the v4 copy so the two can live side by side.

Prepar3D v6 was released by Lockheed Martin in July 2023. The final Maddog X build for Prepar3D shipped in October 2023, three months after that, and did not add v6 support. There is no v6 build, no v6 SKU, no v6 sub-forum, and no statement from Leonardo that one was ever planned. If you are on v6, nothing on this shelf is for you.

What the community consistently praises

The systems, which really are the thing

This is the finding that repeats in every source that has actually flown it, across seven years. In an October 2018 AVSIM thread asking whether to buy the Maddog or TFDi's 717, one owner of both wrote that in systems terms "we are at the level of Majestic, PMDG and so", and another put it "up there with FSL and Majestic, way above PMDG". Five years later, in February 2023, a heavy user described it as "one of the most advanced if not the most advanced add-on available for P3D".

What earns that is not a longer switch list. It is the modelling underneath. Airframe and engine hours persist between flights and drive a failure model you can dial from a brand-new hull to seventy thousand cycles; skip the maintenance checks in the Load Manager and things start breaking in ways the QRH will actually talk you through. Brake energy is simulated properly, which on an aeroplane with the MD-80's famously ordinary brakes means landing fast without reversers puts you in the weeds. Optional equipment is fitted per airframe rather than globally: a 2020 AVSIM thread where an owner could not find the autobrake panel resolved into the correct answer, which is that autobrakes — and therefore automatic spoilers — are a per-livery fit, exactly as they were across the real fleet.

It genuinely can be flown from the real book

The marketing invites you to fly it against the real operations manual. Owners take that invitation and report back that it holds. One AVSIM regular in February 2023 said he had obtained a set of real AOM documentation from a defunct operator and flies the aircraft entirely by that airline's book: "It's been pure joy." The box's own documentation is well regarded too — a full manual set, a QRH and a tutorial flight, plus a video series on the developer's channel, cited independently by simMarket reviewers in July and September 2021 and by AVSIM posters in 2023.

The FMS and the automation, eventually

This series usually finds the real story on an airliner in its FMS, and the Maddog's is the unusual case where the story is mostly good. It ships two selectable FMS units, the CPDLC and ACARS implementation was ahead of most Prepar3D aircraft when it landed, and the ageing complaint that followed Leonardo out of the FSX era — autothrottles hunting endlessly around the selected speed on the 2010 Maddog — was fixed for the 64-bit release. When AVSIM's Bob Scott asked directly in March 2019 whether the hunting was still there, a Leonardo team member answered "It's fully sorted in the P3Dv4" and two owners confirmed it in the same thread.

The ecosystem around it

FS2Crew's Maddog X Reboot (€34.95, currently discounted) gives it a voice-controlled first officer with flows written by a real-world MD-80 pilot. Immersive Audio sell a cockpit sound pack recorded in a real MD-82 for around US$16.80 covering the v4.4 and v5 builds. FSiPanel, GSX and Active Sky all integrate. Very little else on Prepar3D has that much built around it.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The sound — still open, and conceded by the developer

Every long thread about this aeroplane eventually arrives at the sound, and it is the one criticism nobody defends. A simMarket reviewer in December 2021 gave it five stars anyway and still wrote that from outside "the sound is FSX default level". Another owner who has bought the Maddog for four different simulators said in August 2024 that the 2010 FS9 version still has the best audio of the lot. Owners route around it by buying third-party packs, which is the tell.

Leonardo have now said it out loud. In the 20th Anniversary announcement of 19 December 2025 they wrote that "sound design has never been the strongest aspect of the Maddog", explained that fresh recordings are no longer practical because the MD-80 has effectively left European skies, and added: "We prefer to be honest and set realistic expectations, rather than overpromise." That is a straight answer. It is also a confirmation that nothing about the Prepar3D build's audio is ever going to change.

Virtual cockpit textures — still open, disputed since 2018

Not everyone sees this, which is why it has never been settled. In the February 2023 AVSIM thread one owner said flatly that "high quality textures" is not how he would describe the virtual cockpit and that the placard text is illegible under MSAA; another posted screenshots he says are perfectly crisp and blamed the anti-aliasing mode rather than the model. Both are probably right about their own machines. What settles it is that Leonardo's headline pitch for the 20th Anniversary Edition is an all-new interior and exterior model built "to current Flight Simulator standards" — the developer's own judgement on where the old one had got to.

The installer puts itself where it likes — still open

Raised in October 2018 and never fixed: the installer writes to your Documents folder with no path option, which on a machine with a small system drive is a real problem for a four-gigabyte add-on. "Many users protested (including me). So far Leonardo has remained deaf to complaints," one AVSIM poster wrote. The counter-argument in the same thread is fair — Lockheed Martin recommended that location to developers, and A2A do the same — but the complaint was about the absence of a choice, and there still is not one.

You cannot read the support record before you buy — still open

Leonardo's support forums for the aircraft are gated to accounts tied to a purchase. We confirmed it this week: the Prepar3D v4.4–v4.5 build sub-forum returns "Sorry, you do not have permission for that!" to a logged-out reader. AVSIM's root admin flagged the same thing in March 2019 — "prospective buyers can't see what's in there" — and it is still true seven years later. For an €80.00 purchase of a discontinued product, that is not a trivial gap.

The commercial status — the one that should stop you

Everything above is a normal add-on's flaw list. This is not. Leonardo's own forum classifies the Prepar3D products as discontinued. The final build, 2.2b848, was published on 28 October 2023 and nothing has followed it. The last post in the Prepar3D v4 support forum is dated 1 July 2025. Leonardo's public website mentions Prepar3D nowhere at all — not on the home page, not in the menu, not on the purchase page. And the store page you would buy from carries none of this.

