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Traildraggers! Damn I need to buy rudder pedals. But no, I just can't justify their cost right now as I'm saving to spend my money on a microlite licence. I've done some great VFR flying lately including a long distance trip from Wellington NZWN to Queenstown NZQN that really gave me a taste of flying low and slow through mountains and valleys so I don't want to spend anything on my flight sim PC. But I must say, this great Cessna 185 from Carenado really did push me close to bidding late in some auctions for USB CH Pedals.
Well onto the review! I'm someone that managed to never fly a Piper Cub much in real life or Flight Simulator. I've always loved Piper Archers and Cessna 172s, etc. The 185 to be honest blew me away with its performance. Its climb speed of up to 1800 fpm were impressive and it felt very fast for a small plane at 180 mph. Its handling made it fun to scoot around within valleys and it became a bush and float workhorse, ferrying people and livelihoods around Canada, the US, New Zealand and Austrailia. Somewhere near 180 mph being max speed and 56 mph stall speed.
For someone who grew up with the metric system, it's cool to hear aircraft speeds in mph, it makes them feel more like sports cars!
Well by now most people would come to expect a sense of quality from purchasing a product from any flight simulation related company. Carenado's stuff, from what I've seen, is well made and usually well packaged. I'm impressed every time I try a new package from them and their web site exudes quality and style, trademarks I'm happy to confirm are in therir products also. The download and installation process was flawless and the 125 MB package wasn't too heavy in girth for my broadband.
I noticed that there wasn't anything new in my start menu so I opened FSX to check the aircraft was in the menu. The planes did appear in FSX but the installer didn't link to any of the additional start menu features that you often get with aircraft, such as uninstall or links to the manuals or editors. Those PDFs that did accompany the aicraft were hiding in the Aircraft folder of my FSX installation. Not a big deal but it's helpful to have an easy link to stuff you might want to read on a laptop or second screen as you fly.
Word of advice...load up FSX with speakers turned down on this aircraft! I was blasted with engine sound when I first loaded it up, man it was realistic! A real throaty, 300 hp aero engine is now in your sitting room/bedroom/garage, so better prepare for a knock on the wall from some angry spouses! Initial views of the aircraft from outside were lovely in detail, a very good model that looks good in all different lights. The included liveries, of which there are four in the 185F and four in the 185F Bush products, are all very well done and somebody has paid great attention to detail. The aerials move in the wind and wheels are animated. Visual candies include baggage, prop sights, cargo pods, tiedowns to name a few and the control surfaces are well animated. The aircraft has a three blade prop in some models and with the bush pack you get the choice of tundra, snow, bush or float equipped aircraft. Its design and shape for me somehow link it to post WWII aircraft of the 50s, even though this wasn't designed until the 60s and went out of production in late 80s due to the overall GA demise of the time. Amazingly over 4,400 Cessna 185s were produced and ended up all over the world.
As discussed from the outside, the aircraft is visually stunning with plenty of nice animations and attention to detail. Inside is no different.
Stroll up to the aircraft and take in its large propeller and 60s graceful lines. You open the squeaky door and sit into the leather, welcome to the mostly standard Cessna cockpit, complete with ashtrays! The first thing that struck me was how realistic everything looked, simply by being made to feel old and worn. I spent about eight hours in the right seat of a Piper Archer a few weeks ago and old GA aircraft are always really worn and weathered inside, unless of course the owner has the money to update it. This 185 modelled here has had a hard working life, but still has plenty of life in it yet. The avionics are simple but effective. Reach down in the seat pocket and you'll find an excellent indepth manual for the aircraft. It has got everything you need, take off speeds, mixture settings, checklists and procedures for every possibility. It's great to have this so close to hand and means you can read it as you fly without having to switch to Adobe Acrobat for example. I like the way you can click a spot on the left window and your GPS appears mounted on a car-type holder and fully functional without opening as a window. Perfect for those cross country flights where you don't want to fiddle with VORs and ADFs, just load it all up in the GPS before you go and follow the line. Of course you shouldn't just navigate with GPS alone, and certainly not in IFR conditions but it's great to have on board. Personally I do still enjoy flying VOR/DME arrivals and do use local ADFs for reference so it's great that this aircraft has all the old and the new ways to navigate on board.
Starting up from cold the engine splutters into life and burbles at 1200 rpm. Check the mags, run through the checklists and release the brakes. The viewpoint is a bit hard to get settled into at first. It's high wing so you need to be down low to see out the left/right side windows, but it has got a big brow to see over. You end up somewhere in the middle, and I liked to learn forward a bit to see down the front of the wing more. Starting to taxi you get smacked in the face with taildragger physics. Wobble here, overcorrect there, a bit more power to straighten up...I can imagine in real life taxiing straight into the fuel pump! But practice makes perfect (even without rudder pedals) so, off to dance merrily around the apron because your steerable wheel is behind you! Must get rudder pedals. Anyone care to donate me a set? Here's hoping...
