The Virtual Squadron

The Good
There's a lot to like about this add-on. What impressed me as soon as I loaded the CD in the drive was the installation process. Some flight simulator add-ons I have played around with have been, well, a bit geeky. They seem to expect me to know that files need to be manually copied from the CD into the a specific directory on the hard drive. Not this package. It detected Windows 95 (I was actually running Windows 98 but it was near enough) and offered the choice of updating either the DOS or the Windows versions of the flight simulator. It then said it could not find the Flight Conversion software and I thought 'here we go again - time to look for a compatible download on the net', but instead the setup process surprised me and offered to load the missing component. Top stuff! A well thought out process and a good start.
The next surprise was the installation of the aircraft. Back in the day space on hard drives was tight and I've encountered other packages that allow the player to run with large parts of the data remaining on the CD. Here I got the chance to load individual aircraft or individual groups of aircraft. Another nice touch.
The Thunderbirds are well modelled and look good, back in 1996 they would have looked great. As for the bonus planes some look good and have opening doors, working lights etc while others look unfinished.

The Bad
I've been spoiled by later versions of Microsoft's flight simulator and other similar products. What disappoints now was probably standard back in 1996 and should not be used to judge the product harshly.
It was noticeable that all the Thunderbirds, in fact all the jets, sounded the same. This is not unsurprising as there's no mighty development team to go out and record sound files for each aircraft, but all the same it was noticeable.
The other noticeable similarity between the aircraft was the cockpit view. The planes all used variations of the cockpits provided by the Microsoft Flight Simulator, the Thunderbirds make use of the Learjet's cockpit with minor changes to the throttle control. One of the greatest mismatches is the bonus RAF SE5a, a WW1 biplane, which uses the cockpit of the Cessna Skylane

The Bottom Line
So there's a lot of planes here but cockpits are inaccurate, the sounds are just general sounds, are the flight mechanics and the aircraft liveries accurate?
Honestly I don't know. I'm not that bothered now and I don't think I would have been that bothered back in 1996. Back then the emphasis, as far as I can tell, was on the quantity of planes and how they looked and the Thunderbirds here still look good.