Jim Robinson's Blog

Great looking aircraft. I don't know what the payware peeps do to make their textures look that way, but whatever it is, it beats the heck out of most freeware ones. I wonder about frame rates. Maybe I'll crawl out from under my rock and sample. I wanted to start with Razbam's A4C Skyhawk before I saw this!

Have a good one.

Hey bushp04 how have you been? You've been AWOL for a while my friend. Good to see you back.

 

I'd buy that 206 if I were you. You get a float version and a cargo pod version in addition to the one shown above, plus the choice of wheel pants or bare wheels for all. The plane's got some balls, at 8000' you'll still be climbing at 1000 fpm. You'll like the prop sound too. Virtual cockpit is excellent, I'm not a VC flyer but I fly this one from the VC. At $30 bucks for the whole 9 yards I don't see how a person could go wrong. The only things I don't like about it are the lack of a "Both" position on the fuel selector (one wing gets heavy, switch tanks and pretty soon the other wing gets heavy), and the sluggish control response (plan on turning up your control sensitivities). Frame rate impact is less severe than Posky's new 777, and the textures are in DXT3 mode right out of the box.

 

The Skyhawk on the other hand I probably wouldn't have bought if I had it to do over again. I didn't like the flight dynamics, but then I've been spoiled by over 200 sim hours in the RealAir Skyhawk. The Carenado Skyhawk exhibits the same sluggish control response as the 206, maybe even to a greater degree. The visual model is quite nice though so I'm currently flying a merge of the Carenado visual model, RealAir flight dynamics, and the default FSX Skyhawk panel (yes, in FS9) which I fly quite a lot.

 

Have a good one,

Jim

Hi,

Yeah, I've been out of the sky for a while until I got everything straightened out on this PC of mine.

 

Sorry if I misled you on the Skyhawk. I was talking about RazBam's military model A4-C.

Hard as heck to fly, too, at least with Kazunori Ito's flight dynamics. Worst part is the tri-wheel config. They're so close together that it's impossible to taxi.

 

I have a very good friend who flew these off the USS Hancock in the early-to-mid 50's, and he's told me the carrier landings were nightmares! He also 'splained why the difficulty in taxiing--Douglas Aircraft built it with extra high landing gear so as to accommodate an Atomic bomb--no B.S.! Although they never had to to carry one into combat, the high-and-tight gear config. made the plane easy to tip over in cornering.

 

Only wanted the plane for a repaint anyway. I wanted to honor my friend's service of many years by painting a "Scooter" as the Skyhawk's were called, in the colors and insignia of his fighter group VA-113. However, Ito's freeware model is an A4-M, a much later model than the one my friend flew, thus the reason for my looking around for payware.

 

BTW, my friend led a precision team of A4-C's known as the "Stingers," and you might find it interesting to know that one of his wing men at the time was Gene Cernan, the last man ever to walk on the moon!

 

I ended up repainting (with permission) Ito's A4-M, and my friend was very happy with it, but I would still like to upload a repainted A4-c to flight.sim.com.

 

Best regards,

bushp04