teropa

I ordered one… expecting it in a week or so

I got my yoke in January this year. It had an issue and Chris replaced it. The next yoke had an issue with the magnetic sensor, it had become loose. I fixed it with Chris’s instructions and it has been rock solid. The thing is built like a tank. I am saddened to hear that they have been unable to deliver more yokes, and he has gone silent. I hope he is okay, this seems very unlike him or totally opposite the way I was able to message with him about the replacement yoke and the small repair. He was very helpful and responsive. I hope he will be able to return to the scene and regain the lost trust of some customers and make newer versions. Also the 737 model. Tero

I don't care much for the small planes out of reach in real life anymore. A good flight model C172 would have been something else. Currently mostly flying Diesel-powered Cessnas, so that would be extra sweet. I also know they are getting more and more common in Europe. Our club has two! But like said, too bad. The A2A flight model is not something I buy into myself. It flies nice for the most part, but the real interaction for example in crosswinds seems very foreign to me. Kind of then makes the training aspect with the sim a no-go. Tero

Well that is disappointing news :(. I wouldn't have imagined that they ever cancel the Cessna. After all, it was Cessna that got people into Realair. Well, goes to show that in this business you can't rely on anything... And still it is so that there ain't a decent C172 around (flight-model!). Tero

Hi, Has the RA C172 been cancelled? Can't find it from the RealAir pages anymore? "Coming soon" section has been removed. Tero

Any update on C172 from RA ? Tero

Wow, the A2A video looks seriously impressive . Tero

It seems that both companies are doing the airplanes in a detailed and through fashion. Otherwise it wouldn't have lasted this long. Hopefully though, we'll get either of them this fall. I was kind of expecting the RA offering to shoot the market before last christmas . Obviously that was an error in my part, as these things do take time. Especially if quality is what they are after. Tero

Yes, it would be nice to get some update from the RA team. I guess they just are of the type who develop and just announce when it's ready . Nothing wrong with that approach. Nothing wrong with me (us) wanting a teaser either. What matters is what we eventually get. Not the wait, not how many teasers we got. I know the RA C172 must be really good. I am counting on it to be. A2A looks interesting too. I have no experience of their products, so my expectations on that front are rather low. I'd put my pennies in for the RA plane. At least when it comes to FLIGHT simulation side of things. That's what matters to me. Not how I can test the fuel. Tero

Ok, so nothing new at this point. Thanks. Tero

Hey all, Any news on RA C172 development? Tero

Yes, he had also saved many situations with Pause ON, to see if the init could be waited out. Init doesn't run when sim is on pause, so that doesn't help. I see it like this: on the situations saved on the ground, this is not a problem at all. Who doesn't have 15 seconds of time to spare to wait until everything is ready. But on situations saved in-flight, it seems to be more than a minor inconvenience as it prevents user from saving situations in any other kind of circumstances besides level flight, far enough from any point where the aircraft should be doing something on autopilot. Unless you can accept that during the init period, the aircraft will lose whatever maneuvering / profile it's following. Tero

Hi, I actually tried this method immediately after posting the initial question. Firstly I got some controller noise in Slew, so I mapped the "controller disconnect / ctrl+K" to one of his yoke's buttons. And another button for Slew. Then, as the flight was loaded, I first pressed "controller disconnect" and then "Slew". To keep the plane in the same place. It works. But, just as the timer comes to an end, (doesn't matter if you release the "locks" before the times ends or after it), for some reason the lateral mode of the autopilot disconnects and you can't re-connect it back. I tried this many times with many ways to slew and "unslew" during the init countdown, always with the same result as above. My friend was a little frustrated, and I have to admit, during the time that I was testing this plane, I never saved approach situations myself. So I didn't face this dilemma. He flies the NG for real (I was supposed to write "NG pilot" in the initial post lol) and would like to save different phases of approach. To practise raw-data "stuff". Is there any other work-around for this, or maybe even a fix coming for SP-next (don't know what it is) ? Tero

Hi, A friend (NGX pilot) is using the SW to shoot some approaches. He noticed a feature that I don't know how to go around. When you load a saved flight, plane fully configured for approach, you of course have to wait the initialization period. How do you go around the problem of the plane not responding and still moving forward on approach. Let's say you save it on short final and then resume it, it's not possible to control the aircraft during the first seconds, and finally once the init is over, the final is over too. Is there a way to resume a flight without the airplane moving, so that you can really resume from where you saved? Without ending up for instance crashing on the short final. Tero

