Can someone look at the avionics module and see if you can change frequencies etc? Also, does ATC turn on? These are all issues in BRSim’s EMB200, so I am curious if they persist here.
There have been a couple planes from a couple different developers that have had scaling issues, so it could be a sim/SDK issue. The recent GeeBee essentially has a toddler at the controls and makes it look massive.
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My main finds:
- The nosewheel isn’t animated (i.e. it doesn’t turn)
- The parking brake handle is inverted
- When looking from the outside there are either no reflections on the glass or there is no glass at all
- Takeoff performance feels extremely poor. It eats up the runway, almost as if I still have my parking brake on.
- Ambient sounds come in when the windows are open, but there is no sound attenuation on the engines
- Engines are quiet
- Brakes are weak
- Beacon shines through the aircraft
The positives:
- CBs all seem to work
- Toggleable options such as status, doors all seem to work
- Flight model actually feels really good, blows the Ipanema out of the water. Trimming is good, slips are a bit underwhelming but believable, stalls and and spins are solid. Landing feels really good.
- Model is visually really nice inside and out
- Night lighting is excellent
- Animations minus the nose wheel are really well done
All in all, I have no regret with this purchase so far. I hope the things I listed get fixed though because they’re pretty noticeable. Note that BRSim released 7 updates to the Ipanema, so I don’t doubt they’ll work on this.
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Maybe I’m going crazy, but it looks like you’re comparing it to a Warrior in those pictures, not a Bonanza.
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It’s actually supposed to be smaller than the Bonanza.
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The airplane wings on the turn coordinator banking to either side actually represents the turn and roll rate, not the bank angle. So they should actually show a bank when rudder is applied. The wings on the turn coordinator should also bank in the direction of turn when steering on the ground too.
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Thank you! I thought I might have misunderstood that. In my handful of discovery flights I didn’t pay enough attention to the turn coordinator. Editing my post.
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The Debonair and the today’s Bonanza basically share the same fuselage design. Of course it has been improved since the late 1940s. Today’s Bonanza G36 however is larger (that is longer) than the Debonair, so it should appear a tad smaller.
The Arrow/Warrior you parked next to, however, IS about a meter shorter than the Bonanza, and has about the same wingspan. However, since the Debonair also is shorter than the Bonanza, and Debonair, Bonanza, Warrior and Arrow all have about the same cabin width, the pics you posted would suggest the Debonair is either too big, or the Arrow/Warrior is too small.
Eh. If only it was a V-tail.
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I think the tail doesn’t really look right. The vertical stabilizer especially, looks far too chunky.
Compared to real life…
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YIKES, you’re right. My bad, it still feels kinda off, though 
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It could be the angle on the comparison pics.
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Seems quite reasonable to me, as long as it is at least as good as the Bonanza we already have in MSFS.
The Debonair has always held some appeal to me; like a Buick Century compared to a Buick Roadmaster. 
I do agree with another poster about having an option for a Model 35. The “V-Tail” is such an iconic aircraft.
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A2A’s V-Tail was one of my favorite aircraft in P3D.
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Well, I bought it and I must admit that it is quite good. It is not a simple Bonanza mod which I thought at first. The aircraft handles very well and feels realistic to me. The only small bug I encountered was the writing on the left window “do not open above xxx knots” which seems to disappear when viewing through the window at certain angles (via TrackIR).
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Yes, radios and ATC work. I just got handed off, manually changed the frequency and contacted the controller as expected. I’m about to fly an RNAV approach on the auto-pilot.
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It depends which Bonanza you are talking about. Yes, it is smaller than the G36/A36. But those came WAY later. At the time it was pretty much identical in size to the then-current regular K35 V-tailed Bonanza
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The nosewheel is animated. If you look carefully you will see it move. If you look from a frontal view, you will see the compression strut turn. There isn’t a ton of range of motion, but it is there.
There are reflections; probably the easiest way to see them is to enable the digital attitude indicator and then change the time to night. That said, I wouldn’t say the reflections are necessarily anything to write home about.
At least for me, takeoff performance was fine. While I didn’t measure, it didn’t seem to eat up runway. This is the Continental IO-470 (225 HP) version so it is more of a mid-range performer. There was a version of the Debbie that had an IO-520 in it and that one was basically a straight-tail Bonanza. Alas, that isn’t what we’ve got.
