You can disable the fbw in the iris pc21. Theres a switch left side of cockpit
I picked this one up yesterday. I’m a little underwhelmed. Probably just small things to some people but…
The canopy tint is way too dark when viewed externally.
There is some kind of clipping issue with the canopy when in external view.
The shape of the canopy seems a little off to me.
In VR the default starting head position in the cockpit is inside the front ejection seat.
The Directional Gyro gets confused as you pass through a heading of 360º. It spins through in the opposite direction until it meets the correct heading , at which point it behaves normally.
This was just from the first couple of flights.
I think this could end up being a nice airplane with a little more work from the developer, but as it stands I can’t recommend it to anyone on the fence. The IRIS PC21 is far more polished.
Hi, the GPS doesn’t work on the Xbox. Everything else seems ok.
Thanks
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I have to say your experiences were positively positive compared with mine.
Halfway through the loading process as I was loading in on the runway, an alarm started sounding - low oxygen apparently. Never had that happen before. It is very loud, and you can’t stop it until the plane is loaded in. (Ironically, later inspection of the right console revealed that the alarm volume was set to ‘Low’.) Might not happen if starting cold and dark, but shouldn’t happen at all.
The rudder and brakes don’t work [well, they didn’t in my first session]. I managed to keep it on the runway long enough to get it into the air using rudder trim, but that didn’t work on landing. Nor did the toebrakes. I did eventually get it to stop just before hitting a line of trees by using the handbrake, but I doubt that’s standard procedure.
EDIT: I thought I’d better check this again, to make sure it wasn’t a problem with my rudder pedals. It wasn’t - but when I checked the Embraer again, they were working with it too. My best guess is that the alarm went off during the first time I loaded the plane at the exact moment I switched to my VR headset. That broke something, and it remained broken through several flight attempts, but was cleared by restarting the sim to check the rudder pedals.
I’m not the best judge of graphics and modelling: It looks OK, but there were some annoying flickering shadow effects in the cockpit. When I lowered the landing gear, the landing gear lever moved liked I’d flicked a lightswitch.
Also, there is a random little cylinder of plastic floating in the air on the right side of the cockpit. Not, shall we say, a token of the highest workmanship.
EDIT: This is indeed present, but only if you’re using the RAF livery. Which is the one I’d want to use 
The Tucano gets slightly unstable and starts to make complainy noises above 200 knots, but for all I know that’s a genuine characteristic of the actual Tucano.
Let me say there are things to like about the Tucano. In particular this early Tucano model offers a superb clear canopy without a canopy bow, especially suitable for the VR flier, whose view is obstructed only by two large mirrors on the glareshield - which it turns out can be folded down. Yay!
That uncluttered canopy - and the Tucano’s status as an RAF trainer, because I once had a pair of them fly past me at roughly my height while I was driving down a motorway running along the side of a valley in the North of England - is why, now that it’s on the Marketplace, I was willing to gamble just shy of sixteen quid to try a plane I thought might well be a dud, since it gained no traction when it was on flightsim.to
EDIT: Having established that the worst problem I found - the lack of rudder and brake control - was a temporary sim bug, and not a permanent feature of the plane, I’m going to say that I’m not as sorry I bought it as I was a few hours ago. It’s not a first-rate plane, but then it’s not a first-rate price. And that canopy is nice.
But that alarm while loading for a hot start needs to be fixed. And it would be nice if in the weights menu the 50% fuel was distributed between both tanks rather than all being in one.
Will we see these things dealt with? That sound you hear (like the alarm on a hot start) is me not holding my breath.
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On reflection, I think it’s only fair to add that I will be flying the Tucano again.
First, I’ll want to recreate the occasion when I was overtaken on the M6 (a motorway in England) by a couple of RAF Shorts Tucanos, but from the Tucano’s point of view.
Also, one of my frequent flyer aircraft is the Pilatus PC-21. It’s a great plane, much faster and better equipped than the Tucano, but what it isn’t is a STOL aircraft, which makes it a tight squeeze on some of the runways I routinely land on in Scotland. I’ll be interested to try the Tucano on the same runways and see if it does any better.
On another note: you know all those YouTube videos where serious pilots check the controls and brakes before they take off, and you watch and think “Ah, it’s a sim, what can go wrong? Why bother?”
Well, I’ve been checking the controls and brakes a bit more religiously since my experience with the Tucano.
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How did my takeoff comparison between the Embraer Tucano and the Pilatus PC-21 go? The best figures for the two real aircraft I could find online were:
Embraer Tucano (only figures I could find)
Takeoff 700 m (not specified to 50 ft but I presume)
Landing 600 m (ditto)
PC-21 (figures from Pilatus)
Take-off distance over 50 ft (15 m) obstacle at sea level 2,618 ft 798 m
Landing distance over 50 ft (15 m) obstacle at sea level 3,383 ft 1031 m
So how did I do in the sim?
