MB-339: the study-level version promised in 2020 shipped — for a different simulator

In September 2020, before anyone could buy it, Dino Cattaneo wrote the design intent for his MB-339 at the top of a public beta page and left it there. "This is a medium complexity add-on which is meant to depict the Aermacchi MB-339 of the Frecce Tricolori in a detailed but accessible way." Underneath, in the section headed OTHER, was a line that would define the next three years of the product: "Due to MSFS limitations, the smoke system is NOT WORKING — although controls in the cockpit do work."

An aerobatic display jet without smoke. It shipped anyway, on 17 October 2020, as the first third-party military jet for Microsoft Flight Simulator, and MSFS Addons reported the plan on 17 November: this was the Lite. A Pro was coming, "made up to 'study level' standards, with complete system simulation and a very advanced flight model. It will be available at a later date."

The Pro arrived on 28 October 2022. In DCS World. For $59.99. It is a superb thing and it has nothing to do with the aeroplane you buy for twenty euros.

What happened to the Lite instead is the interesting part, and it is not what the store pages say. Roughly thirty free updates later the smoke works, the back seat flies, there are three visual models rather than two, the livery count is closer to twenty than the advertised seven, it carries bombs and gun pods, and it runs in MSFS 2024 — all on the original purchase. The product pages describe none of that. They still describe October 2020. And the last time anybody touched the aeroplane was 20 May 2025, fifteen months ago.

This review synthesises 21 sources: four storefronts and their rating data, the developer's own beta log and the full changelog, five forum threads, two written outlets, two video reviews, and the news record from 2020 to June 2026. Reddit, which is normally where you would take the temperature of an aircraft like this, is unreachable from here, so the sentiment reading below leans harder than usual on the 72 simMarket reviews and the 2,404 in-sim Marketplace ratings.

What you are actually buying

One package, two simulators, no second purchase. The same SKU covers MSFS 2020 and MSFS 2024; the 2024 compatibility work came as a free update in early 2025 and there is no separate 2024 edition anywhere.

Store	Price	Notes
simMarket	€20.00	Badged MSFS2020 and MSFS2024. Shown net of VAT for an unresolved session — Threshold quoted it in July 2023 as "€20.00 (excluding taxes)"
Just Flight (the publisher)	US$23.99	Listed as "MSFS 2024, MSFS 2020". Hosts the official changelog
Orbx Direct	AU$33.00 (about US$23.48)	Needs Orbx Central. Its "known issues" block is stale — it still describes v1.00
In-sim Marketplace	US$23.49	PC and Xbox. 4.3/5 from 2,404 ratings, by far the largest sample anywhere
DCS: MB-339 (for contrast)	US$59.99	Different simulator, different aeroplane, full systems simulation

Do not read the simMarket figure as a discount. Pre-tax the four MSFS stores sit within about 3% of each other; what you actually pay is set by where you live, not which storefront you use. An EU buyer adding 22% to €20.00 lands at €24.40, which is dearer than Just Flight's US price, not cheaper.

In the box: three visual models, not the two the marketing lists. The MB-339A with elliptical tiptanks, the MB-339PAN (MLU) in Frecce Tricolori configuration, and — added as a separate aircraft in v1.2.1 on 27 March 2021 — the A-MLU with 500-litre wingtip tanks. Front and rear cockpits are both modelled and both flyable; the back seat became functional in v1.4.0 on 28 March 2023. Liveries run well past the advertised seven: Al Fursan with blue smoke, Peru, Nigeria, Ghana, 214° Gruppo, the Frecce Tricolori 60th Anniversary Pony 0 and Pony 1, the "100 Anni" Italian Air Force centenary scheme, T-Bird II, Armada 4-A-115, and schemes replicating both the 1992 and 2024 American tour ferry flights.

Weapons appeared late and are not mentioned in the sales copy at all: MK82s and DEFA gun pods in v1.4.8, rocket launchers and .50 cal pods in v1.4.9, with a salvo jettison button in v1.4.10.

The smoke, in order

Because this is the feature the aeroplane exists for, the dates matter.

• October 2020 — does not work. The switches move; nothing comes out.
• 17 August 2021, v1.3.0 — white and coloured smoke added, wired to the real cockpit logic: SMOKE master, then WHITE and COLOR tank switches, then wing lights and recognition lights as the triggers. Red and green PAN variants included.
• 18 December 2021, v1.3.4 — effects rebuilt after Sim Updates 6 and 7 broke them.
• 28 March 2023, v1.4.0 — colours reworked.
• 17 June 2024, v1.4.4 — effects redone from Touching Cloud's open-source work, and, crucially, smoke state now propagates to other players through the wing-light and recognition-light variables. Your trail is visible to the aircraft on your wing.
• 26 June 2024, v1.4.7 — duration cut to 75 seconds, colours recalibrated.

