FlightOne/DreamFleet Cessna 177 Cardinal/177RG for FS2002 - Islands of the West Indies Volume 1 Bundle

By Andrew Herd (30 December 2002)

he 177 was developed in the mid-sixties as a successor to the ageing 172 family, which had an airframe dating back to '55. At the time of the 177 launch, few could have conceived that the aircraft it was designed to replace would prove to be the most successful light plane in history, outselling its new rival by a factor of ten to one. The 172 remains in production today, having sold around 44,000 units, while production of the 177 was terminated ten years after its launch in 1968. Only 4240 hulls were built, a dismal failure by Cessna's standards - the irony being that it would have been a triumph by anyone else's.

To begin with, all the signs were that the 177 was going to be a sure fire success; with hindsight it is hard to understand why it didn't do better than it did, because it is an attractive little plane, especially in the upmarket Cardinal version DreamFleet have chosen to model. Compared with a 172, the 177 featured a larger cabin, a flush rivetted wing which was set back to improve visibility in turns - the Achilles heel of the 172 - and an all-moving tailplane. There was also a higher standard of avionics, the price was only 10% more than the 172 and you could seat four adults in comfort.

But the 177 did not sell at all well; the problems, at least initially, being the engine and a tricky (and totally un-Cessna-like) stall. Cessna's new baby had a 150 hp O-320-E, which was more or less exactly what you got in a 172, and by then it was well known that the Skyhawk wasn't too happy with the idea of hauling four adults off the ground on a short runway on a hot day. So the heavier 177, with only 5 more ponies, got a sideways look from many pilots, who went on to buy a 182, which had another 80 horsepower up front. Cessna's response was to fit a 180 hp O-360-A, which is what they should have done in the first place, designating the new model the 177A. Sales improved, but not enough, so the engineers sharpened their pencils again and this time they did a proper job, revising the wing, introducing a new section with special conical camber tips that improved the stall; and also fitting cowl flaps and a constant speed prop. This model was known as the 177B and for those who could afford it, there was a luxury version with a full IFR fit, dubbed the Cardinal Classic. For good measure, 1970 also saw the release of the 177RG, which had retractable gear and a 200 hp IO-360-A with fuel injection. Thirty years on, the RGs retain a small price premium over the 172 - reflecting the fact that Cessna nearly got it right.

To a company used to selling aircraft by the tens of thousands, the 177 sales weren't good enough, and after a decade of trying, Cessna threw in the towel and production ceased in 1978. It was the right decision; in the final analysis the 177 sat in an awkward slot between two absolutely classic designs. This doesn't mean it is a bad plane - far from it - but it didn't quite hit the sweet spot for Cessna's accountants.

The FlightOne/DreamFleet 177 and 177RG are available as a 34 Mb download from FlightOne's web site. Existing users will need to download a 10 Mb patch to get the 177RG - which is worth doing, because not only does it bring the new plane, it fixes a few bugs in the orginal release. While most users will buy the plane on its own, there is a bundle of the 177 and FlightOne's new "Islands of the West Indies" that is worth considering - this weighs in at 70 Mb and is the package I reviewed. The documentation is available directly from DreamFleet's server and although it is a 6.3 Mb download is free of charge. I recommend reading it, because for all that the 177 is a GA add-on for FS2002, it is remarkably complicated.

The DreamFleet Cardinal simulates N1384C, a 177B hull built in '78 and operated by Knoxville Flyers, a club in Tennessee. The Flyers own three aircraft; a Cessna 152, Cessna 182, and the Cessna 177, which is their most popular plane; once you have looked at the avionics fit, you will understand why. This is an aircraft that demands to be taken places. You also get a 177RG with a retrofit 'turbo' upgrade, so all in all this is a very interesting package and one that provides great value for money.

I had no problems with the download, installation using FlightOne's familiar key system. If you buy the 177 on its own, the package costs $22.95, while the "Islands" bundle is a bargain at $38.90. Installation was straightforward, creating a new folder for 84 Charlie and another for the scenery in my FlightOne folder. In addition to the plane, you get the Text-O-Matic and Config-O-Matic utilities, which allow you to install different freeware liveries for the planes and to set up the sim - there is a neat option which lets you choose from three different radio stacks, but more of this later. Two liveries are supplied as standard for the 177 and there have been many freeware livery uploads to FlightSim.Com in the last few weeks, so once you have bought 84 Charlie, you will have access to a wide range of aircraft, although do note that the downloads average around 5 megs apiece.

The aircraft model was designed by Mikko Maliniemi of Finland. Mikko should know something about 177s because his father belongs to a club which also has a 177. The visual model reflects Mikko's familiarity with the marque and is neatly proportioned and fully detailed. All the control surfaces are animated and there are none of the gaps which let down the otherwise excellent DreamFleet Archer. The wheels turn, the nosegear strut compresses and both the cabin and the baggage door can be opened - and you can tie the aircraft down with a single keypress, even if it happens to be flying at the time. The cabin is well executed and includes models of Mikko and his dad. Needless to say, the 177 has reflective textures, even on the glass.