Well, I wasn’t looking at fifty-foot obstacles, though on takeoff in one direction I was flying round rather than over some relatively short trees. I was flying out of Blair Atholl* (EGQI, ca. 510 ft above sea level) airfield, a private airstrip in the Highlands of Scotland I visit often, and in the past I’ve just barely managed to land and take off there in the PC-21. I tried both the Tucano and the PC-21 on its grass runway of 1566 ft length. Both were flown single-pilot-only, and both had about 645 lb of fuel on board (no external tanks on the PC-21).
Interestingly, the aircraft were well matched on takeoff. Both did make it into the air, but both had to be dragged off the ground at the very end of the runway.
I think this is due to a case of swings and roundabouts. At 1600 hp the PC-21 is more than twice as powerful as the Tucano, but its stubby little wings, presumably chosen to match its handling to the jet trainers with which it’s supposed to compete, do nothing for its stalling - and therefore takeoff - speed.
The Tucano can’t accelerate as quickly but with its much bigger wing it doesn’t need to - it too has reached its rather slower takeoff speed just at the end of the runway.
Landing is a different matter. Here the Tucano shines. That big wing makes an equally big difference to landing speed, and Surprise! The Tucano has a working thrust reverser. You can stop very short. Now the thrust reverser implementation doesn’t run to a working visual representation on the throttle, but if you have a button bound, you can use it.
In the PC-21, on the other hand, if your speed’s not pretty close to stalling speed by the time you’re approaching the threshhold, you should open the throttle, go round and try again. You can get landed and stopped with a little distance to spare if you do come in slow enough, but otherwise you’ll be off the end of the runway.
So the Tucano is the landing champion. But it’s not clear how much that matters if it can’t also get into the air again in a shorter distance than the opposition. Because of the matching takeoff distances, they are effectively limited to the same minimum length of runway.
In the air, of course, that honking great engine makes the PC-21 at least a hundred knots faster - probably more if you’re prepared to abuse the engine. That means a considerably greater radius of action within a simmer’s available playing time - not a trivial consideration. Probably why I’ll stick to the PC-21 with its superb - though perhaps slightly less superb than the Tucano’s - VR-friendly canopy as my frequent flyer. But I’ve got at least one more flight to do in the Tucano, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few more after that. And for the entertainment it’s already given me, I kind of feel I don’t have to worry about having had my money’s worth.
Incidentally, I was able to successfully achieve a successful cold and dark start in the Tucano by following the checklist. There is no checklist for shutting it down, and the gate on the throttle you should use doesn’t work on shutdown, but if you’ve followed the checklist you’ll know where both sets of main and auxiliary fuel pumps are, and you can cut the engine using those, turn off as many other switches as you can be bothered with, turn off the battery and you’re done.
A couple of other passing observations:
the canopy does open;
there’s a tiny switch to the upper left of the - well, I suppose it’s an inverted totaliser. Moving the switch up and down will set the fuel total, which will then count down as it’s burned off.
there’s a switch at the back of the left console that raises and lowers the seat height. We have of course other ways of adjusting our height, but it’s a touch I wasn’t expecting on a relatively cheap plane.
Getting rid of that annoying noise on loading a runway start would just be a matter of setting one switch, turning one knob, and balancing the fuel tanks in the Weights & Balance page. The more I’ve flown the Tucano the more I wish the developer would fix that. Well, we’ll see.
*Using custom scenery by SAC Designs, found on flighsim.to.
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Hello, now the Tucano is available at marketplace too.
For those that is facing problems regarding the static aircarft here is a video that shows how to fix it and a update is on microsoft too, for smoke FX and more liveries.
I’ve just downloaded the in-store update.
The alarm is still going off when I load the aircraft onto a runway. Fixing this is a matter of adjusting one switch. Please do this in the next update.
There is still a little floating black cylinder in the RAF version of the Tucano. Given that a surprisingly high number of MSFS users (i.e. your potential customers) are British and likely to be particularly interested in this version, it might be worth your while to fix this.
The thumbnails that appear in the aircraft selection and livery menus are very low resolution. Customers who have bought the Tucano may have to live with that but it won’t encourage them to recommend the plane to their friends.
Finally, I was unable to get the throttle lever out of the cutoff slot. I may be doing something wrong but I don’t remember having any difficulty with it when using the last build.
I’d like this aircraft to succeed. It won’t until you do better.
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We are happy to inform you that new update for EMB-312 T-27 ‘TUCANO’ PC and Xbox is available today.
are any of your updates ever going to get pushed to fs.to?
I also have this question too please. I bought from fs.to but have no updates there.
Please Join the official Discord server, there we can proceed with the instructions to the update.
