What I’ve been doing so far is:
I normally fly lowish at about 10.000ft or so, I do the initial descent about 20nm away from my destination, with prop and throttles almost idle (but not idle) and without caring much about speed. I try to be at platform level at about 10nm away and then reduce prop and throttle while keeping the aircraft level as I add flaps. The plane will deccelerate quite rapidly, I think the key is to have it at about 110kmh or 120kmh before final.
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Don’t pitch down that much. If you’re coming in short, you give it throttle. If you’re coming in too high at idle, you might have to just go around and set up your approach better. In this plane, bleed your speed off a bit early and settle into a steady descent with a constant low speed and pitch. Side slipping can also help. Your throttle should be used to hit your landing target. Don’t tip your nose down much unless you want speed. This is kinda slow/STOL landing 101, but it’s different from regular GA flying where you stay further from stall speeds have longer flares to bleed off speed.
You should climb up a few thousand feet and practice idle power descents. See how the plane behaves when you’re using landing settings, but aren’t actually distracted by trying to land. Try different things at very slow speed and even try to make it stall out. This will show you the limits of what you can utilize when actually trying to land.
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I had the chance a long time ago to fly it a couple of times, and yes the drag is unrealistic. Especially during the flare in ground effect.
I can’t add links here for some reason (just registered…), but I suggest you to search youtube for AN-2 vids, there you can clearly see, that the landing behaviour in msfs very different from the real plane.
I hope this gets fixed soon, because otherwise it is an excellent addon.
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Thanks for your input.
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Just a random landing video. You can clearly see, that the plane touches down in a stable 3 point landing very quickly after the engine goes idle. Not much floating there.
Here is another: You can hear when the engine goes idle. MSFS is very far from this now.
Here is one, that is filmed from the cockpit. This is the best, as you can see the airspeed indicator (watch after 7:40)
(Here are the vids, I wanted to post originally. )
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That last video was great, really shows how quickly it slows down IRL. Plus looks like he’s only @ flaps ~20 too. Definitely not like that in sim
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Thought it compiles on first load?
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It’s often the way of things - there were a lot of uninformed comments about the JU52- complaining that they could take off in unfeasibly short distance - an old sweat who’d flown it said, yes you can but why would you? The point was in real life you’d have managed to get a horribly unstable aircraft on your hands by lifting off too early… in real life this might kill you but in the sim you always live to fly another day because fate can’t hunt us down in the sim. Big wings create huge amounts of lift and thst has to be managed. In the old days pilots called these early aircraft “kites” - for good reason…. And when you take a look at the tiny flaps on the AN2’s huge wings it isn’t any wonder to me that it’s hard to slow…. I’ve managed do far by doing lots of trimming… if you fly this one with auto trim on you’re going to have problems. Also the checklist implies that you need to throttle right back at top of descent… I’m not an IRL pilot but I think maybe we should take a bit of time to get used to flying this old legend - and if there are some IRL pilots out there who’ve flown this aircraft I for one would be delighted to get the benefit of their knowledge so I can get to fly it better than rather my rather clumsily and ham handed efforts to date…
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Yeah, that was my point. It shouldn’t have taken that long on my second try flying the aircraft.
I just tried again and it loaded super quick. So whatever was wrong yesterday seems to be over now.
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Ok, thought you were saying was first time . My bad
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Most people mentioned it feels wrong at landing and are mostly happy with the rest. Even with the very easy take-off.
But landing defies physics and someone who flew in IRL mentioned that.
Just one observation i made which somehow proves that something is wrong with landing (or better: idle thrust?).
I repeatedly saw the following:
Land it and bring it to a full stop. After a second release brakes and it will start rolling again.
Hit brakes again to full stop then release: rolling again.
Now hold the brakes again for the third time and a bit longer-> release again: plane doesn‘t roll anymore.
This is independant of wind of course on a flat runway.
How can that be explained?
Delayed thrust from somewhere?
Also to me i wonder why props dont make any difference at anytime (or very minor-props full or fully back).
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Does anyone know of planned future support for pop-out GPS on the “modern” avionics model? I have Flightsimbuilder GNS530 hardware but I noticed that for some reason, I cannot pop-out the 530 in the model at all to move it to another screen.
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The huge wings create a lot of lift, yes, so very short takeoff and extremely low stall speeds are probably correct. But wings would not account for lack of drag, quite the opposite, the cross section of the plane is substantial, so cutting power should reduce speed considerably. I could found POH in russian, and it says the descend should happen at the cruise speed with reduced manifold pressure at vertical speed 1.5m/s, but not at idle (correct me if I am wrong, but I have read in many places that you basically never idle radial engine in-flight). The POH states the numbers of MP for various speeds: 200 km/h - 630 mm.Hg, 180 - 520 mm.Hg, 160 - 400 mm.Hg. And the sim model seems to not want to descent at all at 630, and even at 400 mm.Hg it has hard time to slow down and descend.
Saying all that, I really love how the plane handles overall. It’s rather magnificent and legendary machine.
