Between 10/29/20 and 12/08/20 The Mooney Ovation had multiple crashes to the desktop when interacting with basic systems. Buyer beware. Asobo makes major version/breaking changes to core APIs, and Carenado is not responding to those changes. There appears to be no clearly-communicated SLA from either company, and in this case it took over a month to fix.
I purchased the Mooney M20R from the marketplace and I have some information about it.
The Mooney is the only aircraft in the game with all of the following:
- A Prop (blue) Lever
- Retractable Landing Gear
- Steam Gauges
The Goods
The Mooney uses Steam Gauges, not the G1000:
The Mooney has a Throttle/Prop/Mixture lever setup:
The mixture affects the cylinder head temperature and the engine gas temperature as expected. The throttle affects the manifold pressure and the prop affects the RPM, similar to in other aircraft with these 3 levers. The gauges all appear to work correctly. If you start on the runway at an airport with a high altitude, you will need to quickly set the mixture or your engine will stop.
The landing gear can be retracted. The single engine is quite powerful and the aircraft can climb and travel very quickly! It has 3 levels of flaps and it handles quite well when controlled by hand.
The aircraft can display static elements when parked. These are controlled from an iPad accessible by clicking the yoke.
Version 1.1
Version 1.1 fixes the hat switches.
The auto-pilot oscillation seems to have been fixed as well, at least when I tested it.
Things Not Fixed
The barometer adjustment appears to be far too sensitive. You it jumps around 3-5 when you just barely click the control.
On this same theme, the trim is also extremely sensitive, setting a trim to a value between 0.0 and 0.1 (just clicking the trim button on my stick a few times) causes the aircraft to fly into a near vertical climb and stall out.
When talking to ATC just after takeoff on a direct VFR flight (Request Flight Following) the “type” of the aircraft is just a blank, so it reads “is type ,” whereas it should be “is type Mooney,”
When looking at the aircraft in the hangar, there are people inside the aircraft already.
Conclusion
After the update to version 1.1, this aircraft is pretty much my go-to aircraft.