Donald Douglas

I just left Riyadh (2000 msl) at 36C and only about 195T-- Flap 3 Flex 53-- no issue getting off the runway and initial climb was fine, but I definitely barely made the above FL230 SID restriction almost 60 track miles away, and this was with no intermediate level segments, and I was speed restricted to 250 until around 13k feet. So I think, yes, it might be pushing harder on takeoff than some airlines did irl, but overall it's climb performance is still pretty realistic.

Had 2 step climbs programmed (auto load and auto step climb OFF for me)-- when I passed the first one (had to wait for ATC handoff to request higher) I got a Step Climb Deleted message, but saw both step climbs were gone. Is that by design or a bug?

When I use CPDLC for clearance request in the ini A340, I can send the request,I see it in BATC, then see the response in BATC, but it never comes to the flight deck, so there's no way to respond or acknowledge it. This seems to work fine in the A350.