PILOT'S GesmbH Boeing B314 Clipper

By Andrew Herd (19 November 2002)

he increasing popularity of air travel, together with advances in aircraft design led to a demand for trans-oceanic flights in the mid-thirties, to which Pan American's response was to ask for a long-range, four-engined flying boat. Boeing rose to the challenge and developed the Model 314, which was nicknamed "Clipper" after the long range sailing ships. Faced with a challenging problem, Boeing opted to play safe and they married the wings and engine nacelles of the experimental XB-15 bomber onto the flying boat’s enormous hull. Power was provided by four of the new 14-cylinder double-row 1600 hp Wright Cyclones, which were the first engines to use 100 octane fuel. Nevertheless, there were a few problems with the design and Boeing tried single, twin and finally triple vertical stabilisers before they finally nailed the stability down once and for all.

On July 21, 1936 Pan American signed a contract for half a dozen aircraft, the first of which (designated Model 314) flew on June 7, 1938. It must have made an impressive sight, because at the time it was the largest civil aircraft in service, with a 152 foot span, gross weight of 84,000 pounds, and a length of 106 feet. The first hulls cost a breathtaking $550,000 apiece and their fuel capacity was no less than 3500 gallons. At a theoretical maximum ground speed of 184 knots, the Clipper only had a 1200 mile range, but in practice it was rarely flown that fast and flights were made at speeds as low as 108 kias, which allowed it to make flights of three times that distance, albeit at not much faster than the speed a Cessna 172 can achieve. A 314 duly made its first commercial trans-Atlantic flight on the eve of the outbreak of the second world war, under the expert command of Captain A.E. LaPorte, carrying a ton of mail from Port Washington to Marseilles, via the Azores and Lisbon. This was followed by the first scheduled transatlantic flights, from New York to Southampton, via Newfoundland, carrying 22 passengers one way for $375. In today's money, that was rather more than twice the cost of crossing the pond on Concorde, but if you could afford the trip, it was a magnificent service. Clipper passengers enjoyed fantastic views through huge windows and could use dressing rooms, a dining room/lounge and even a bridal suite. For overnight flights the seats converted into bunks and top chefs served gourmet meals en route. But however Pan Am tried to present it, every flight was an adventure, with the threat of a forced landing an ever present possibility; Clippers operated at the limits of what was technically possible and at least two mid-ocean landings were made as a result of fuel exhaustion.

Nonetheless, twelve Model 314s were built between 1938 and 1941, but then war intervened and the Clippers were pressed into service to ferry materials and men, there being little alternative on the long routes in question. By now, the plane had become a legend and Roosevelt flew in one to the Casablanca conference in 1943, celebrating his birthday in the dining room on the way home.

The total build included six Boeing 314As, which were an improvement on the 314 with a capacity of 77 passengers and about a thousand more gallons of fuel, which extended cruise range to over 5000 miles. The prototype 314A flew on March 20, 1941, but in the end most found their way to Pan Am, three being bought by the British government and put to use by BOAC; Winston Churchill developing a penchant for travelling in them. The original Yankee Clippers were split between the USAAF, the US Navy and Pan American, three being destroyed during the hostilities. While the survivors all had exciting careers, the war led to such sustained attention to long range aircraft development that by the time it was over, the 314 was an anachronism and Pan Am quietly removed them from service in 1946, although the remaining hulls soldiered on with charter companies until around 1950. It might seem an ignominious end for a spectacular plane, but by then the Clipper had earned its place in history.

When you read this review, you will have to remember one thing, which is that I have a particular weakness for flying boats, my father in law having reminisced so much about Supermarine Southamptons and Stranraers and Short Sunderlands that I am no longer capable of thinking about these ships without remembering his stories. But as special as those planes were, the Clipper was a thing apart and it surprises me that no-one has thought of doing one for Flight Simulator before. Not only was it one of the rarest planes ever built, but its sheer size puts it into a class of its own - the 314 having more in common with ocean liners than it ever did with the planes of its generation. Flying it was an art form and only the most experienced skippers were trusted with one; and now anyone who is prepared to part with a few bucks can share the experience. Sounds good to me. Let's take a look at what PILOT'S GesmbH have on offer.

The package is available from PILOT'S in two versions: a CD and a download. The CD costs $34.90, the download version Eur 39.99, the major difference between them being that the the CD contains two videos - the download is a whopping 52 megs, which should make anyone without broadband sit up and pay attention. If you choose to order the download version, a registration key is sent out by email, although the site warns that this can take up to 48 hours to arrive. I reviewed the CD version, which meant that I had to download various patches. The first edition of the CD is sold out, so anyone ordering a copy of the Clipper after reading this review will not have to go through the same process, but patches aside, the installation was no problem at all. If you check out the downloads page on PILOT'S site, there are also a number of optional upgrades and add-ons available.

