This is a beautiful aircraft, gorgeously rendered and in flight an absolute dream. BUT…
No doubt there will be peeps who will disagree but things are not right with this biplane. I have flown biplanes in most sims for many years. That and helicopters (sadly missing from MSFS). I have a friend in Cambridge, UK that took me up in a Tiger Moth at Marshalls airfield. From my experience of biplanes and what he tells me of biplanes in general is this:
Take off and landing takes a bit of getting used to in a biplane. He says this plane is way more difficult than normal although he has never flown this model. The severe pull to the left and then right using rudder and tail wheel is far too exaggerated. Also, like all high torque radial engines the plane is more likely to seriously tip over as much as pulling to one side when applying too much power. Many noob pilots in WW1 died before getting into the air in Sopwith Camels because of this. Have watched videos of RL pilots taking off, with very little deviation on the runway
My biplane pilot friend told me that because of the large wing area of a biplane it produces (similar to a helicopter) ground effect where the plane floats above the landing strip so needs quite a lot of coaxing to get it on the ground. The YMF-5 here has no ground effect and can land hard.
As I’ve said, in the air it is a pleasure to fly, just one annoying thing is when reducing the throttle to about 80% there is a strange noise emanating from the engine like the sound of a duck, but constant.
For the price and the beauty of the plane I do consider it money well spent. I hope Carenado patch this plane in the near future.
I agree with most of your ‘thoughts’. Having put some hours on both a Stearman and a Pitts I do caution the uninitiated when it comes to the gyroscopic precession in any taildragger but particularly in short coupled biplanes. That big radial out there is a massive gyro. When lifting the tail off the ground the precession is going to want to swing the nose left with more force than you are used to with traditional nose wheel aircraft that are only dealing with the torque effect, not a combined torque and precession. If you are too aggressive with the rudder that same precession is going to pitch the nose down. If you are not ready for it the combined forces as you lift the tail, add power and counteract torque all at once will conspire to stick your nose into the ground.
Trust me when I say, you do not see air show pilots demonstrating outside loops at 0ft AGL for a reason. USE CAUTION
Simple.
At the time we had biplanes as the standard format, an airplane with ONE wing would have fallen out of the sky.
The technology did not exist to create enough wingspan to create the required lift. By having two wings you could have the same lift in the same span. It also allowed for the two wings to support each other.
If you look up a Bleriot, one of the first mono wing airplanes you can see the effort put into keeping them from folding. It also illustrates the weight saving required to have the lower sq in of wing.
If you want a advantage. Maneuverability. That is why Fokker created the triplane. Super short wingspan and big control surfaces made it the single most maneuverable deathtrap (extremely difficult to fly. Not for the novice) with wings
Biplanes in this sim are modelled as having a single pair of wings. The biggest issue will be where you position that fake pair of wings as it will influence ground effect. It is still better than FSX where biplanes were apparently modelled as a single wide wing.
More to the point - when people say flying a biplane they are often meaning flying a taildragger. It is important to distinguish the two as not all tail draggers are biplanes, and whilst rare, tricyle biplanes do exist.
The issue with the Bleriot was the landing wires were too thin. It was relatively easy to fix but by then they had a bad rep.
The main reason for preference for biplanes up to the late '30s, especially in military aircraft, seems to have been manoeuvrability was prioritised over speed (like in your triplane example). There are documented cases in WWII of P38’s trying to fly like modern online combat gamers and being shot down by Japanese float biplanes which were lucky to do 100 kts but could “turn on a dime”.
If any of the enemy fighters made an attack, they’d just pull up, give a short burst, and the enemy fighter would pull right back up out of range. When they failed to do this one day, three of them were shot down. They went down below 20,000 feet to get some “easy meat”, (these float bi-planes that can turn on a dime) - went down and tried to dogfight - that was the end of three P-38’s
Interesting. Thanks. I understand the historical significance. But why anyone would want to fly one nowadays is a question… I mean, why not Bleriot then? I have that thing in the sim and it’s… interesting to fly.
It is not surprising wing warping never became a thing. With the in game Bleriot you are often better initiating a turn with rudder as the resulting slip will induce a bank easier via yaw-roll coupling than using the stick. I have no idea whether that is a side effect of the sim having yaw-roll coupling by default or an actual aspect of the original Bleriot.
This is however getting way off topic.
I do not find the YMF-5 too bad after the recent patch.
People do need to go into the content manager and install the patch though or they will still be using the original YMF-5 buggy first release. The patch does not install automatically.
I think the physics taking off is far too exaggerated. It is almost uncontrollable really but the plane is lovely in the air and is so beautiful I can’t stop flying it.
IRL, that’s a whole other thing. There is a purity about a leather helmet and a pair of goggles for a windscreen. Kind of like a child sticking their hand out a car window and pretending to fly. If you have never done it you can not possibly understand the sound of the wood creaking and the wires and fabric make a music all their own in the wind. After a ride in an old open cockpit biplane you would never look at flying the same way.
That’s very possible. It’s a terrifying prospect, but an exciting one. I AM a bit of an adrenaline junkie, so… I will tell you this. First time I was in a small Cessna flying over the Carribean, there was nothing like it.
By comparison your Cessna flight would be like taking a bus to the mall.
Pretty sure you could find a Stearman pilot that would be happy to take you for a spin.
I’ve been up in helicopters, a blimp and several closed cockpit planes including a twin otter (In that plane flying across an area of Western Australia at 1000ft saw a rare sight of a herd of kangaroos charging across a desert region in the daytime)
But my best memories are being a passenger up front in the open cockpit of a Tiger Moth. The wind, smell and sounds of a biplane beats them all IMHO.
If you like the old birds, I can recommend Rise of Flight to see and feel what is being discussed here.
"where are my wings, why am I upside down, what is the greasy stuff covering my googles, windsock- I don’t need no windsock…opps maybe I do…
So tell me again how the engine runs at one constant speed and you slow down by shorting the spark plug momentarily: doesn’t that make landing very difficult? Oui !
It’s a terrifying prospect, but an exciting one. I AM a bit of an adrenaline junkie, so… I will tell you this. First time I was in a small Cessna flying over the Carribean, there was nothing like it.
