I respect, understand, and admire those who fly multi-engine (ME) airplanes in MSFS. They must be delighted in all of the ME planes that have been introduced in the last year. They have a lot to choose from.
For those of us who are not ME pilots however, releases of Single Engine Land (SEL) planes seem to be under represented in MSFS. Within the SEL pilots category there is a sub Special Interest Group (SIG). These are what might be called “historical” aircraft, which fall into the following groups:
Antique = prior to about 1930.
Vintage = about 1930 to about 1942.
Classic = about 1942 to about 1955
I have acquired pretty much all of the few models available in these groups, and love having the vicarious experience of flying them (which would not be possible any other way).
What needs to be done to encourage developers to include some of these planes in their releases? The answer of course is “income”. Maybe there are not enough SEL/Historical pilots to justify creation of these products – I don’t know.
I’d be interested in hearing the thoughts of others on this subject.
MODERATOR: Please do not move this to the “Wish List” category. It is general discussion.
Stinson Reliant would be me. I like the Businessliner but the Reliant was uniquely beautiful. A little clipped wing Taylorcraft would always be nice too, even just a D model. Will be interesting with 2024 modeling actual fabric over tube what comes along.
I keep forgetting to check out the Ryan ST if that’s decent or not. Another favorite. And the Staggerwing is excellent as well.
Stinson will kind of round out the R/C heroes of yore. A FlyBaby would be cool too.
I was also trying to add another monoplane but I can’t remember the darn name. It’s another two holer tandem, about the size of the STA but not as elegant. Low to the ground. Usually yellow with red scallops. Kind of like the next size up from the FlyBaby. Going to facepalm it when I get it… ETA: It was the Spacewalker, which is essentially a more modern copy of the FlyBaby, so I’ll stay with the original one.
Golden Age Simulations has made all of those aircraft listed above and many more from that period of early aviation. One of the few developers who paid attention to the Travel Air, Stinson, Waco, Pitcairn, Ryan, Howard, and many more manufacturers - and actually focused solely on that period between 1925 - 1939 to bring those Golden Age planes to life.
Granted those works were all for earlier iterations of flight sim, times change.
The GAS Model 75 is just the start.
Personally I think there’s kind of a lot. I don’t have them all, but I have a lot and it’s mostly what I fly! I’m certainly open to more… But I don’t feel there’s any lack compared to other things.
I’ll have to check out the Spartan. Is the flight model sorted on it? With golden era you will have a bit of envelope overlap. The Spartan at least breaks some of the archetypes.
I don’t mean ‘wrong’ by some supposed data sheet and making sure everything matches, as in is the FM make you smile, fun to fly and take-off/land good… The average ‘study level’ guy leaves the house or goes to sleep while the plane is flying itself somewhere.
Of course, I have no experience in a real spartan, but the MSFS plane is fun to fly. Its a handful on takeoff and landing, but once you get the hang of it it flys really nice. There is a little sound looping with the engine noises, and the transitions between different throttle positions is a bit off, but those are very minor. Its fun to fly!
I enjoy flying the old birds over anything else. There is something visceral about having to turn nobs, levers and hand flying than pushing buttons and letting the autopilot do everything for you.
I have been working my way around the US in the Staggerwing for the past few months. Been a fun experience so far.
Well that’s a tough call, sounds like the same state the Ryan ST was left hanging in. You get these larger, long moment aircraft that definitely do not have instantaneous power and take a good bit of a runway to get off, then they have ground manners of an 800lb STOL bush plane with triple it’s original intended power. Should be a bit lopey and dopey and not zipping all over the runway left and right.
Certainly does not handle like an 800lb STOL plane on the ground, it does feel a bit heavy, and takes a little bit to get it moving.
I would say it feels similar to the Staggerwing maybe a little heavier? Takeoff does need some length, but not a ton. It has a very huge tendency to veer to the side if you are not on top your rudder pedals. Certainly not a study level aircraft, but fun to fly.
Landing is probably the most challenging thing with it. You have to hit the numbers or it will either stall on final and you end up eating dirt, or it will go bouncing down the runway like a rabbit high on caffeine. The center flap is really not needed unless you need to get down in a hurry, it creates a TON of drag. I was watching a few videos on the Executive 7w, and it seems that many of the pilots do not use the center flap either. It can also be pretty easy to ground loop if you are not dancing that rudder.