Three years and eight months from release to a smoke system a display team could actually fly with.

What the community consistently praises

The exterior model is the least disputed thing about this aircraft, and it has been since launch. Into the Blue Simulations put up a full-flight review through the Mach Loop on 18 October 2020, the day after release; it has since passed 110,000 views. The textures were remastered at higher detail in v1.2.0 on 15 March 2021. Even the reviewers who mark the aeroplane down agree here — the simMarket buyer who gave it three stars on 4 November 2021 for its speeds and sounds opened his complaint with "Graphics are amazing."

The second thing, and the more interesting one, is that this is an analogue aeroplane and people bought it for that. AVSIM's Bosco19, writing on 17 March 2021, put it plainly: no glass panels, all 1970s steam gauges, VORs and TACANs, and a flight director that guides rather than flies. He called the immersion factor very high and the learning curve daunting but rewarding. A simMarket reviewer on 14 May 2021 compressed the same thought to one line — if you are into analogue IFR, this is the aeroplane.

Third: it became the MSFS formation community's standard mount, and the reason is boring and decisive. It is cheap, it is forgiving, it has adjustable formation lights (v1.4.0), it has working smoke that other people can see, and since v1.3.0 in August 2021 it runs on Xbox through the Marketplace. In May 2023 the ForderLearnToFly group ran a public training session on the MSFS forums specifically to bring people up to speed on the MB-339 before a Formation Flying 101 course with the Shadow Display Team, with one entry requirement: "Flight Simulator on an Xbox or PC with the MB-339 Military Training Jet." Nothing else in the sim at this price does that job.

Fourth: the update record, which is genuinely unusual. From v1.1.0 on 16 November 2020 — a complete flight-model rebuild issued a month after launch to kill the Modern flight model instability that early buyers called the "dolphin dance" — through to v1.4.10, everything has been free to everyone who bought it once. That includes the whole MSFS 2024 effort.

And the developer demonstrably reads his reviews. The 4 November 2021 simMarket complaint that the jet managed 405–407 knots at sea level against a real 485 was answered on 18 December 2021 by v1.3.4: "High speed drag is now more realistic (resulting in higher speeds)", alongside improvements to high-speed roll rate. Six weeks, complaint to changelog line.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The systems are shallow, and the AHRS/GPS is where you feel it. Still open — by design. The developer said so himself in 2020: "Flight model and systems simulation is based on default MSFS functionalities (no external code)." The consequence shows up in the negative reviews rather than the positive ones. Marco, two stars on simMarket on 13 August 2023: "too many missing features, the biggest being the limited AHRS/GPS, essential for IFR flights." Orbx's product page has carried "AHRS/GPS functionality limited to DATA model variant" in its known-issues list since v1.00 and has never removed it. This is not a bug and it will not be fixed; it is the difference between the Lite and the Pro that never came.

The flight model's numbers are argued over even by people who like how it flies. Partially fixed, partially still open. The sea-level speed deficit was addressed in December 2021. The broader complaint was not: Marco's 2023 review still says "power settings and aerodynamics differ too much from real life." Set against that, the DCS module's marketing states its flight model was tested by real MB-339 pilots including former Frecce Tricolori — a claim never made for the MSFS version, and the honest reading is that the MSFS aeroplane was tuned to feel right in the PAN airshow configuration rather than to match the book. The developer's own beta note is the fairest summary of what you get: the aircraft should be able to fly all the formation manoeuvres of the Frecce Tricolori programme, but not all of the solo programme. The Lomcovák, which the real MB-339 is famous for and which the DCS module supports, is not available in MSFS.

Nobody could work out how to fly it at launch. Mitigated. The very first substantive post in the MSFS forums release thread, 18 October 2020, was a buyer who could not find a manual and could not work out altitude hold, heading hold, or half the unlabelled switches. Checklists arrived in v1.1.2 on 30 November 2020 and the flight manual was moved into a proper Docs folder in v1.3.7 in October 2022, but the documentation has never been the strong point and the store pages do not help.

Sound is the weakest area and has been called out repeatedly. Mitigated, not solved. The package started in FSX legacy mode — which the marketing still says it uses — moved to WWise a month after launch courtesy of Christophe de Bortoli, and had its engine sounds rebuilt from real-world samples in March 2021. The 4 November 2021 three-star review still judged the exterior audio behind the then-new Hawk T1, and in the same breath flagged the missing jet-exhaust heat distortion that makes the aeroplane look static from outside. v1.4.8 brought "improved sound package by Echo19" in early 2025, which is a real step up, but this is not where the aircraft wins.