Hi, Please Join the official Discord server, there we can proceed with the instruction to the update.
Are both cockpits modelled? Can it be flown from either cockpit (like the Just Flight BAe Hawk)?
I fired up MSFS for the first time since returning from my Christmas break, and found an update for the Tucano in Content Manager. I downloaded it and took the aircraft for a spin.
Runway start: the annoying alarm on loading is still present, but now it stops when the aircraft is loaded. It looks like the developer has set the offending switch to the right position, but for some reason it doesn’t stop the alarm from sounding during loading. Not as bad as it was, but it would be nice if it were completely gone. Otherwise I didn’t have any problems with a runway start.
Cold and dark: I am now able to get the aircraft started and flying by following the Checklist - as I was on the initial release but not after the first update. It’s not the best checklist ever - for one thing, the ‘blue eye’ pointers to individual switches and other controls don’t work - but there are many worse in the sim, and it’s good enough to get the plane in the air.
The problem I had getting the throttle out of cutoff in the last update is gone.** I still can’t figure out how to get the throttle back into cutoff, but the engine can be stopped by switching off the fuel pumps, so that’s not a fatal error.
The small black lump in the RAF Tucano cockpit is gone. Yay! That after all is the version I and my fellow Brits are most likely to be interested in flying.
One other niggle I noticed during today’s flying is that the canopy doesn’t seem to open as much as it should. *
In-game thumbnails have been improved. Looks much more professional in the Marketplace now.
Still one or two improvements that could be made, but I’d say the developer has brought the plane to a place where it’s worth the full, fairly low price.
Now I can’t see the current price or the sale discount because I already own it, but I’m told the plane is currently available in the Marketplace Christmas sale for 53% off. For half off, if the Tucano’s of any interest to you I’d say hurry while the sale lasts.
*Edit: Took it for another flight and at the end the canopy opened fully. No idea what’s going on - but if you look at the beauty shots in the Marketplace sales page you’ll see that the canopy isn’t fully opened there.
** I now think the problem I had with the throttle in the last update was mine, not the plane’s. The throttle is moved out of cutoff simply by advancing it, which I did on the original build, and have done testing it this afternoon and evening. But just before the first update I had been flying the Hawk, where you click on the throttle to take it in and out of cutoff - I must have thought that was also what I’d done the first time round on the Tucano, so when it didn’t work on the second visit, I just assumed it was broken.
No, it wasn’t the Tucano that was broken.
Treacherous things, brains. You’re better off without 'em. Or so my zombie friend keeps telling me.
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Purchased on xbox , asked for refund immediately after trying a few flights
trim is terrible , starts out already trimmed left wing down and wont re-centre correctly
Pitch trim is rubbish , it will not trim level , continuously oscillating between nose up or down
Throttle lever moves in 5% increments instead of 1% like every other aircraft in the sim
Fuel remaining counter does not reflect values input, no matter what i input it always jumps 20 - 30 more within seconds
Flight instruments stay in spawn orientation, so if you have to slew around due to building in way of spawn then your hsi and bearing indicators are not aligned with compass at all
Conclusion is to avoid , even at sale price
Edit , on further research, the aircraft should have a 4 bladed prop, not 3 blades as modelled, plus the performance figures don’t match up to specs found online for the Tucano, all in all a disappointing product.
I am sorry for your experience, but its a nice aircraft for sure!
They are a miiltary trainnig aircarft and you need to treat it propperly.
Many real pilots (military and civilian) used it and flown perfectly for them, you need to use the trim for aileron too to compensate the torque and rudder too.
There is a switch on the fuel remaningn gauge that activates the digits (like the real aircarft does) the pilot need to use it… If you use the checklist this step is there to be done.
Its not a study level aircraft due its a military and it has classified documentation for it that make some parts harder to bring to the sim.
The 4 blades is Short Tucano not the Original Tucano (this one that is available has 3 blades and a quite less powerfull engine too)
Please join the Discord server and talk about what is too wrong to make you request a refund.
You need to fly it gentle and once you do that its very good flight and acrobatic aircraft to fly.
Thank you for your update on it. I am happy that you are happy now. We are constantly work for it.
Yes you can but some functions are available only at front seat. just as the real aircraft. So My tip is, start the aircraft at Pilot 1 position ( the front seat) and if you want to use the back seat change the view camera to Copilot at configuations than you will “jump back to the back seat” and flight from there.
No thanks , its a poor aircraft that in no way matches what it is supposed to be
Any aircraft should be able to be able to be trimmed to fly straight and level for a short time ; impossible with this aircraft.
Fuel remaining counter indicates 20-30 lbs heavier than what is in the aircraft, it doesn’t match the weight and balance page
I only purchased the aircraft due to the RAF livery and it doesn’t even match the aircraft correctly , wrong propellor and engine performance.