Heh, I fly the Staggerwing and WACO all the time and have mastered that aspect of runway manners(wasn’t until I upgraded the pedals though…). They actually behave true to you asking it to do something it’s not ready to do. Sounds like it has a touch of (unmodified)D18 behavior in it on landing. The D18 you can line up way out there, spend a lot of time getting everything proper and it falls apart between the threshold and flare-what the!? I’ll keep an eye out for a possible sale around the 4th.
I saw that the Ryan has the ‘ping bounce’ too in the FM that wasn’t massaged out of it. Like the RV14/C170/FFOX and a few others have. I may still get it if it goes on sale too. Some of these FM developers REALLY need to send their tail dragger models over to Got Friends for a few bucks to get friction/suspension/tires tweaked. Most GF aircraft land in a way you’d swear you felt it in your butt.
The bunny hoppers everyone tries to excuse them off on the pilot, but there’s some FM/friction/tire dynamic that some get wrong and they all behave the exact same way. If it were pilot, it would bounce off, the suspension would twang and wobble for a second and it would squash back in for another go at terra firma. When the FM is wrong, it’s just a hard skip-off. Akin to the random auto-skip at exactly 60KT on water on about half the amphibians, where the other half has them figured out by the developer. If you stalled the flare it should reward you with two nice crunchy smackdowns not skippity skip skip skip. Trying to land a still flying plane should just politely send you back in the air a couple times until the speed lowers then begins to punish you for continuing to try get it wrong-really!? OK you asked for it now…
Try landing it holding ~15% toe brakes on touch down and see if it stops it from bunny hopping. When they do this for seemingly no reason I find it helps. Someone needs to purge about 50PSI from the tires.
If it’s modeled nice and heavy, I imagine the flap would be more of a speed brake if you’re within 2 miles and still about 30KT too fast to get it trimmed and settled for final.
What can be better than flying an 80 years old open cockpit steam gauge plane?
Programming a computer screen on a computer screen probably not?
Excuse the shameless plug, just wanna show that there’s more to come regarding historic planes.
Thank you for this response. It was not my intent to create a thread containing a list of wished for airplanes in the antique/vintage/classic category. Perhaps somebody else could do that as I have several to add. My intent in this thread is to discuss what can be done to get more airplanes in the antique/vintage/classic category published. To that end this thread has gotten off topic. But in the hopes of getting back on topic, I’ve done a bit of analysis as follows.
I went to the simMarket website because this was the only place I could find what seems to be a complete list of MSFS planes (let me know if there’s something better). There are 258 MSFS airplanes there. I then counted what I consider those to be in the SEL antique/vintage/classic category. There are 13. This is 5% of the total. In FSX my gut feel is that this was more like 30-40%. There were a lot of publishers/developers that focused on this category.
So if anybody has any great ideas how to get the antique/vintage/classic category in MSFS to be higher than 5% please share your thoughts. I’ve already tried my own personal version of a “letter writing campaign” to known SEL publishers with no affect. I am not in the inner circle of MSFS publishers, but if somebody is perhaps they could do some pleading for us.
SimMarket won’t list many of them. I know for sure there’s more than 100. My quick count is just over 100 and I’m probably forgetting how many exactly are in the Reno pack (since the T-6’s, P-51’s and Pitts S1 should probably count.
Hi Sir!
As this new sim caters for a wider, younger market than the older sims used to I think we have to accept quality rather than quantity for our vintage tastes. There certainly IS quality around and more on the way all the time.
I recommend Flying Iron Simulations and Big Radials for starters. I think they have 13 old uns between them so that should up your numbers!
Maybe you could compile a database /list of the aircraft in the various categories you specify?
There are quite a few of us out there who appreciate the cry of "PROP!!! "
ETA: It was the Spacewalker, which is essentially a more modern copy of the FlyBaby, so I’ll stay with the original one.
The average ‘study level’ guy leaves the house or goes to sleep while the plane is flying itself somewhere.
