Haven’t had a chance to fly it yet, but what I see in the video looks quite nice - possibly payware quality. I hope I’m not wrong about that. It will be tomorrow before I can fly it.
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It’s an awesome machine. It is better than some payware aircraft out there. The flight model reminds me a lot of the Aerosoft Bronco from the FSX days =)
Here is a short aerobatic flight I just did with it:
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Grabbed it to try out over the weekend. I just saw an interesting documentary on these and their role in Vietnam which I honestly wasn’t aware of.
Heck, it’d be good as a payware plane. Superb quality!
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I took the Bronco for a flight over Germany this afternoon.
I started at a small airfield west of Cologne, did some low speed handling trials over Bonn, low level flying over the ground to the east till I looped back to the Rhine, then followed the Main till I reached Wuerzburg and dinner time. Landed at EDFW - overweight and out of hours, but I don’t see the German authorities coming after me.
Visibility, especially forward and down, is superb - in the sim I’d say only the DoubleEnder can compete.
With full flaps you can (well, I could just, a better pilot might find it easier) maintain 70-80 knots but the workload to do so was so high I wasn’t doing much observing - which is of course the point of flying so slow. A hundred knots was comfortable.
I found that with the props in T/O position and everything (just) in the green I could maintain about 230 knots.
Low flying at 230 knots with superb visibility is a lot of fun!
I only took off once and landed once so I don’t have too much to say about the STOL capabilities, except EDFW is a 2200 ft runway and I didn’t use much of it.
I struggled a bit with the ground handling but what else is new?
All in all an excellent addition to my fleet that is going to see more use.
I shall look at the AzurPoly version when it comes out: if they can find a justification for adding a variant with an autopilot and a radar altimeter they’ll have a sale.
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I noticed that the multi-position switches, for example the NAV lights that have three positions, react backwards.
Hover the mouse on the top and get a visual up arrow and click, but the switch goes down.
The condition levers work the wrong engines too, so if you’re doing cold/dark starts by hand, it’s something to remember.
After loading up, I couldn’t find the avionics switch, so I said who cares and did a canyon run. I found the “inverter” switch after landing.
Over on fs.to the author seems to have acknowledged the backwards switches, so that fix may come in a future update.
I didn’t see a note on the condition levers, but I also didn’t read every comment. Hopefully he’s aware of that one, too.
I started the plane blindly and didn’t pay too much attention the first time. Also took me a while to find avionics. Time to RTFM 
Oh, also, I flew out of Nellis AFB and everyone must have been very curious to see a Bronco as I had many F-18’s and F-22’s flying alongside and circling around me. I wonder what my plane looked like to them 
Great looking plane.
…Bonanza 
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Out this afternoon - early morning there - at Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands (full of bush strips, many of which aren’t in MSFS but can be spotted using OpenStreetMap - you can see them if you have that selected as the displayed map in LittleNavMap) practising STOL takeoffs and landings.
The plane meets, indeed exceeds expectations. My one beef is with reverse thrust, and it isn’t really with the plane, where it works about as well as you’d expect of a tricycle undercarraige plane with turbine lag, but with MSFS’s handling of the button assigned to reverse thrust. It doesn’t allow you to engage reverse thrust until there’s weight on the wheels - which is frankly too late.
You will get a tiny benefit if you get it exactly right. More likely - at least if you’re me - is that you hit the button a fraction too soon in which case you find yourself accelerating down the runway or towards a wall of trees, or a fraction too late in which case the plane has more or less stopped by the time turbine lag generates enough thrust to cause your tricycle undercarriaged plane to tip on its tail.
Since people with suitably equipped throttles can apparently engage reverse thrust when they like, I really would prefer a reverse thrust button for my rather more impoverished system that works as long as the flaps are down and the throttle closed. It’s my fault if I screw that up.
I hoped for an OV-10 in MSFS since the begining. Although recovering from a stall after regaining energy seems delayed significantly, this addon is a gift for those who value what the OV-10 airframe brought (and might continue to bring for some time) to the operational aviation community. The addon has all the basic fundamentals, and I at least (having read some questionable critical reviews) enjoy flying it.
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