Yeah, throw us a bone

Where can we find this modified FDE by B. Stolle ? Tero

Super happy about the (so far) non-Glass availability. Tero

Wanted to participate in this discussion too. I have been an "avid simmer" since around end of 1980s. This was due to my dad getting his PPL back around that time. So, it's been 20+ years of simming, flying everything possible and doing it with some "skill" I think. Always wanted to do everything "like they do in real life", be it a Cessna or a Boeing 757. This July I started my real-life flight training, after having sat through theory classes and tests during the winter. Obviously I had some experience in flying (ie. manipulating controls myself) small GA planes, mostly PA28 and C172 when I was a kid. And then flying as a pax on small GA a lot. My flight training is on the last bits and am hoping to be certified soon. My findings as to "simulator vs reality" are the following. Everything I say is based on FSX and comparing C172 (RA model) to its real-life counterpart. Flight Instruments: Basic flight instruments can be simulated in FSX about 100% as they work in real life. There might be some small limitations when it comes to reception ranges for nav aids and the kinds of things that do affect radio transmission in real-life. But the instrument functionalities, smoothness etc can all be done in FS. Taxiing: With proper pedals (CH does not count) and proper settings in control settings / FSUIPC, one can replicate C172 taxiing properties to an extent. Real thing is very different to taxi depending on gross weight, CG position, wind and the condition of the bungee system and brakes, even tire pressure affects. In the sim you don't feel any difference in taxiing when something changes. Only thing that I can see is the gross wt affecting power required to break into movement and to stay moving. Wind and CG don't seemingly affect anything, while these have a huge effect in real life taxiing. Also, in my opinion the FS brakes are always way too sensitive and "digital" even when you fine-tune them really well. The "slack" and lag of the real C172 taxiing (dependant on many things) can make real taxiing a real chore, and with good wind you have to "drive it". Sim is always the same, and lacks the control issues that are easily seen in real-life. Flight controls: Obviously the most important thing when it comes to sim is what HW you use. I use PFC Beech yoke with HE sensors. Saitek Cessna pedals with max stiffness adjusted, Saitek Cessna trim wheel and Saitek TQ. I'd say that to simulate realism the best, you need: a yoke that does not "stick" in either axis and is stiff enough to simulate "average" control forces. PFC is very good. You need pedals that are stiff enough, and that simulate the section of pedals that you control with your foot tips, and the surface that you control with your entire feet, ie toebrakes. In the takeoff roll you always remove your feet from the toebrakes, and return feet to the fully covering position on roll-out so you can brake. CH is again not very good. Saitek and Cirrus pedals are good. To really simulate the other chores in real flying you need own panels for basic engine / light controls and radios. Saitek sells nice and cheap panels to make this happen. For throttle your mileage may vary, and it's not important if you use a Cessna or Piper style thrust lever. (our Diesel C172s use a "Piper style" lever) In the real thing the control "throws" / range is also typically 90 degrees either side on ailerons (older Cessnas have slightly over 90 deg, newer slightly less). Typical sim yoke is the CH offering with 45 deg. It's not enough. In the real thing you do need maximum deflection sometimes. Simulation does not change the control pressure / feel with airspeed, as happens in real-life. This is problematic in my opinion, since the feel does change a great deal because of this. You need a different way to handle the elevator in 55KT than when doing 105KT. To summarize: with decent HW you can come close, but the airspeed dependant feel is not there, and some peculiarities (like slack in rudder, and even in aileron control) are also missing. With the cheapest stuff you don't even come close, and I would advise saving up for the PFC stuff and forgetting about those plastic CH yokes. Then there is the trim difference where in real-life the trim moves the elevator to a different setting, and in the sim you have to manually ease up or tighten your grip on the elevator axis. I don't find this a big issue when judging the sim anyhow. It's a small difference. Basic flight maneuvers: Lack of effects of wind as they happen in real-life. As the airplane flies within the air mass, instead of just "against" or "along" the wind (the feeling you get in the sim), some things are duly missing in the sim. Generally speaking what you don't need to do in the sim, but do need (carefully, I need to add) in the real thing is "flying" the airplane even when it's on the ground. Wind affects taxiing, wind affects take-off roll, wind affects landing, and wind affects your control forces as well. And I am not talking about just the drift of wind, but its aerodynamic effects on the airframe. Taxiing in high wind, with your controls positioned