Eaglesoft Raytheon Hawker 400XP for FS2002 and FS2004

By Andrew Herd (9 August 2004)

aglesoft have become well known as specialists in FS business jets, so their release of a Hawker 400XP comes as no surprise at all. The XP stands for 'Extended Performance' and this is one of the features which distinguishes it from the otherwise similar BeechJet 400A - the two are hard to tell apart on the ground, the clue being that the 400XP has one less cabin window than its stablemate.

The Raytheon Hawker 'family' has a confusing lineage, because the 400XP is a development of the Mitsubishi Diamond, whereas the 800XP is based on the BAe 125-800 and the Horizon is a virtually new aircraft, although it is inspired by the same philosophy that lies behind the Hawker name. This state of affairs arose because of the necessity of merging and rationalising different product lines in the wake of the 1995 merger between Raytheon Corporate Jets and Beech to form Raytheon Aircraft in 1995. The team that are developing these bizjets can say, with a good deal of justification, that they are involved in the world's longest running corporate jet development project, given that the ancestor of the 800XP and Horizon is the DH125, which first flew in the very early sixties. The Hawker name is a legacy of the merger of De Havilland into the Hawker Siddeley Group, which in turn became part of British Aerospace, before the Corporate Jet dvivision was sold off to Raytheon in 1993 - few other brands achieve such global recognition, so I guess it isn't too hard to understand why they kept the name.

The Eaglesoft 400XP is a 25.5 Mb download from the Eaglesoft website and costs $17.99 (€14.86, $Can 23.75, $Aus 25.53 approx). As usual with top end Flight Simulator products, installation requires validation of a key; but the whole process was very straightforward and ran without any problems at all. The 1.6 Mb manual is the same as the BeechJet 400A and has to be downloaded separately as does the checklist - but both the latter are free. One manufacturer's livery is included as standard, but many more are available for download from FlightSim.Com. At first glance it looks as if there is only one repaint for the 400XP, but it is possible to use any of the many BeechJet 400A liveries that have been released (most of them by the indefatigable Ed Knapp).

A quick check of the performance stats given by Eaglesoft shows that the 400A and the 400XP are identical in all respects and if you load the planes one after the other, the 2D panel, the virtual cockpit and the virtual cabins are indistinguishable, bar the fact that the Beech has passenger flight cards with the prominent letters "400A" tucked into the backs of the front seats. Now at this point, many simmers are going to ask what the point is of releasing two virtually identical simulations, but I guess that variety is the spice of life and few users are likely to buy both the 400A and the 400XP. Given that the liveries are interchangeable, the only decision that has to be taken is whether you want to fly around in a Hawker or a Beech.

The 400XP serves as a good introduction to one of flying's perennial problems, which is that with a few exceptions, passenger aircraft can either fly with full fuel, or a full load, but not both. The maximum payload is a generous sounding 2050 pounds, which sounds more than enough, until you work out that that leaves you with only 3500 pounds worth of fuel capacity and cuts your range to 874 nm. Doing the calculation the other way around, you can fly around 1500 miles with three seats occupied, or maybe four if none of your passengers is a big eater. Of course, achieving these figures does demand careful fuel management and if you hog along with the taps wide open, you are likely to be disappointed - there is a 25% difference in fuel consumption between high speed and economy cruise.

One of the great joys of flight simulation is that there is no requirement to conform to certification limits, so unless you plan on flying the 400XP absolutely by the book, you will not need to worry about the payload - bar the fact that when the addon first loads it is well overweight and needs something like 1500 pounds taken out of either the fuel or the pax or both. Failure to do this will result in the sim eating up well over its share of pavement; according to the book, at sea level, a little over 3900 feet is required at full load. A takeoff at the default ramp weight used up nearer to 5000 feet as near as I could judge, so all I can say is be careful!

