The Beriev A-50 is one of the more distinctive shapes in Russian military aviation: A heavily modified Ilyushin Il-76 airframe carrying a rotating radar dome above the fuselage, built to serve as an airborne early warning and control (AEWACS) platform. Alongside aircraft like the E-3 Sentry in Western air forces, the A-50 exists to extend radar coverage far beyond what ground-based systems can see, feeding tracking data to fighters and air defense units. That silhouette has now made its way into Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 through a freeware release from developer folcorrr, who has reworked an existing Il-76 project into a dedicated, natively built A-50.
Under the hood, the A-50 borrows its cockpit from Asobo's default Boeing 747-8i, with textures adapted to fit the Beriev's Soviet-era flight deck aesthetic rather than a modern airliner. It's a pragmatic choice that a lot of complex military and specialty aircraft projects lean on, and here it extends to the startup flow as well, which follows a sequence similar to the 747's rather than a from-scratch systems simulation. Where the aircraft distinguishes itself is above the fuselage: the radar dome actually spins during flight, giving the AWACS role some visual credibility once you're airborne, and the rear cargo door can be opened in flight using the wing light switch keybind, letting you recreate that recognizable open-door silhouette seen in real-world photos of the type. The flight model has also been tuned by the developer to reflect the real aircraft's handling characteristics as closely as the underlying Il-76 base allows.
The package includes four liveries, all drawn from Russian Air Defence service and identified by their registrations: RF-50602, RF-93953, RF-50601, and RF-50606. At version 1.3, released two weeks ago, the aircraft is still actively being refined. The developer has been upfront that some animations remain a work in progress, and has asked the community to focus feedback on bug reports for the current aircraft rather than requests for additional airframes, suggesting attention will stay on polishing the A-50 itself for now rather than expanding into new projects immediately.
For an aircraft of this complexity, distributed at no cost and downloadable directly from Flightsim.to, the A-50 represents a meaningful chunk of development time handed over for free. You can download it here: ➡️ Beriev A-50 (Native Conversion).