Lining up, check t's and p's and open the throttle. Due to torque and the wheel layout of the nature of this beast a bit of rudder is needed to keep it straight and then it's a smooth liftoff after 60/70 mph. Climb rates are excellent at between 1500-2000 fpm depending on weight, etc. This makes the time it takes to get to most VFR altitudes quite short and an interesting feature of this engine is you having to monitor the fuel mixture on the way up to your cruise altitude to make sure the correct air/fuel ratio is maintained. Keep a close eye on EGT and other temperatures and use your cowl flaps and throttle to keep everything in the green. There's a bit of a sense that this aircraft is borderline vintage so I felt like I had to always be gentle with the engine to keep it purring away nicely. During low speed and climbs the aircraft still handles well, torque playing its part in the aircrafts constant want to yaw a little. Once at cruise altitude you can throttle back a bit and still maintain a very healthy 180 mph should you choose to do so. I did cruise on occasion at up to 10,000 just to get a sense of the view but often it's much more fun to keep a plane like this down at 500-2000 feet and use its handling and speed for maximum valley flying enjoyment.
Stalling is something I would be quite happy about avoiding with so much power to weight but if you do manage to stall this bird its a nice gentle nose drop and very quick recovery. All in all its handling was quite simple and predictable, its power and great climb rates were a constant joy! Night flying is great with ome of the best interior night lighting that i've seen. The cockpit roof dome light is dimmed with a red difuser and a seperate control illuminates the cockpit gauges internally. It's a great effect and works really well compared to some of the poor quality GA aircraft night lighting found in other products and the standard FSX aircraft.
I found the speed quite easy to control in this bird as you begin descent, just cut the engine back to 1500 and manage your pitch to control speed. The flaps, being so big, have quite an effect on the 185, you can drop 20 or 40% and instantly lose a lot of speed/height, for real slow 60 mph landings on short bush or beach strips the aircraft can handle the low speed well and still give you enough directional control to be able to perform some tight maneurves close to touchdown. You must monitor the fpm closely to not sink too fast as she will drop with a stone if you need to. The brakes are good and again you're straight away reminded you're in a taildragger by having to keep dancing on the rudder a bit to keep her straight. I tried to touch down at about 50-55 mph and let the tail gently settle soon after.
So it's a lovely bird to fly, easy to land once you stay within the perscribed speeds and use flaps properly and a bit of a challange controlling on the ground due to being a taildragger. In some ways it feels just like a 172 or smaller but with a lot more power! Great performance and agility with decent range. I found it had enough features and quirks to keep me happy during short and mid range VFR flights. The flight manual too keeps you interested and there's plenty of stuff to brush up on to learn about this beast.
My system is no Concorde:
AMD Athlon X264 3800
3 Gb RAM
AGP Radeon 3650 512 Mb
But happily I didn't find any of the 185 models much of a drag on my frame rates while inside and maybe only 1 or 2 fps when outside. This went up a bit more when I used the chromey glossly model in the original pack. Not a biggie I would therefore say for the vast majority of people.
I'll speak a bit more about this package as it is seperate to the original 185. With the bush package you get four different models, all based on the normal 185 but with some slight differences. The most obvious being the undercarriage, where you've got the choice of amphibian, float (with and without window door), ski (with and without window door) and tundra. The included eye candies (cargo pod, wheel chocks, boxes and packages, pitot cover, sights prop and tiedown ropes) are a bit different and I was pretty sure the engine note was different also even though I can't see any difference in the specs. You'll notce bars across the cockpit window, presumably for extra strength, and some slight differences to the interior.
The addition of a float plane for me was one of the best things you could do with a 185 and I did wonder why it wasn't part of the original package to be honest. So for my test flights I got out the 185 amphibian and flew around the top of the South Island of New Zealand. There are some fantastic waterways in an area known as the Marlborough Sounds, lots of inlets and resorts only accessible by boat, great floatplane territory! I did plenty of water takeoffs and landings around here and found the 185 floatplane to be a great performer, lifting off from the waves at about 60-70 knots and performing nearly as well as her wheeled sisters even though she has to drag around big floats.
The ski/tundra models are also quite fun, a quick trip around New Zealand's Mount Cook put this plane through its paces nicely. That's about it though, this extra package is nice and all but doesnt give you much extra bang for your buck except for the features listed above. So I'd say either buy this bush package and have the best of both land and water worlds, or buy the original package and get an extra model but no access to the sea or rivers.
This is an excellent model of quite an interesting old aircraft. Old is by no means bad, this plane can really move and has excellent performance for a single engine prop. Its ruggedness gives you access to exciting places like beaches, bush srips or narrow lakes. It's an excellent touring craft and a good fun way to do mission type flights in mountain or valley areas. Or simply as a way to explore some nice VFR scenery. You've got the best of both worlds of power and easy handling with this plane, Firewall the throttle and it will leap for the sky but then it's got great slow speed handling for moving around tight valleys and landing on those amazing beach and bush strips that up to now you just had to fly over.
I did find it a bit weird that the bush and original packages are seperate products. Maybe they should just be bundled together for a more reasonable price. They're both excellent products but the whole point for a lot of people who buy this aircraft surely would be to have access to a floatplane or amphibian so why make two seperate packs for two different prices with essentially the same airplane in both just with different undercarraige arrangements? If you buy one, there's very little to want to push you over the edge to buy the other...if anyone was going to buy this I'd recommend they save a few bucks and just get the bush package...it's got the same great airplane as in the original just with different wheel and float setups.
Good points:
Excellent owners manual
Excellent visuals and animations
High quality sound
In flight manual and checklists
Nice easy flight model
Bad points:
The economics of two seperate packages don't make sense to me and I'm sure will irritate some users who have already bought the base package.
Paul Clancy
paul@flightsim.net.nz
Learn More Here:
Cessna 185 Skywagon X
Cessna 185 Skywagon Bush X
Cessna 185 Skywagon For FS2004
Reviews Of Other Carenado Products:
Cessna 172N
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