Installation was easy, creating a PILOT'S software program group, containing links to the developer's Clipper homepage; a very informative 63 page pdf manual; and two videos of a real B314 in flight. Checking out the FS folders revealed nine liveries, split among the two variants of the B314 - prototypes with one, two and three tailfins are also included. I have shown Yankee Clipper in the early screen shots, because it shows off the reflective texturing to advantage. Not only is this mother big, but you get to see your face in it, because PILOT'S have done the visual model in Gmax and claim nearly 90,000 polygons including the virtual cockpit. In addition to shiny hulls, you get opening doors, detailed engines, a trolley so you can beach the varmint, mooring ropes and lights, a 3D cabin interior and working cowl flaps. Who could possibly ask for more?

The 2D panel is not, in my opinion, the stongest part of this package, though given the fact that no examples of the Clipper are extant, I can understand why. According to the developers, only two pictures of 314 panels exist and they show a flat, uninteresting wedge of metal, which is exactly what you get here; but while the layout might be historically accurate, the 2D panel lacks a certain something. The flat perspective doesn't quite recreate the cockpit ambience of a thirties classic, but the good news is that Stefan Schaefer, for whom the Clipper is probably more of an affair of the heart than anything else, is working on an enhancement.

But whatever one might think of current panel bitmap, everything on it works well and the overwhelming impression this package gives is of the vast amount of work that has gone into it. The VC is about the size of a small barn and worth panning right around, if only to wonder at the size of the flight engineer's station and acreage of chart table behind the left hand seat.

Designed as it was, within a few decades of the first powered flight, the operational routines on the Clipper are nothing like the ones you might be familiar with on modern airliners. Leaving aside the fact that it is a flying boat, most of the changes are concerned with engine management. For a start, it takes around 30 seconds to move the props from coarse to fine pitch, a limitation set by Boeing, who were understandably nervous about the possibility of overstressing the engines. But that isn't the end of it - the levers are backed up by what was an incredibly sophisticated system for its day. If you are thinking of buying the package, it might be worth getting a flavor of what it is like, because the Clipper was one of the first planes in which the pilots didn't have total control over all the systems.

So take a good, long look at the flight engineers panel on the left, because you are going to get to know it well. If you take a look down at bottom left, you will see four warning lights which illuminate if inappropriate pitch selections are made - the pilots have a set of these too, but as engineer, you got the switches, so you are king.

In another victory for the mechanics, while the captain has a mixture master lever which alters all four mixture settings simultaneously, only the engineer can govern the engine mixtures separately. The engineer also has a set of "bowser bypass controls" which were originally intended to allow fine tuning of the power settings, though these never worked well on the original. Effectively, the way the flight control systems worked on real Clippers, the pilots were responsible for the ballpark settings and the flight engineers did the fine tuning. The sim works exactly the same way and the need to fine tune the plane to achieve any kind of extended range means that you need to swap to the engineer's panel once you are stable in each phase of flight and fool around with the settings.

Another item that needs a bit of attention in flight is the cowl flaps. Cowl flaps aren't that common on modern planes, but radials almost invariably had them to aid cooling in low airspeed/high power situations, particularly takeoffs and climbs. Forgetting to close the cowl flaps on something like a DC3 isn't a terrible sin, but on the Clipper, it could chop 15 knots off the cruise and result in one of those mid-Atlantic landings. Ever mindful of the amount of drag the cowl flaps caused, crews rarely opened them fully, except when they were taxiing - leave them open in the sim and climbing can be problematic.

The manual appears to be well researched and is (as far as I can tell) very good on procedures like engine startup sequences, exhaust gas temp monitoring and use of the wonderfully named pyrometer. A pyrometer sounds like something you definitely shouldn't have on an airplane, but in fact all it was was an early example of a cylinder head temperature gauge - but managing the instrument is another thing altogether and there are several paragraphs on the subject in the manual. In the shot above, the big white pyrometer dial is showing us the temp at the base of engine one, cylinder one. Don't ask me whether the reading is good or bad, I ain't read that far yet. And as if this isn't enough, the engineer also has to monitor the carburettor air temperatures because of the risk of icing and the oil temps have to be worried over as well. This was not the sort of aircraft that could be left to fly itself; I could go on about the instrumentation, but take it from me, this is techie heaven. And just in case you fall into the same trap I did, because if you don't visit the engineer's panel and flick the autosyn switch to "alternator" once engine 4 is run up, half the instruments will be dead.