Performance and stability

The Maddog X had a genuinely bad launch on this front and then fixed it properly, which is worth separating out because the bad half is what most search results still surface.

At release in February 2018 the virtual cockpit could collapse to single-figure frame rates on hardware that had no business struggling. An owner with a GTX 1080 and 16GB of RAM reported 3–7fps inside the cockpit against 40–50 outside; another with a 4.2GHz CPU and the same card left the only sub-five-star review on the simMarket page, calling it "extremely resource intensive" and noting it cut his frame rates by two thirds or more. The AVSIM thread on it ran to 93 replies and 21,500 views.

The cause was the two third-party visual libraries the aircraft shipped with, TrueGlass and RealLight. The initial fix was a workaround — disable TrueGlass from the P3D add-ons menu, drop RealLight's texture setting — posted by an owner who had opened a support ticket and been given the answer. The real fix came later: by September 2019 a Leonardo team member was telling a struggling owner in the same thread that "Realight and Trueglass were removed from the Maddogx", along with an instruction to clear the shader cache. Fixed. Reports since then run the other way — a simMarket reviewer in March 2022 said it gets better frame rates than his PMDG aircraft on a 6GB GTX 1660 Super, and a 2024 owner with copies on both Prepar3D v5 and MSFS called the frame-rate impact good on both.

Two smaller things stay on the record. The published minimum of a 4GB GPU for the v4 build was optimistic in 2018 and merely undemanding now; the v5 listing asks for 8GB and at least two owners with 6GB cards say that figure is overstated. And in the P3D v5 build the TrueGlass beta shipped with a known windscreen artefact — Leonardo said so in their own launch communications in May 2020 and attributed it to a simulator bug rather than their code, which the record supports.

Stability itself is not a complaint anyone makes. Across seven years of threads we found no recurring crash pattern for this aircraft, which is more than the 717 it was most often compared against could say in 2018.

Who should buy it

You already own it and fly Prepar3D v4. Nothing has changed for you and nothing is going to. Build 2.2b848 is the last one, so update to it if you have not, and keep an offline copy of your installer and your purchase code. You own one of the best airliners on the platform. Carry on.

You fly Prepar3D v5 and want a Maddog. Do not buy this SKU. Buy the P3D5 listing at €95.00 instead, or accept that the €80.00 plus €15.00 upgrade route lands you in exactly the same place for exactly the same money with an extra step. Either way, know that you are buying a product its developer has retired.

You fly Prepar3D v6. This is not for you and there is no version that is. Leonardo shipped their last Prepar3D build three months after v6 arrived and did not support it. Nothing is coming.

You want a study-level MD-80 and you are not committed to Prepar3D. Buy the 20th Anniversary Edition for Microsoft Flight Simulator at €69.99. It is cheaper than this, it includes the MD-83 and MD-88 that cost €25.00 extra here, it has a new cockpit and exterior model, and it is the version receiving builds — the most recent landed on 8 August 2026, with a simulator-update fix following on 14 August. This is the profile the review exists for, and the answer is that the €80.00 product is the wrong purchase.

You are a Prepar3D loyalist buying your first serious airliner and money is not the issue. This is the one case where we would not argue with you, with a condition attached: understand that you are paying full price for frozen software, that you cannot read its bug forum until after you have paid, and that if your activation ever stops working there is no commercial incentive left for anyone to fix it. If that is acceptable, the aeroplane underneath is superb and there is nothing else like it on the platform. The Coolsky/Flight1 Super 80 line is older, shallower and ended development before Prepar3D v5; TFDi's 717 is a different aeroplane with a thinner systems model.

Where it stands today

The licensing question is the one we most wanted to answer cleanly, and the honest report is that it is fine right now and unguaranteed forever. Registration works the way it always has — an email address and the purchase code from your simMarket account, entered in the Load Manager — and Leonardo's infrastructure is demonstrably alive: the website, the ticket system and the forum all respond, staff posted on 14 August 2026, and the 20th Anniversary Edition's new Manager pulls liveries from Leonardo's servers as a shipping feature of a product they are actively selling. We found no report, anywhere, of a Prepar3D activation failing for want of a server. But the servers stay up because a current product needs them, not because a discontinued one does, and Leonardo have given no undertaking about how long that lasts.

Which leaves the thing that actually bothers us. The last build of this aircraft is 2.2b848, dated 28 October 2023, and its changelog is almost entirely FMS work — a route discontinuity string overlapping other text on the CMA-900, an arc identifier stuck at the wrong line-select key, holding entries, holding speeds, the aircraft turning the wrong way on certain procedures, cruise thrust occasionally exceeding max continuous. Eleven fixes, nine of them in the flight management system. That is a developer still finding real bugs in the deepest part of the aeroplane on the day they stopped working on it. Some of those fixes are corrections to behaviour a study-level customer would notice, and whatever was next in that queue was never written.

Leonardo have behaved decently here by most measures. They told the community what they were doing, they explained their pricing openly, they conceded the sound problem instead of spinning it, and they honoured support for existing owners. The failure is not really theirs alone: a store listing with a live Add to cart button, no discontinuation notice and a "P3D4" name that hides which point releases it covers is simMarket's page as much as Leonardo's — and simMarket clearly knows how to mark a withdrawn Leonardo product, because they have done exactly that to the Microsoft Flight Simulator Maddog X sitting two rows above it. A buyer arriving cold in August 2026 has no way of learning any of this from the page taking their €80.00. That is the review.