RealAir Sf260 And Decathlon For FS2004

By Andrew Herd (7 February 2004)

RealAir stayed loyal to Fly! for longer than many and the first package of theirs to catch my eye was their Super Decathlon/Citabria addon for that sim, released back in January 2002. At the time, despite my feelings about Fly! which was getting noticeably long in the tooth, I liked the plane, so when the developer released a Super Decathlon for FS2004, it was kind of hard to ignore. The only question in my mind was whether RealAir would make the sim interesting enough to stand out from the crowd - the reason being that a default FS2004 installation already boasts several high wing single-engine monoplanes.

I won't go through the history of the plane itself, which is covered well enough in the Fly! review, beyond making the observation that few product lines can have had as many owners as the ancestors of the Super Decathlon has - I guess the reason must be that old though the design might be, it is not only fun to fly, but one of the cheapest production aerobatic planes around at $110,000 if you go for a new one with a basic panel. You simply cannot get much cheaper than that and many home builders actually end up spending more. When you consider that for the money you are getting an IO-360 with a variable pitch prop thrown in (around $40,000 on my reckoning, with all the parts), a real Super Decathlon really is something of a bargain - and now RealAir are selling a 22 Mb downloadable sim for only $25.00. Now that just has to be worth a look, doesn't it?

The first thing that strikes you about a real Decathlon is how classic the design looks. This is an airframe that belongs to the Taylorcraft/Piper Cub generation and American Champion, the present manufacturers, have done nothing to change it at all. You get a fabric covered steel tube fuselage; tandem, sit up and beg cockpits; a single panel; and no flaps. Cessna fans will be devastated to realise that you can actually see out of this mother without sticking your head out of a window, the reason being that the panel is only about eight inches high, leaving you just enough space to get in a set of basic VFR instruments if you are very careful. In fact, there is perspex all around the pilot, making it easy to keep an eye on the horizon - and you will need the view later, believe me.

One virtue of the plane is that it hasn't got enough goodies in it to be complicated, but the fuel injection means the startup procedure is a little different: in a real Decathlon, with the battery on, you set the mixture fully rich, crack the throttle and then turn on the fuel pump until the fuel pressure gauge shows positive, then you turn the pump off, pull the mixture lean, switch on the mags (behind your left ear, best to be in VC to use 'em, though the sim does have a 2D panel pop up) and hit the starter switch. For some reason you cannot pull the mix lean when you are starting the addon, which may be something to do with the way FS2004 works, as I have used other sims which have had the same problem.

Once the engine is running, you need to keep half an eye on manifold pressure as well as the rpm, but this is a small sacrifice compared to having to deal with a wildly overspeeding prop half through the downside of a loop at the precise moment you notice that the houses are twice as big as you expected them to be. Bear in mind that although the Decathlon can do aeros right up to Intermediate level, it doesn't exactly have an excess of power and so the first thing you should do on loading the sim is check that it isn't operating at gross weight - the manual has some good advice about this, but the sim actually loads well overweight in my setup, at least. This may sound a pain, but in theory at least, you have to do it every single time you get in a real plane, which is a considerably more complicated process than anything you are faced with in FS.

As the manual suggests it is very difficult to execute even basic aeros with a full payload and tanks, so I did all the tests with a single pilot and 50% fuel. Even when it is within category, the Decathlon needs to be nursed through many maneuvers; this is no Extra 300S, so don't expect to get out of trouble by dragging it around figures behind the prop - you have to fly it.

Apart from the standard flight and engine instruments, the panel on the sim has a Bendix King KX155a nav/com and what appears to be a modified Bendix King KT 73 Mode S transponder. This particular radio can do rather more in real life than the sim would have you believe it can - for example, pressing the nav mode button cycles the display from frequency, through CDI mode, bearing to mode, radial from mode, timer mode and then back to the frequency again, which is extremely useful. The KT 73 transponder is overkill for an aerobatic panel, as a matter of fact I haven't seen one fitted to a GA plane yet, but that is one of the joys of flight simulation, you can have all the avionics you can eat.

