V-22 Osprey

The V-22 Osprey is a controversial aircraft in its own right. It’s the perfect aircraft for the bored pilot who’s flown everything. Right off the bat you have to like the RealFlight Osprey. The user can control rotor tilt, retracts and the usual control surfaces. As the huge rotors kick into gear, clouds of smoke billow beneath the nacelles and the sound of turbines become audible. When you perform a vertical takeoff with the Osprey, the software faithfully (and I’m guessing here, but it sure seems this way) simulates the feel of a lumbering airplane floating upward like a space ship. The hover feels different from a traditional helicopter and you notice this immediately.

Once airborne, I tilted the rotors forward by rotating the dial control on the RealFlight Interlink controller. This puppy can fly! The Osprey can loop, roll, fly inverted and even knife edge (with full opposite rudder). The only challenge I found was changing the rotor tilt during flight. After a bit of practice, I figured out that I could rotate the dial by using my right thumb to control the right stick and snaking my forefinger around the dial to change rotor tilt. I also discovered that by tilting to full hover position during forward flight, I could just “fly” the ship in like an airplane and then transition to stable hover just as I would with a helicopter in forward flight.

Pilots beware! If you get going in a backwards hover with the Osprey, she’ll flop over on her back, drop from the sky and give you that satisfying RealFlight thunk (accompanied by the usual laughing from the invisible field hecklers). You’ll also figure out real quickly to angle the rotors up for takeoff and make sure they are so angled for landing.

We had loads of fun with the Osprey and strongly suggest you try the “Deadstick” event with it at the Mountain Pass venue (more thunking).

Gee Bee

Lancair ES

The RealFlight Lancair ES comes in both glow and electric versions. We toyed around with the motor settings on the electric version and notice a couple of interesting phenomena. If you change the standard motor from “KnifeEdge 90 Brushless” to “KnifeEdge 45 Brushless” and do not change the battery configuration, the Lancair leaps off the runway. You can get the same effect by leaving the 90 on and increasing your battery cell count to 14. Although it purports to adjust performance based on weight, I’m not certain if the RealFlight program is really adjusting the aircraft’s performance with the added weight of cells. Regardless, it’s fun to mess around with the configurations and I must say the electric motor “whine” is faithfully reproduced here.

Tiger Moth

The Tiger Moth is a fun biplane to fly with a standard .61 glow motor on board. For scale flight, I barely cracked half throttle. The graphics on the Tiger Moth are not as detailed as some of the other aircraft in this package. The Moth flies realistically, but I would love to see a version of RealFlight that ripped the wings off when users try to overpower it and fly beyond its flight envelope. Flying the Tiger Moth at roughly half throttle gives it a nice scale-like appearance.

KingCat

Does anybody have two football fields? Flying the KingCat gives you a real appreciation for what it takes to maneuver and land a streaking jet at your local field. After clearing out all obstacles at the “RealFlight Park” field, I loaded up the KingCat. The Cat has flaps adjustments (and auto flap mixing with the elevator) as well as retracts and that nifty turbine spool-up delay and sound.

One of the most realistic aspects of the KingCat is the distance required to land the jet. Like a real Cat, the RealFlight KingCat goes and goes and goes, teaching the pilot to make long, steady approaches.

The graphical detail on the KingCat is not as good as that of the Osprey or the MD500 helicopter, but the performance more than makes up for it. I had a local jet pilot fly the KingCat for me and he was thrilled with the realism.

JayHawk Helicopter

This is a fun ship! The JayHawk is not only a scale ship, but it also sports a four-bladed scale rotor system, faithfully simulating the difference between a two-bladed “Bell-Hiller” system and a multi-bladed system. The JayHawk is no 3D flyer, but it will tax your brain as you attempt to make it do scale-like maneuvers. The JayHawk is a heavy aircraft so you need to stay a few seconds ahead of the ship, just as you would a real model.

The graphical detail on the JayHawk is great. The only thing that would make it better would be photographic quality graphics, but that might impede the speed of the program. I’m sure RealFlight is cooking something up right now.

MD500 Helicopter

Detail best describes this model. The RealFlight MD500 has nice fuselage details (e.g. rivets, handles, decals etc.) as well as cockpit details! This 5-bladed firefly will give you exactly what you expect from a nimble, multi-use heli. Like other multi-bladed helicopters, the MD500 is not as stable as two-bladed ships and RealFlight reproduces this effect in their software.

Contender

We tested the Contender in Event mode, trying limbo and spot landings. The Contender is, for lack of a better description, “ho hum”. It’s a an OK sport plane, but with all of the other fun aircraft in the RealFlight arsenal, this is one of the last ones I would choose. It is a bit heavy in the air and doesn’t offer great aerobatic capability. This is less of a comment on the simulator as it is on the aircraft itself. That’s why it feels like filler in this volume. Go ahead, try it, but I’m betting you will be back to the Osprey or KingCat in no time. . “Yeah, it coulda been a contenda – but it’s not.”

Double Whammy