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Like I said, I wasn’t trying to take off, I was trying to taxi. I just tapped the throttle slightly forward to get rolling and wasn’t touching the yoke or pedals as this was my 1st time in the plane and I wanted to see what it would do if left to its own devices. And what I found was that acted like it was made of helium. It just wafted gently up while maintaining the same 3-point attitude it had on the ground despite the trajectory being about 60^ up compared to forward progress, all while moving forward at walking pace.
This is a bug, NOT me doing stupid airplane tricks. I mean, sure, the An-2 is quite STOL but IRL it can’t maintain altitude, much less climb, at speeds below where the ASI is even alive yet. Even at 25 IAS, it does its famous “parachute” descent.
And it’s EXACTLY the same bug the Ju-52 had when initially released, and which has since been fixed in the Ju-52 (again proving this is a bug). In the Ju-52, this bug was exacerbated by having the cockpit windows open–don’t ask me why but apparently this can break the flight model of slow planes with lots of wing. I did in fact have the An-2’s windows open when this happened (because I hadn’t yet discovered the left fan switch), so I probably should have known better given prior experience. But the Ju-52’s been fixed in this regard so long I’d forgotten.
Sure, the USSR had way more NDBs than VORs so it’s cool the An-2 has 2 HF radios for them. I wish more planes were that way, so I could use 1 radio for navigation and the other for listening to AM radio stations simultaneously. Problem is, however, there ain’t many NDBs left in the world these days (nor does MSFS support tuning to real world AM radio stations) so this functionality is largely wasted. But even more of a waste is having modern VHF NAV radios (in BOTH the “stock” and Garmin versions, mind you) that cannot be used AT ALL because no instrument on the panel in either version has needles that use their data. This goes beyond being a bug. This is an intentional and VERY BAD product design decision by the devs. It makes almost zero sense from any real world perspective.
Granted, the NAV radios are obvious retrofits in BOTH versions. And I can kinda sorta a useless NAV radio in the stock version because somebody was pinching pennies. He bought a stock VFR An-2 but had to talk to modern ATC, so needed to install a modern VHF COM radio. And the best price was probably an antique combined NAVCOM unit, which can be used as 2 COM radios. So I can see not having a CDI or anything fancier for this set of circumstances.
However, no amount of such special pleading can forgive having the 530/430 stack, which includes not just 1 but 2 NAV radios, and NOT BEING ABLE TO USE EITHER. What person in the world, sober, drunk , or on acid, would do that? Seriously. At the very least, there MUST be a CDI somewhere on the pilot’s side of the panel and the ancient attitude indicator should, at the very least, be replaced by a 1970s unit with a glideslope marker and maybe even flight director bars. The current arrangement makes zero sense.
Well, all MSFS planes have an autopilot, in that you can let your copilot fly (if you’re brave enough to trust the AI…) But yeah, you can see the plane USED to have such a device and now it’s mostly gone. So either put the missing pieces back or add a 1970s autopilot familiar from other planes.
What do you mean, “popped out” ? Do you mean onto a separate monitor? Or do you mean removed from the plane entirely? As to the former, I have no idea as I only have 1 monitor. As to the latter, there is 1 and only 1 livery with the Garmins. All the other liveries lack them. So yeah, that sucks. It would be nice to have a tablet where you can pick the avionics for all liveries but nope. Apparently that costs more effort than devs are willing to spend on $15 (or $10 on sale currently) planes.
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According to POH the landings are usually made with 30 degree flaps, unless there is strong cross or headwinds. In those cases flapless landing is possible.
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Word on the street is the drag thing might be a bug with the regular base version, which isn’t present in the GNS 430/530 version. I flew that version around tonight and seemed to be controlling my speed better on approach. Even getting too slow & dropping too early. Maybe it’s placebo. I invite anyone else to try.
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How do you do that?
General settings > Accessibility and enable instrument name tooltips. Legacy works just for names but for the starter description showing the percentage the starter has wound up or whatever you’ll need the lock ‘cockpit interaction system’ with instrument description tooltips also enabled.
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Read that too. I tried the “steam” version exclusively.
I did 4 identical short flights (2 with GNS and 2 with non GNS version).
They are definately different. As you said: speed management on approach is better with GNS variant. Did all landings with flaps 25.
GNS variant slows better without having to go to full idle.
With non-GNS even at full idle it won’t really slow down.
One proof which is obvious that there are differences is that the flap indicator on the GNS variant will not go below “4” on the dial (when flaps are fully retracted).
On the non-GNS variant the dial shows “zero” (which would be correct.
Of course that could be a totally separate thing.
It isn’t always easy to pin down but i’d say when i would have only tried the GNS version i would have never complained because speed/approach management is working good and i can get quite short landings with that version.
(can get short landings with the non-GNS version too but that is a haaard fight and if you’re not coming in already low & slow there is not much room left for compensating).
Long story short: GNS-Version looks fine to me.
(except only 1 livery xD )
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