Smoke that appears not to work. Still open, and it is the simulator's fault. The developer's own release note for v1.3.0 warns that "due to a simulator bug, effects may not show if activated in the internal views in certain conditions." Buyers hit this and conclude the feature is broken. One did on simMarket on 28 September 2024, in an otherwise glowing five-star review: "The only issue I have is that the smoke doesn't work on any of the aircraft that have the function. Maybe it's just me?" It is not just him, and it is not really IndiaFoxtEcho's bug, but nothing on any product page tells a buyer to look from outside.

The reported spin problem was not one. For completeness, because it surfaces in searches: a bug report on the MSFS forums on 21 February 2023 claimed the MB-339 would not recover from a stall-induced spin. The reporter tested again six days later and withdrew it — "it seems as if this is my mistake" — having been recovering too low. No corroboration anywhere else.

Performance and stability

There is no crash record here worth reporting, which after reading 21 sources is itself the finding. Frame rate is not a complaint; one AVSIM-era user reported his settings went up after installing it. VR gets specific praise — a simMarket reviewer on 28 August 2021 called it "very well on VR with good FPS" — and VR cockpit collisions were fixed as far back as v1.2.0.

MSFS 2024 is the live question, and the answer is: supported, competently, but late and with a caveat. The compatibility pass is v1.4.8, and here the record disagrees with itself — the Marketplace changelog dates it 7 February 2025, Just Flight's dates it 22 April 2025. Either way it landed between three and five months after MSFS 2024 shipped on 19 November 2024, and it is a real piece of work rather than a recompile: canopy glass material changed for 2024's renderer, GPS and radio display self-illumination fixed, an external collision mesh added, aircraft.cfg changes to stop the jet spawning randomly at airports, and the nose gear rebuilt in v1.4.9 to stop polygon culling. One item is explicitly parked on Microsoft: "applied workarounds to some missing cockpit animations in MSFS2024 (although this issue will be fixed by Microsoft on SU2)."

The wider stability worry is not technical. It is that v1.4.10 landed on 20 May 2025 and nothing has followed. In the same window IndiaFoxtEcho shipped F-35 updates through to v1.4.5 in April 2026 and, on 18 June 2026, previewed a prototype AI back-seater called M.A.R.I.O. for the DCS MB-339. The studio is thriving. This particular aeroplane is not currently on its bench.

Who should buy it

If you want to fly formation or aerobatics in MSFS, buy it now. This is the aeroplane the community organises around, it is under twenty-five dollars, it works on Xbox, and the smoke shows up on other people's screens. There is no close competitor at the price.

If you like analogue navigation, buy it. VOR and TACAN work, the HSI and flight director are properly modelled, and holding an altitude by hand in a bumpy descent is the whole point. Several buyers describe it as the aeroplane that taught them to navigate without a magenta line.

If you fly on Xbox and want a jet with real switches, buy it. The Sim Update V cockpit interface went in specifically for Xbox in August 2021 and the aircraft has been maintained for controllers since.

If you want a study-level jet trainer, do not buy this. Buy nothing here and go elsewhere. The developer told you in 2020 that the systems run on default MSFS functionality with no external code, and that remains true six years later. If what you actually want is the study-level MB-339, it exists — as a $59.99 DCS module, in a different simulator, that you will need DCS World to run.

If you need a like-for-like MSFS 2024 showcase aircraft, look elsewhere first. It runs in 2024 and it runs properly, but it is a 2020 model kept current, not a 2024-native product, and the exterior lacks effects — animated jet exhaust above all — that newer jets have made standard.

Where it stands today

The MB-339 sits at all-time #31 on simMarket's bestsellers, which for a €20 single-type aircraft released in 2020 tells you most of what you need to know about how many people have found it worth the money. Its simMarket page shows a headline "5 out of 5" over 72 reviews. Do the arithmetic on the spread — 52 five-star, 12 four, 5 three, 3 two, none at one — and the real average is 4.57. The in-sim Marketplace, with a sample thirty times larger, says 4.3. Both are high; neither is five.

The gap this review is actually about is not between those two numbers. It is between the aeroplane and its own advertising. Every product page for the MB-339 describes the October 2020 build: two visual models, front seat only, seven liveries, FSX legacy sound. What you download in August 2026 has three models, a flying back seat, roughly twenty liveries, WWise audio improved by Echo19, a working multiplayer smoke system, a weapons loadout, and MSFS 2024 support — every bit of it free to anyone who paid once, five years ago. That is close to the best value proposition in the MSFS aircraft catalogue, and IndiaFoxtEcho have never bothered to say so.

What has changed in the last year is momentum. Fifteen months without an update is not abandonment — this is a developer with a live 2026 release schedule, and the aircraft works in both simulators today — but it does mean the version you buy now is very likely the version you will still have in a year. Buy it for what it is: the friendliest, cheapest, best-supported formation and aerobatics jet in Microsoft Flight Simulator, finished being built. Do not buy it waiting for the Pro. That aeroplane took off in 2022 and flew to a different sim.