One of my favorite planes in FS2020 was the Grumman G21A Goose Redux II, by OzWookie and the OZx team. This project is an FSX import, but unlike many other such 3rd-party add-ons to FS2020, the OZx Goose was amazingly responsive and fun to fly - she felt "alive", in a way that most other FSX imports never did. The skin textures were obviously FSX: low resolution, rivets and screw heads were fuzzy and indistinct, as we all remember from FSX, and the instrument and switch labels were often hard to read. But the engine sound was amazing right from the moment you toggled the starter, until the moment your flight was over, the bird was parked, and you shut 'er down. The OZx team re-created the instrument graphics and liveries in high-def resolution, so you could actually read them without squinting, and everthing was configurable, right down to the load and CG balancing. Flying off land or water, she was gentle, forgiving of mistakes, with enough power to cruise at 148 knots and climb at 750 fpm. She had retractable wing floats, which were added to some existing airframes in the 1950's and 1960's, and this gives the OZz Goose about a 25 knot speed edge over the official Asobo/Microsoft G21 Goose.  The OZx Goose is so much more fun to fly! She has an autopilot, which the  Microsoft version of the plane lacks, and the sound files are a better rendition of the rumble of the R-985 Wasp Junior engines, than what comes with the Microsoft Goose.

Sadly, I have to report that the OZx Goose Redux II has issues in FS2024. Two problems are so serious that they make the plane almost unflyable: The numeric displays on the Bendix radio stack, which are red LED's, are blank. This affects the Nav and Comm radios, the ADF, and the Autopilot (the DME never worked, even in FS2020). But the problem is more serious than no numbers on the radio stack: the autopilot has some bizarre fault: as soon as you press the AP power button, the plane noses down into a steep dive, and doesn't respond to any inputs on the VS Up/Down buttons or elevator trim commands. The only way to recover is to disable the autopilot and re-trim to level flight. And pray that you recovered before passing VNE speed, which is only about 190 knots. I've tried every suggestion to isolate the problem so that (maybe) a fix can be found, including removing all other files from the Community Folder, but this didn't help. There must be something in the plane's autopilot modeling that's incompatible with FS2024. It's a big disappointment,  because I love this plane, but I've discovered several other compatibility problems with importing 3rd-party aircraft, these also worked fine in FS2020 but have issues with FS2024. Microsoft/Asobo's claim that "most FS2020 add-ons will work seamlessly in FS2024" seems to be not as reliable a claim as we all hoped.

I never saw this behavior in FS2020 - everything worked perfectly except the Bendix DME - the OZx user manual stated that they were unable to make this work, but were hoping to bring it online in a future release. The autopilot always worked perfectly, exactly as it should; I made many ILS approaches in the OZx Goose and never encountered a glitch, except one time, in very bad weather, when apparently the gyro tumbled and I had to use the Increase/Decrease Drift Angle keybind to re-calibrate the gyrocompass.

As far as I know, development on the Goode Redux II was discontinued 3 or 4 years ago, when the OZx team began work on a new project, a payware version of the G-21A Goose modelled on the US Navy JRF-6. This model is closer to the WWII Goose, with fixed wing floats, and flight dynamics more or less like the Asobo version.

On 1/24/2025 at 1:48 AM, lgcharlot said:

....the autopilot has some bizarre fault: as soon as you press the AP power button, the plane noses down into a steep dive, and doesn't respond to any inputs on the VS Up/Down buttons or elevator trim commands. The only way to recover is to disable the autopilot and re-trim to level flight...

I have solved this problem. It has to do with weight distribution and trim. The location of the wing fuel tanks was placed too far forward in the flight_model.cfg file. This parameter should be -5.382 (fore/aft), +/-10.256 (left/right), 4.041 (up/down), 110.000 (gallons), 0.000 (unusable), and somehow it was changed to -4.0, +/-10.256, 4.041, 110.000, 0.000. This error was making the aircraft nose-heavy, requiring 20% up-trim to maintain level flight: as soon as the autopilot was engaged, the elevator trim would go to 0, and the plane would go into a dive. I shifted the CG further aft, from 27% to 45%, to allow level flight at 0% elevator trim, and now the autopilot behaves properly. I don't know why the aircraft is requiring the CG to be moved aft this much; 45% is a couple feet aft of the trailing edge of the wing, so it's obviously wrong, but where the underlying cause is - probably in the model files somewhere - I can't suss out. Anyway, it's now flyable, except for the radios still having no visible numbers.