There isn't much to choose between the 2D and the 3D panels, in practice, this is a plane where I could have understood it if the 2D panel had been left out, because the cockpit is relatively simple and for once it is much easier to pan around in the VC than it is to use the pop ups. One minor criticism is that the graphic of the bar that comprises the bottom of the panel has a slightly weird perspective - it just looks a little out of place to my eyes. You load the FS2004 GPS by pressing shift 3 should you become temporarily uncertain of your position and in a real emergency (like you need to answer the doorbell, or answer the phone to explain why you aren't at work), and htting Z will engage a 'mini-autopilot' which will level the wings and maintain whatever pitch attitude you currently have. The VC gauges are all backlit and have reflective glass, and this is an active panel, so everything is clickable in the style of the default FS2004 aircraft. You also get full night lighting, though I doubt many of these planes go out much after dark.

The visual model is reasonably detailed, not that there is much to show off on such a slab sided airframe. Frame rates were never a problem on my system, although admittedly it is a 3.0 Ghz Pentium with a stripped out config, but all appearances to the contrary, the Decathlon has a high polygon count for a GA sim. All the control surfaces move, Shift E opens the cockpit door, the wheels rotate, you know the deal. You get five different schemes and two different versions of the plane - one loads with a 'basic panel' that lacks the DI and artificial horizon - this is an aerobatic plane, after all. The guys that fly these things never look at anything in front of them.

Anyway, enough of the plane and panel, both have clearly had time lavished on them, but they are not the central feature of the sim, which is the flight model. In general, I give equal weight to the panel, flight model and visuals, with a few notional points for the sound set, but in the docs RealAir go to town on the ability of the sim to do aeros and so I took them at their word and gave it a real try out. If you buy the addon, please bear in mind that to get it to perform as expected, you must follow the instructions on FS2004 realism setup as given in the manual, which is available as a 1.8 Mb separate download if you want to read it before buying.

With the caveat that the Decathlon is an aerobatic tail dragger and that the two areas where Flight Simulator does not shine are at the extremes of flight and with tailwheel ground handling, I am definitely impressed with the way this addon flies. It needs what feels like just the right amount of rudder to keep it straight on the runway and in the climb; and sticks reasonably well to the published data, give or take; but the addon really sings when it is looped and rolled, while at the same time managing not to be totally forgiving in the fashion of the default aircraft. I am so used to Flight Simulator planes now that the first thing I attempted was an aileron roll at a thousand feet with insufficient airspeed and the Decathlon rewarded me by falling out half way and spinning in. Yep, it really does spin. After that, I took the plane up to six thousand feet and tried intentionally spinning it - which isn't too hard to achieve, though it needs full rudder. Recovering the spin can be done by letting everything go, but the real plane isn't that tough to extract either. Interestingly, when I tried an inverted spin, the Decathlon immediately overstressed, but I confess that it has never occurred to me to do this with an FS plane before and maybe the developers had not had the idea either (-:

The other nice thing about the flight model is that it is one of the very few I have seen which can produce an approximation to a spiral dive. Banking the Decathlon to 90 degrees and letting go of the controls results not in the standard FS behavior of a clumsy wallow, followed by a climb, followed by a polite stall, followed by a series of low amplitude phugoids into level flight - instead it actually results in what happens in a real Decathlon, which is a spiral dive, followed by an overstress if you don't do something quick. RealAir are to be congratulated about this - just about the only real planes which don't do this are ones that carry massive dihedral, our Rallye being a good example. As if this was not enough, the addon sideslips really well - most FS planes do an appallingly bad imitation of a sideslip, FSD's Piper Cub being the only other one I can recall that sideslipped properly. It is just as well that the Decathlon sideslips, because the total absence of flaps means that often times you won't have any other way of quickly losing unwanted height. And watch crosswind landings, because this is one of the few simulations I have come across which will actually ground loop - after touching down you have to dance on the pedals to keep it straight just the way you do in a real taildragger.

So that's the Decathlon. Personally, I think it is the best FS2004 addon of its type available at the moment, though the price may deter some purchasers. RealAir points out that with the Pound very strong against the dollar at the moment, it represents fair value for money as far as they are concerned and I can't disagree with that. Yes, you can get an airliner with a stuffed panel for the same price, but will you really have as much fun using it?

