Anything Beechcraft catches my eye, this being no exception.

After waiting for v1.52 to be released I took the plunge.

Initial impressions?

Well, lots of room for improvement, but the basic aircraft is not disastrous.

A few initial observations:

Cockpit panel is almost 1D, no depth as regards instruments, bezels etc. As others have pointed out, nozzle finish is 'rough'

AP - Won't hold magenta NAV line, but will hold HDG & ALT when I go the Keyboard 'Z', AP ON/OFF route. The AP Keyboard choices are mirrored by the AP lighting up accordingly. Haven't tried Keyboard NAV as I am not sure which MSFS bind command to use.

Take Off: After jumping out & pushing after the 3rd aborted attempt on a 7,500' runway, I managed to get a 70% of Gross Allowable Weight B99A into the air by not using any flap. It struggles to get to lift off speed and the first few hundred feet in the air can be a tad white knuckle as you nurse it along.

Liveries: Some appear a bit rough when you get up close. Pin stripping etc a bit jagged.

Controls- Feels a bit twitchy on the rudder.

Landings: Haven't got that far yet.

Despite the current limitations/idiosyncrasies, I like it & I am hoping it is a Work In Progress & more refinements will come through as updates.

T45

Edited January 10, 20215 yr by Treetops45

1 hour ago, Treetops45 said:

AP - Won't hold magenta NAV line

It will if you select GPS instead of V/L on the Bendix DME. This is what slaves it to the GPS.

1 hour ago, Treetops45 said:

It struggles to get to lift off speed and the first few hundred feet in the air can be a tad white knuckle as you nurse it along.

You need to give it plenty of positive elevator trim. Then you need to let the speed build before too much maneuvering. Don't engage the autopilot until you know you are in a positive climb with quite a lot of altitude.

1 hour ago, Treetops45 said:

Landings: Haven't got that far yet.

Initial approach at about 140 whilst setting up flaps, gear etc, then slow to around 120 as you drop a final stage of flap for the last bit of the final approach. Keep some power on until you know you've made it for sure. 

18 minutes ago, Chock said:

It will if you select GPS instead of V/L on the Bendix DME. This is what slaves it to the GPS.

You need to give it plenty of positive elevator trim. Then you need to let the speed build before too much maneuvering. Don't engage the autopilot until you know you are in a positive climb with quite a lot of altitude.

Initial approach at about 140 whilst setting up flaps, gear etc, then slow to around 120 as you drop a final stage of flap for the last bit of the final approach. Keep some power on until you know you've made it for sure. 

Thanks for tips.

I have managed a couple of landings, 1st was pretty quick.

A small niggle, the prop disc spinning is a bit more noticeable than some other aircraft.

However, I think this is one of those aircraft that grows on you the more you fly it.

BTW, what controls the RPM gauge, I'm having difficulty getting the needle out of the red, & what Mixture % do you use on Cruise?

T45

One of the more colorful B99 liveries, a Danish Airline variant headed to Denmark from Hamburg.

T45

 

2 hours ago, Treetops45 said:

However, I think this is one of those aircraft that grows on you the more you fly it.

BTW, what controls the RPM gauge, I'm having difficulty getting the needle out of the red, & what Mixture % do you use on Cruise?

T45

I use both the throttle and prop levers to keep the needles in their green arcs. The 'mixture' lever is actually a fuel condition lever in turbo-prop planes - here's a quick description I found for the King Air: 

the condition levers in the King Air have 3 positions, Cut-off, Low-Idle, and High-Idle. By moving the condition levers to Low-Idle, you set the engine to idle at a specific speed, moving them to High-Idle allows the engine to idle at a higher speed by introducing a greater constant fuel flow. Low-idle is used for starting and taxi; High-idle is used for normal flight and any time that that extra bleed air is required (such as for the air conditioning with only one engine running). Cut-off is just that, it cuts-off fuel to the engine.

You probably won't be able to get the gauges correct on this thing for engine management because they don't work accurately as far as I can tell, and even if they did, you'd still need the operation manual, but if you want to have a stab at that, here's the relevant pages...

