After having endless issues with my Saitek X56 HOTAS I decided to pick this up, it’s available at the relatively low price of around £100, I got mine from scan.co.uk.
Build Quality
The overall build quality is very decent, even though it’s mostly plastic it feels like good quality plastic that does not creak and bend when pressure is applied, the paint job is of high quality and I suspect will last a long time.
It’s quite compact which works well on a cramped desk and despite it’s low weight it doesn’t move much on my wooden desk, a mounting hole is provided if needed, the throttle leavers move quite smoothly to the point when I had to increase the tension adjustment quite a bit, but once done it feels good just don’t over tighten it or you will break it.
The only real negative I can find is the mechanism to link the throttles together, it’s possible with a bit of pressure to move one throttle slightly but it isn’t generally a big deal in practical usage.
Functionality
Four push buttons are included, two on the throttle levers, and two on the lower pedestal, there is also two switches and a three position switch, not a lot but it’s sufficient, it’s possible to link two throttles together to give yourself four throttle levers which is ideal for something like the A380.
Thrustmaster also sell an addon module which includes speedbrake, gear, flaps, parking brake and more for around the same price, although at the time of writing this there was no stock available.
Another useful feature is it allows you to plug in a Thrustmaster T.Flight rudder pedals helping to save your usb ports, speaking of USB it uses a type C connector (on the product side) which is a nice touch.
The throttle includes detents which are found in the real Airbus aircraft, these can be disabled by removing four screws and switching some plastic parts around, this could be a bit annoying if you switch a lot so I would have liked to have seen a different mechanism to do this, the included detent range is also not ideal as it leaves little room for the manual thrust range, fortunately someone has already produced a mod to fix this minor issue if it really annoys you, personally it seems ok to me.
The thrust reverser can be disabled to allow you usage of the whole range if desired.
Overall
Given the relatively low price this is a good throttle that offers some degree of extension if you need more controls in future, I’ve used it a fair amount in MSFS now and it appears to work just fine, some complaints about certain functions not working appear to have been resolved, overall I have no hesitation in recommending this.