I pull up to slow below VFE, once in the speed range I lower gear and full flaps, and approach the runway descending at about 105kt IAS. With the lever ‘stuck’ at quite a high setting, I practice one of the three strategies discussed by Charlie. Having recently read Charlie Huke’s column on how to deal with a stuck power lever (see the Spring 2020 issue of Pilot), I decide to give that a try. I break visual at 300ft agl and go around to practice, as I had promised myself, an abnormal scenario. However, the simulation is very realistic and it is very useful training to improve your instrument scan. Here the small screen of the smartphone is a problem, since looking simultaneously at the PFD and the navigation display forces you to look at the cockpit from a slight angle and not straight (more on this later). I then set myself up for a ILS approach to Runway 08L. Slow flight is also quite realistic, with the controls becoming markedly more sluggish below 110kt. More bank requires more pitch up to maintain altitude and more power to maintain speed, and precise flying requires quite a degree of concentration. A few steep turns confirm the realism of the flight simulation. Turning to the southwest for some general handling, I level off at 4,000ft, where 70% N1 gives me a IAS of 200kt. That yields a 1,500fpm climb rate in ISA conditions and near Maximum Take Off Weight, which I’m told is pretty realistic from pilots who have flown the actual aircraft (I’ve never flown a real one). I rotate at 90kt, and once gear and flaps are up the Vision Jet climbs at 160kt with about 8 degrees nose up. On takeoff I need to use a tiny bit of tilting right and left to keep centred (a small issue here, but a bigger one on prop planes as I discuss later). The realism and fun is increased by the endless weather combination that you can set up, with practically everything under your control: winds, cloud cover, cloud type, visibility, time of day/night, turbulence and indeed thermals.Īfter getting familiar with the main features of the sim, I set up my Cirrus Vision Jet on Runway 08L at Honolulu International Airport, planning for a flight that would include the two things for which I find simulators most useful: instrument training and emergencies. The Cirrus Vision Jet, for instance, features the exact same Garmin 1000 displays that I found in DA42 Twinstars while training for my ME rating. And the cockpit features are basically just like the real aeroplane. The scenery is quite stunning and fairly realistic for VFR flying, although it is limited to Austria, Washington State and Hawaii in the free version. If you are stuck at home and are not familiar with flight simulators, you may actually be astonished by the realism that you can get from this little thing that many of us still call a ‘phone’. Many more types, however, are available at prices between £0.99 and £5.99 each (among them many popular airliners like the A320 or the B777, but also some gems like the Piper Cub and the A-10 Thunderbolt). In the free version there are two types of aircraft you can fly, the Cessna 172SP and the Cirrus SF50 Vision Jet. The other main controls are operated by touching the right and left side of the screen (respectively to control flaps and gear, and power and brakes). Tilt forward and backward for pitch, and right/left for turning (there’s a finger-controller rudder, more on that later). The sim relies on your phone motion detectors, turning the phone into a control column. It turns out, you can actually get a very good flight sim experience, even in these conditions.įor this review, I downloaded X-Plane Mobile. Caught by surprise by the lockdown, with no joystick at home (my father “borrowed” it) and no prospect of getting anything delivered, I only had my iPhone 6s Plus and an internet connection in order to “fly”. Housebound, isolated, and wanting to fly? The phone is the limit! All you need to fly from home is a phone, X-Plane Mobile, and an internet connectionįor this first flight simulator review of ‘The Isolated Aviator’, we took the example of a very isolated pilot – your assistant editor.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |