With the much-awaited release of advanced airliners for Microsoft Flight Simulator, many are on the market for a good yoke controller to enhance their immersion, and one of the most relevant and recent options is the TCA Yoke Pack Boeing Edition for both PC and Xbox by Thrustmaster.
You can purchase the whole set including the Yoke and the Throttle Quadrant, the Yoke on its own, or the Throttle Quadrant on its own.
This makes the system rather modular as the Yoke on its own would be enough for your basic simulation needs, you can add the quadrant for better immersion and control, and you could even get a second quadrant to be able to individually set the thrust on four engines.
That being said, I definitely advise pairing the set with pedals to control your rudder, as that’s nearly indispensable for immersive simulation and precise control. In order to test this set, I paired it with my Thrustmaster’s own T-Flight rudder pedals, and they work great together.
While the yoke is officially inspired by that of a Boeing 787, it’s pretty much perfect to immersively simulate any Boeing aircraft, or any airliner with a control column, like Leonardo’s MD-82, Just Flight’s BAE 146, Aerosoft’s CRJs and Twin Otter, and many more.
That being said, since this is a Boeing-branded controller, the main testbed for this review was the brand new Boeing 737-700 by PMDG.
As a matter of fact, above you can see a video of a very challenging approach performed using the TCA Boeing Pack with the new 737-700. It’s the famous (and rare) “Itami Turn” in Osaka, Japan. If you’d like to learn more and challenge the Itami Turn yourself, you can check out a tutorial video about the approach, albeit that one is specifically done with an Airbus A320 with Thrustmaster’s own TCA Airbus Edition.
The yoke is definitely the main course of the set, and it comes with its most unique features. Most yokes you’ll find on the market are mounted on the assembly of the controller horizontally as you’d see in a smaller general aviation aircraft and some business jets.
Most airliners and larger business jets usually have their yokes on a pendulum structure mounted at the bottom of the flight deck (usually called control column), which offers a completely different feeling compared to the other kind of assembly.
This is what Thrustmaster’s controller aims to imitate, and despite the fact that the pillar of the yoke is mounted vertically on the assembly and doesn’t quite reach as far as the floor, the sensation is amazingly similar to the real thing.
The yoke’s tilt mechanism is powered by default by three springs, but the set comes with a fourth that you can add optionally. I definitely advise doing that, as the feeling of resistance the four-springs setup offers is the closest compared to the effort required to control the pitch on real airliners (albeit I am not a professional pilot, my father was, so I had plenty of opportunities to put my grabby hands on real yokes, though not in flight for obvious reasons). That being said, the room for customization is definitely welcome here.
While the shells of the assembly and yoke are made of plastic, they’re built over an all-metal frame that gives them an extremely solid feeling, definitely different compared to the toyish sensation offered by many other controllers on the market.
This solid build combined with the pendular motion gives the TCA Boeing Pack the most realistic and immersive feel I’ve experienced in this class of price if you’re aiming to simulate airliners and larger business jets with floor-mounted control columns.
Of course, with flight simulation, the sky is the limit and some go as far as buying or building full-sized alternatives, or even sourcing original OEM parts or dismantled ones, but you’re looking at spending a lot more in that case. If you want to keep the price reasonable, I personally believe you can’t find anything better than this in terms of pure tactile feeling.
The same solid resistance you find in the pitch action is offered by the sideway steering of the yoke, which will return to the centered position very naturally, exactly as you would expect.
The precision of control offered by the yoke is also top-notch. As you can see in the video of the Itami Turn above, complex approaches that require coordinating both pitch and aileron control carefully are definitely facilitated by hardware like this that comes with a realistic heft, while those with a flimsier build and weaker resistance definitely encourage overcorrecting your inputs.
This is especially relevant when you’re flying long-bodied airliners like the upcoming 737-800 and 900, which require an extremely precise hand during take-off when their tail clearance (provided that you use the correct rotation technique) is just a handful of inches and a yoke that offers the correct resistance and feels solid in your hands is critical to avoid a tailstrike.
On top of the premium assembly quality, the yoke also comes with tons of buttons and additional controls. It includes two hat switches which make controlling your camera in all directions pretty much a breeze (for the first time, I’ve ditched the additional Xbox controller I usually use for this purpose), two triggers, four trim-style switches that can easily cover all your trim axes, two additional buttons on the yoke itself, a landing gear lever, two analog throttle-style sliders, and four more buttons usually associated with the default Xbox Series X controller functions, and can be customized however you like on PC. All the buttons feel sturdy and nicely clicky, and you have plenty of options available here.