the wrong way, is difficult. Do it with the controls in the right position and it becomes a lot easier again. Take-off roll in crosswind without upwind aileron is downright dangerous in real life. In the sim it's irrelevant. Landing sideways (crosswind) in the sim is just a minor "issue", whereas in real life you can skid yourself easily off from the runway, ground loop (mainly taildraggers) or just cause very serious sideways bobbing and motion that leads to directional control troubles. The real airplane flies in the airmass and the "air-to-ground" connection (=transition from coming to/from ground with the airplane still flying in the airmass) during takeoff and especially landing is something that creates lots of troubles for the real world pilot, to make the airplane go straight along the runway without turning it over or doing many other possible mistakes. This connection/transition in the sim seems very very weak and very rarely does an error in piloting produce anything worth mentioning. Ground behavior in FSX is very poor in my opinion. Sideloads, skidding, braking, and generally speaking all wind effects near the ground are poor. Basic flying like turns, stalls and even slips can be simulated decently in FS. Takeoff is somewhat close to real-life takeoff, when you forget the effects of crosswind. Landing is far from it. A friend on the same course with me says wisely "the similarities between the sim and real plane end at 2m height" (talking about landing). In heavy crosswind you really need to align the airplane with the runway with rudder. Even full rudder sometimes. And at the same time you really do need to try to land on the upwind main gear. In heavy wind if you land sideways and/or do not counter the gusts trying to catch your upwind wing with ailerons and drift with bank, you will end up in trouble. Serious trouble. Straight and level flight in the sim can be harder due to the real thing being easier to trim. Of course, with a C172 you always need to accelerate the thing from climb to cruise flight without immediately reducing the power, so that is something to be learnt by the virtual pilot. Otherwise it will manifest itself as "continuous need to re-trim" even in real life . Generally speaking trimming is easier in real-life. RAs C172 model produces a very nice simulation of cross-controlled flight. You can really train heavy cross-wind approaches with it. Very near the ground & at low airspeeds something odd happens and it no longer flies like the real thing, but this belongs to the same category as in "below 2m" as said before. That part no longer is useful for real flight. Seat of the pants: It's true. The real thing can either be silky smooth, (as in Really Smooth) with proper weather. Or it can be dreadfully unsmooth like the other day when I approached my home airfield on a close to 20kt, gusting nearly 30kt direct crosswind with windshear reported by a jetliner before us (had the CFI riding with me that day). Didn't have enough rudder to push the nose from crab during approach. And the gusts were not very nice. I've found that you can find all kinds of WX in real life so it's hard to say if sim is unrealistic or not. Perhaps the physical feeling of being tossed around in bad turbulence is something the sim pilot will never experience. For me it was interesting to see how difficult it was to get used to being "in the airplane" to see things unfold, like bad crosswind situations early on in training and not knowing really what to do and just feeling the airplane doing something instead of me doing the right things to make it go where I wanted. It is imperative to be decisive and use the controls without hesitation to make things happen. In the sim you can kind of fly the sim and it doesn't feel awkward to see something happening as it does in the real thing, inside of which you yourself travel. Everyone with a license knows what I am talking about. Sorry for the long post already, just a short summary of my findings: - ground behavior and the requirement to fly the airplane until full stop in real-life is very different than in the sim - wind effects on all phases of flight are over-simplified in the sim, especially during landing - air-ground connection (hard to explain) is too simple in the sim - basic flight maneuvers can be trained in the sim with proper HW and proper flight model - sim can give an illusion of being a "passenger" in the simulated airplane, when in real life you can't ever become a passenger when in controls - flight controls are not ideal in the real plane, and the feel changes with airspeed, configuration and conditions Can you benefit from the hours flying in the sim? YES! There's a lot to be learnt from a million different things, that the simulator can teach you. Radio navigation, instrument flying, "aviation world" ie airports, runways, taxiways etc, procedures and mindset, basic flying and handling "rules" so to speak can be if not learnt/self-taught, at least "observed" in the sim. Plus many more. But real flying does require somewhat more, and the sim can't teach you everything. The rest you only learn in the real thing. And I hear (and do believe) that it's an endless trip and PPL ticket is just the start. Tero