On the plus side though, the de-icing boots do actually work...

 

Thanks for that.

I concur on the de-icing.

T45

19 hours ago, Chock said:

 

You need to give it plenty of positive elevator trim.

How do you do that?

I found in the cockpit that here are live trim wheels for Rudder & Ailerons, & a flat 'plate' arrangement for elevator trim, but I can't get anything to move on that.

T45

Assign up and down elevator trim commands to a key or joystick controller button.

Here are a couple of YouTube videos that give a great view of how the throttle quadrant levers are used irl in the Beech 99 - Part 1 is take off to cruise, Part 2 is cruise to landing.  No music or ATC chatter either, only the engines and cockpit sounds. Must see how close it's possible to get to this in the sim!

 

Weather Radar would nice addition as well

Ok against my better judgement I decided to take the plunge and added it to my cart while I also picked up the the VGP Powersolo (which is great btw).

Taking off is very strange in this bird, it takes forever to get up to speed and get off the ground and your AOA needed to take off has to be very shallow.  I have no clue as to how close this behaviour is to reality or not so what I decided to do was duplicate my takeoff from the same airport using visual clues using the kingair which is the only other 2 engine turbo prop which required the same distance to get up to speed so I can't claim this means the flightmodel is bad/unrealistic on that front.

Sound is weird in a way that being at full power doesn't sound a whole lot different compared to being at idle so when landing it's very peculiar as the sound doesn't match your expectations when the props slow down but again I have no idea whether this is matching the true soundscape or not.  

When it comes to visuals, the outside model is ok from a distance, certainly nothing to write home about.  The internal modelling is atrocious, given the age of my system gauges are my go to cockpit and I expected a low polygon cockpit here based on all the feedback so far and I was willing to compromise on that because I knew I would get better frames at least but way too often I can't even read the gauges.  The night lighting is utterly useless, still way too dark and when you are flying against the sun at dusk  your dawn you can't decipher anything either, the actual switches have no lights at all so you'll be using your flashlight to manipulate those in the dark.  I read the throttle quadrant had its colours updated but I can barely seem them even still and those visual shortcomings are ultimately the dealbreaker here.  With the exception of exceptional light conditions I feel like I'm looking at the panel through dark sunglasses using the wrong prescription lenses.  And it has some glitches as well, the artificial horizon seems to be transparent, if there are clouds they show up in the AH ball, it also rains inside the cockpit.   Bottom line ugly outdated and low res textures are everywhere, the flight model seems 'ok' and I was able to take off and land and enjoy it once I got used to its behaviour, sounds can do with some serious tweaking I believe.  But as mentioned the instrument panel lighting, overall readability and dark levers on the throttle quadrant are what ultimately ruins this to the point where I can't recommend this airplane despite its low price.  If you are interested and given there have been 2 updates so far it may be worth keeping an eye on how things progress as maybe some of these shortcomings will be addressed and that may change my current opinion. I hope they will be as otherwise she will remain in my hanger indefinitely as the negatives far outweigh the positives which is unfortunate as I really wanted a commuter plane to fly to mountain based airstrips inaccessible to larger birds. 

 

5 hours ago, stefaandk said:

Ok against my better judgement I decided to take the plunge and added it to my cart while I also picked up the the VGP Powersolo (which is great btw).

Thanks for your thoughts.  I was close to buying the B99 but I will hold off a while now to see how the developer responds.

By the way, I bought the Powersolo also - like you say, it is great - something different and with an excellent view.  So I do like it, but are your cameras messed up?  Quick view left and right on mine jumps outside of the aircraft.

7 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

So I do like it, but are your cameras messed up?  Quick view left and right on mine jumps outside of the aircraft.

No worries, there is an easy fix to that simply by editing the cameras.cfg file, I gave it my 20 cents in this thread (pixella) and the dev himself replied that he will implement the fix in the next update along with some cosmetic stuff.

Quite a variety of liveries come with the B99.

This is one of them, over in North East Canada. (There appear to be 'ice mounds' in the background)

"Wagair was formed in 1982, (Operated Beech 99 and Navajo aircraft into Vancouver Airport)"

 

T45