Climb performance is reasonable for this class of plane, taking 18 minutes to reach FL370, which equates to around 2000 feet per minute, on average. The certified ceiling is FL450, which sounds far too high for anything except heavies, but if you are flying anything more than 500 nm, it makes sound economical sense to get up to at least FL430 in the 400XP. Getting up there is all fine and dandy, but do remember that you have to get down again and take care to plan ahead if you don't want to end up losing height circling around your destination. Descents from the upper flight level cover a lot of ground when you are travelling at 390 knots and if this plane is the first passenger jet addon you try, it might be worth remembering the old rule of threes for descents.

I don't have much to say about the sim that hasn't already been said about the BeechJet 400A, but for those of you who haven't read that review, the 400XP has an attractive visual model, with all the usual animations. The textures are fine without being too detailed, one side-effect of which is that the frame rates are very good indeed and the visual model captures the lines of the plane perfectly adequately.

Turning to the inside, the 2D panel is of a similar standard to the default planes and offers a neatly detailed overhead, pedestal and an FMC/radio unit. Before you get too excited about the latter, I ought to warn you that the FMC (flight management computer) is non-functional, although it has a neat graphic. Eaglesoft devote a paragraph in the manual to explaining why the FMC doesn't work, which is partly because they wanted to save on download size, but mainly because there are third party FMCs out there already. What they don't do is to recommend a compatible unit and before anyone emails me to ask, I can't help as I haven't been sent such an animal for review to date. The radio frequencies are a little fiddly to adjust, but I got used to it and you don't have to have the pedestal showing all the time as there is a small radio repeater on the right side of the panel.

You have access to the default GPS 500 unit and the Primary Flight Display (PFD) and Multi Function Display (MFD) can be enlarged to facilitate approaches and procedures, although you are likely to fly the 400XP on autopilot most of the time. This being a first generation glass cockpit, the autopilot controls are spread all over the place, although the arrangement has a crazy kind of logic once you get used to it; you will find you need to keep the pedestal in view on approach, unless you are some kind of a hot key wizard. The panel being the same as the BeechJet, all my comments about that addon apply, including the fact that some of the legends are hard to read - for example, I think the red button on left of the glareshield says 'master warning reset' but the words run into each other enough that I can't be sure.

A thorough read of the manual is recommended, but that being said, if you are a reasonably experienced simmer there isn't much here that you won't have come across before. One gotcha is the course selector, which isn't active unless you either have the RMI (the green display to the far left) set to HSI mode, a feat accomplished by clicking the top right button on the unit; or the PFD rose set to HSI mode, which is controlled using one of the buttons at the bottom of the MFD. While we are looking at this part of the panel, there is a stack of simicons down at bottom right which toggles the overhead/pedestal panels on and off and energises the virtual first officer, a useful guy who fed me all kinds of vital information and never complained about my flying once. Once you are familiar with the MFD it is possible to call up the checklists and go through them without having to wade through a stack of printouts, however, unless I missed them, none of the V-speeds are in there and neither are they on the kneeboard, so you will have to make a note of them someplace.

The virtual cockpit - shown above - is very good, apart from rather garish night lighting. As you can see from the shot, you could easily fly the plane from the VC the entire time and I used it fairly intensively during the review without experiencing any problems. If you turn around, you can tour the virtual cabin, which is mercifully free of children asking how much further it is to go daddy (to which the answer is: five minutes since you last asked, son, now let me concentrate on this NDB approach, for which your mother forgot to bring the plate). The good news about the VC is that it doesn't cane frame rates, but you still need a reasonably powerful machine to fly in this mode into a complex airport with all the display and weather options turned up high.

The flight model is easily up to the standard of the rest of the plane - if there are any differences between it and the BeechJet, they didn't exactly jump out at me - and much the same can be said of the sound set. As an introduction to addon FS corporate jets, the Eaglesoft Raytheon Hawker XP would make a good choice for simmers looking for a step up from the Lear; there are just enough knobs and whistles in the cockpit to make the addon a little more challenging and the price is right.

Learn more here