Hi Larry, Yes, it works quite well in the RA C172. Better than in anything else. With 25kt+ direct crosswind you start to run out of rudder, exactly like in real life. Only thing is that in slow speeds, very close to runway there seems to be a some kind of very thin layer of much less wind than say 100-200ft above, where you need to take most of the bank out momentarily. This does not happen in real life. What's also nicely modelled is that the rudder will start to lose its effectiveness when you near the landing speed, ie. close to stall. And the nose will start to weathervane a little just as you sit her down on one leg. On ground, aileron into the wind produces more drag to downwind wing, and assists in keeping the nose from turning towards the wind. In all, it works well, but it's not perfect. Tero

Hi Donald, Thanks for the information. I am on my final hrs of the training. One thing that I wanted to try at home would be x-wind landings. I have decent hardware (PFC yoke, good pedals, Cessna trimwheel etc.), and have had good results with Realair C172. In FSX that is. It's really a decent simulation of the real thing, for the most part. The reason I am asking in the X-P side is because the RA new Skyhawk is not yet released. And I am not entirely satisfied with how the FSX models crosswind and the control inputs' effects on the airplane. What I would like to know is that how well does the X-Plane 10 (or older) fare when it comes to cross controlled flight dynamics? Compared to FSX, also ? Tero

Hi, I am training on a C172. Was wondering, if there was any really good Cessna 172's for X-plane? I don't own the newest X-P but if a good one (FDE is the most important thing) exists, no problem in getting the sim. Tero

Hi, I borrowed a Track IR 4 with the PRO clip from a friend. To try how it feels to fly the RA C172 with that kind of setup. I now have a decent setup for some sim practice, to complement training on the real C172. I setup the Track IR and setup the Center and Pause buttons to the yoke and set some speed and smoothing values as I saw fit. When I started to fly, I faced two problems (I am running a 27" / 1920*1080): - I tried to get the kind of setup "centered" that feels like sitting in the real cockpit: close enough, high enough (but not too high). It seems no matter how hard I tried to twist myself for find the proper spot to hit "Center", the view was always "off" when I re-positioned myself to the proper seating position (after hitting center). Sometimes it was close, and then I went to try to adjust it a bit, and then it was even more off :). So: what is the easiest way to get a perfect Centering position for my physical seating position, that I could replicate in the sim over and over? I don't want to spend an eternity finding perfect center each time I fly. There must be some trick to this... - I couldn't get the adjustments quite right to produce a relatively fast and smooth viewing of both sides (and a little over, maybe 100 degrees to each side), which didn't move so much about when I re-centered my head (I mean, after I looked to the sides and then returned my head to view forward). It seemed that the center view was not a very stable position, if I wanted to have fast enough a side view (so that I didn't need to twist my neck to see 90 deg left/right). Is this just something that one needs to live with, if one wants "speed" enough to check both sides (that the center then becomes a little too sensitive) ? I am a total newbie with TIR, so sorry if the above seems stupid and easily correctable :). I think there was some kind of slope setting, maybe that could help with the problem #2 ? Tero ps> where does EZDOK come into play here?

Hi, Just a note on the spin side of 172, After the M-model introduced the newer type of wing, the spin entry was dramatically more difficult, requiring application of power in the proper attitude and combination of control inputs. So, your garden variety C172 should not spin that easily. That said, I can't wait to get the RA new C172, and I am thrilled to hear that it's going to be perhaps a more basic version, ie. non glass what it looks like to be :). I would be happiest with an older gen model, to be honest :). Tero

Hi! These videos beautifully demonstrate how you can achieve a sensation of flight within the sim. It's true that small aircraft in smooth air just fly smooth. But in the summertime, most of the time there's some turbulence. That can be felt, even if it's small. The small sideways motion and sudden tiny bumps that roll the wings just a little. In these two videos the sensation of that is nicely done. I'd like to know more, how to do it? It looks like you are using Track IR as well. Tero

Hi all, Seeking information on the possible release schedule / feature set of the upcoming Realair C172. The RA web page information is very sparse. I have seen the RA guys posting here, so maybe... :) Tero