By now I can smell the big iron enthusiasts sweating a little. What about the autopilot? Surely we aren't gonna be expected to fly this thing right across the Atlantic by hand while we keep swapping to the engineer's panel every ten minutes? Well, I have heard that that often was the way it was done in adverse weather, but the 314s were fitted with a device called a gyro pilot which took some of the load off the pilot by maintaining a constant attitude. Anyone who is familiar with the sim of the early Sperry unit found in the R4D simulation will be at home with this one. Basically, the gyro pilot gives you limited control over the axes of flight, but don't bet the farm on it in rough weather - these early autopilots were intended more to take the strain off the pilots than to let them wander back and chat to the passengers. There is an extensive section on the gyro pilot in the manual - read it well!

Then there are the radios, which sadly, due to an FS2002 limitation, can't exactly simulate the original units - the 314 didn't have VHF; and there is the direction finder, which has pages to itself, and several stations specially set up in FS so you can use it for navigation.

OK, so how does it fly? Well, slowly, is the answer. This is definitely not the plane for people who like to go places in a hurry and the handling is best described as stately. I reckon it gives a good impression of how unmanoeuverable these boats must have been and PILOT'S have done a good job getting their heads around the flight model; which is impressive, given that the FS2002 seaplane handling was really designed for GA planes like the Caravan, rather than gravity defiers like the 314. As is usual with FS floatplanes, it isn't really possible to convincingly "step" the hull for takeoff, but landings are neat - you just reduce power and hold off and off and off until the hull gets wet. After all, your runway is infinitely long, so you can afford to take your time about it.

The manual goes into endless detail about water handling, which is sensible, because the sim takes a nod at the real 314 and is a bitch to taxi. For a start, the rudder is completely ineffective and if you aim to use it, you had better have a couple of hundred miles of clear water to turn around in. Real 314 skippers used to make turns using the outer engines, but this wasn't entirely straight forward; for a start, you had to do it with the props fully coarse, or you didn't going anywhere. Next, the sim is a bitch to turn in a wind, just like the original. While PILOT'S haven't been able to capture the full horror of dipping a wingtip during a turn - FS2002 doesn't allow it - the Clipper does a good impression of being impossible to taxi in a crosswind and if you fly with real weather, you will discover the joys of tacking, just like I did.

Ahhh, what else is there? Well, there is a stack of scenery, fifteen bases in the install, ranging from Foynes to Guam. While none of these is going to win any design awards, they aren't at all bad and I enjoyed landing at the ones I tried, although if PILOT's have any sense, they should lose the animated flock of seagulls. Just because you can do a thing in FS, doesn't mean you should do it. My favorite base was Foynes, by the way, which is a peach.

Should fifteen seaplane bases not be enough, I notice on the web site that there are another 23 available in an add-on from Bluegrass airlines. There are also over 9000 stars available. No, I don't mean STARS, stupid, I mean stars. You know, the things that twinkle. Yeah, unreal to be sure, but some caring person at PILOT'S has expanded FS2002's paltry collection of barely 1600 astronomical bodies to an impressive 9095, positioned according to the official star catalogs. No, I didn't realise that stars had catalogs either, but seemingly they do. And there is a "real moon", for those of you who have got the sun and the stars already and still want more.

Did I like the Clipper? Well yes, I did. I think PILOT's deserve to be congratulated for bucking the trend and producing an add-on that features a classic aircraft rather than a modern airway hugger. The early years of aviation saw the development of some of the most characterful aircraft that ever flew, such as the DC3 and 4, the Martin 404 and a slew of GA planes ranging from the Tiger Moth to the Beech 18. By and large, these aircraft have been ill served by flightsim developers, there being few add-ons of period planes with the level of operational detail that this one features; part of the reason being that investors have taken the temperature of the market and have decided that users are not interested in flying classics. Well, in my humble opinion, it is time for a rethink - and PILOT'S are to be congratulated for showing us the way. Aircraft like the B314 and the others I mentioned came from a time when planes had to be flown; they didn't have fancy systems like wing levellers and autothrottles, or even radios.

The Clipper's panels are not something I would write home about, but if they were improved - and I am told that an upgrade is on the way - I would have no reservations in recommending this package unreservedly. Not only is the Clipper something completely out of the ordinary, but it kind of grabs you by the gut and makes you want to adventure. Right at the beginning of the manual the developers state that the project was inspired by a book called Night Over Water, by Ken Follett, which has passed me by, but having tried this sim, maybe I might just get around to reading the book after all, because if it entertains me as much as PILOT'S B314 has done, then it will be worth the money.