Hmm, maybe I have a bug but the nosewheel is not deflecting even at full rudder. I’ll do some more testing. Maybe it just needs to be increased. As for the engine, I’d love to take a stab at a IO-520 variant through config tweaks, been meaning to learn how to adjust engine performance. But if someone beats me to it, I won’t be mad lol.
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For ~ $28.00 my initial impressions are that it is not bad, but it isn’t great. There are a few minor niggles as @LostBoii1103 pointed out–like the parking brake control being reversed. Also the lighting wasn’t super: the strobes never worked for me, while the beacon and the nav lights were very hard to see in day light.
Beyond the minor stuff, I’m not especially convinced that this is a high fidelity aircraft (which to be fair, the developer may not be intending to provide). The oil temperature gauge didn’t seem to bear any relation to reality as it seemed to always be cold. I’m a bit skeptical of the leaning behavior; I’ll need to find a POH and do some more testing…The included documentation is limited and while it gives fuel flows for percentage power settings, it doesn’t give the actual MP and prop settings that would produce those percentages. I tested most of the switches, and they do work, though I wouldn’t necessarily say that the implications of having the switches set is modelled to a high level of fidelity. For example, opening the cowl flaps didn’t seem to affect the cylinder head temps. Nor did leaving them closed on take off. Sound is just OK; there is engine sound, but it is pretty generic. Also, I don’t love the engine start behavior. Maybe it is a function of mediocre sound, but it feels very binary. There is no state preservation, which is slightly annoying if you want to fly with the digital attitude indicator, but that is probably acceptable for this price point.
As far as visuals go, the texturing is pretty good inside while outside it is a bit mediocre. It isn’t Carenado crisp and while I don’t need that, it isn’t even at the level of Just Flight (for which people were giving them grief). At least with the default livery, there are plenty of jaggies when zoomed up close. The windows don’t reflect well and the propeller disc seems to distort the view (at least on my NVDIA 1080ti box). The modelling is pretty good and there is good detail, but… there is a noticeable gap around the pilot’s-side vent window. I definitely agree that the scaling is off. This airplane appears far too big on the ramp when placed next to aircraft that should be bigger. I also agree that the vertical stabilizer appears to be too fat. Maybe it is the scaling, but there is something that I can’t quite put my finger on that makes the visual appearance seem not quite compelling to me…
The airplane does fly pretty well and has some expected Debbie twitchiness. It also had that expected Debbie slipperiness. It doesn’t slow down easily. The autopilot is two-axis (no yaw damper), but it functions well. There is a VS mode, and I’ve used it, but I can’t quite figure out how I’ve gotten into it. I used the pms50-gns530 mod with the navigation system and that all functioned as expected. I flew an RNAV approach on autopilot and set the appropriate VS for the glide slope and it handled that perfectly. COM 1 radio worked correctly with in-game ATC. I think there is only one nav/com radio, but if there is a second one somewhere I didn’t try it. I also tested the fuel transfer from the tip tanks and that works as expected.
All in all, I’m not sure where the market is for this plane is. I don’t think I can recommend it for the high fidelity crowd–at least not without some additional work. This is nowhere near the level of the Just Flight Piper Arrows. Nor does it seem suitable for the folks for whom Carenado aircraft have appeal, since the texturing and appearance isn’t top shelf. Like I said, this aircraft isn’t bad, but neither does it seem to be great. Hopefully there will be some fixes to make it better, but as much as I wanted to, I don’t love it.
I may locate a POH and fly it a bit more to get a sense of how well it mirrors the real thing. I would like to know how true to life the actual performance is. I also want to find out what the correct power setting is for slowing down. I feel like I had to pull way too much power back to get it to slow down in level flight–to the extent that I would have been worried about shock cooling the engines.
[EDIT] The developer turned around quick update to resolve many of the issues mentioned here. I’ve included my thoughts on the latest version in a later post in this thread. TLDR; visually the aircraft looks great, but it doesn’t completely model the expected performance, being unable to match the real aircraft’s 185 MPH cruise speed. [/EDIT]
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