Siai-Marchetti SF260

We reviewed the original release of the RealAir Sf260 back in September 2002 and until FS2004 came along, it was my favourite FS single. Although at first I assumed it was a straight port of the old model, RealAir assure me that the plane has been redesigned from the ground up in Gmax, including specular highlighting. Despite this, most of what I said in the original review still applies, bar the fact that the VC is much better than it was in the FS2002 version. The flight model has been very well optimised for FS2004 and qualifies the SF260 as one of the most realistic feeling addons I have tried to date. Once again, the plane is aerobatic and it can be spun, though it is more reluctant to do so than the Decathlon and I found it needed full rudder to start a spin, the rotation ceasing as soon as I centralised the control. One of the most interesting things about the flight model - which conveys the impression of what it is like to fly a fast, slippery plane really well - is that accelerated stalls are always a possibility, though they are nowhere near as vicious as they usually are in real life. I well recall the first time I did one in a 150 aerobat, which really got my attention, since the plane flipped inverted without any warning after the shortest possible bleat from the stall horn. However, the fact that they occur at all in the sim is a tribute to RealAir, because the FS2004 flight/physics model does its level best to prevent any plane from getting into a spin in the first place.

Once again, I would recommend an early perusal of the manual, because the SF260 can be a mean beast and despite all the power it has on tap is somewhat load sensitive, so don't try aerobatics at gross weight unless you start at 10,000 feet! Once again, the manual is helpful on this point, but make sure you take out some fuel and weight before you start doing anything too ambitious. Simmers transitioning to this plane from the default Cessnas will have a certain amount of learning to do centered around management of the constant speed prop and the sixty knot difference between the 170 knot cruise and the max flap extension speed. Another point is that the approach has to be flown around twenty knots faster than the Cessnas, which means that the SF260 is that little bit trickier to land well - so if you haven't used an addon of this type before, be prepared for some bounces. It all adds to the fun.

The new VC is a big improvement on the old one and is of the 'active' variety, so 3D panel enthusiasts can dispense with the 2D cockpit altogether. Once again, like the Decathlon, the SF260 lends itself to being flown entirely from the VC and I used it much of the time. Out of interest, there is a custom VC for every plane, so you will never have to suffer the indignity of glimpsing the wrong livery color over the top of the panel. The sound set was fine and is new to the FS2004 version.

Frame rates seemed pretty good to me, although there are many more gauges than there are in the Decathlon, so it will inevitably put more stress on lower spec systems. I get a steady dribble of emails from people who cannot get good frame rates on apparently fast systems, so this might be a good place to reiterate the advice to put aside a few hours to going through all the programs that load on Windows startup and pruning the list down to something reasonable. I came across one guy a while back who virtually accused me of lying about the frame rates I could get - when we checked out his why his 2.4 Ghz PIV was crawling along, it turned out to have no less than 25 apps loaded in addition to FS2004, so it is worth checking. If you haven't already done this, check out this link for some helpful descriptions of what all those cryptic filenames mean.

In its FS2004 incarnation, I still like the 260 very much. RealAir have gone out of their way to depict oil-stained, working airframes and you get six extremely varied and colorful paint schemes, which is great, because to look at most FS addons you wouldn't imagine that dirt and oil existed. There is a reasonably good manual, but for some reason it isn't added to the SF260 program group under the start menu during the installation; instead, you have to hunt for it in the aircraft's folder within the \Flight Simulator 9\Aircraft tree.

The best news about the SF260 (FX: roll of drums, fanfare, reviewer steps up to microphone with tears in his eyes) is that if you bought the FS2002 version, the upgrade to FS2004 compatibility is free. This is extremely generous of RealAir, because they must have invested at thousands of man-hours redesigning the plane, updating the flight model and repackaging the addon, so giving the upgrade away for free is admirable. Otherwise, a new purchase will cost you $25.00, the 15 Mb package being available for immediate download.

Visit RealAir Simulations:
www.realairsimulations.com