Starting with the 2D panel, because I always do, you can tell from the screen shots that DreamFleet have gone in for something really different. Yep, what we have here is a genuine wood-effect fascia. You do not see many of those any more and whatever the other attractions of 84 Charlie might be, this panel alone should be enough to bring in sales, because there isn't anything else like it, particularly when you consider that you don't just get to sit in the left hand seat panel, you can try out the other side too. While you won't want to be flying the plane from the right hand seat for too long, it adds variety. The little switchbox you can see at bottom left is "PanLMatic", which lets you switch views rapidly should you wish to. For people who are too grand to visit the right hand seat, it is possible to view all the far gauges as pop-ups from the main panel view and there are click spots on the panel if you don't get on with PanLMatic. Before I forget, clicking on the glove box will open it - though I have never yet been in a plane which had anything remotely useful in there. This one doesn't either.

The "Islands" package contains mesh, airports and hand painted textures for ten islands: Anguilla, St. Martin/St Maarten, St. Barthelemy, Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, Antigua and Barbuda. The scenery has AutoGen and will only work with FS2002, but it makes a perfect companion to the 177; inviting a series of short VFR hops from island to island. You get six flights to start you off, pdf documentation, and three small patches to download - which require manual installation. Given that I had to concentrate to work out where the various files went from the patches, newbies would definitely have trouble with them and it would be much better if these could be combined into a single, automatically installing patch.

There are some extremely neat features in the scenery, ranging from pilot controlled lighting at some strips, via auto-refuelling at a couple of places, to boats that head into wind and give you clues about which runway to use. There is a useful manual, which includes a mini-sectional and screen shots of all the airports, including the famous Grand Case on St. Martin, though my favorite is Gustavia on St. Barthelemy, which must have been designed by a sadist who hated all aviators. In real life, you can't land there without at least an hour's training by a rated instructor - if you buy the package, you will quickly understand why if you try to shoot a few approaches with a crosswind. Saba makes for another interesting approach, being shoehorned into the only flat piece of ground on the island, leaving you without any under or overshoot to speak about. Looking at the topography, it must have nightmarish local windshear too.

Chris Wilkes has gone to a good deal of trouble modelling the islands correctly, and Blackburne International at Montserrat is half buried under lava and ash, just like its real-world counterpart. On the other hand, if you like demanding chopper missions, you can always try Gerald's Bottom (yep) helipad on the same island in a brisk crosswind, which is a tiny concrete square and not much else. So there is lots to visit, including Cocoa Point on Barbuda, home to international celebrities and kind of sniffy about the likes of you and I in reality; though in FS, you can fly inverted over it at 300 feet just as often as you like. Problems with the scenery included sea textures running up cliffs, but these only occurred in a couple of places, a good example being the approach to Grand Case, which is one of the included flights.

The avionics fit in DreamFleet's 177 is the sort of thing that most real pilots dream about, comprising two VORs, an ADF, a GPS, transponder and a sim of a period Cessna autopilot in the default stack. Config-O-Matic lets you select three setups, the one that is actually in 84 Charlie, an FS2002 style Bendix-King stack and an old-style Bendix-King fit that includes the standard fit Cessna autopilot, which is the one you see here. While I am on the subject, Config-O-Matic lets you choose whatever lighting color you want for the panel and the gauges, so should you wish to fly around with peach lit gauges and blue panel lighting you can, though I'd be grateful if you didn't send me the screen shots. You can use the same utility to load the aircraft, setup hotkeys for pop-ups and to install photorealistic 2D interior views.

DreamFleet and FlightOne have gone to their usual great lengths over the 2D panel and I counted a dozen pop-ups including the right seat view and a landing view which cuts the main panel height. The one that most people will find themselves using all the time is the radio stack, which continues the DreamFleet convention of using both the left and right mouse buttons to make adjustments. While I hated this at first, I have to admit that I have grown used to it, and it is a definite improvement on the default method of working. With one exception the panel bitmaps are all incredibly sharp and I fell in love with the old-timer Bendix-King radios, chiefly because they look so like the ones I use, right down to all the missing bits. The way Cessna originally built 'em you had to reach all the way across to the right side of the panel to do the tuning, although DreamFleet have simplified things greatly by slaving the DME to the NAV radios, rather than duplicating the way the real one works, which has to be manually tuned with a horrible pull-out knob. The knob is shown on the DME graphic, but it is non-functional.

Left/right clicking on the center of most of the gauges will toggle them on and off for partial panel practice, should you be masochistic enough to want to do so, although it does allow for simulated IFR/IMC practice. Many of the gauges also feature digital readouts if you click in the right place and the altimeter can be calibrated in either inches of mercury or millibars. Looking around the main panel you get a working primer and an animated fly-off parking brake lever with a suitably horrible sound; someone needs to oil it. On the pedestal you get the rudder trim which is so vital on the 17* series, a working ashtray, the fuel selector valve, cowl flap lever and flap control lever.

The stacks offer a wide range of functions, ranging from the all-singing, all-dancing stack 2, which uses a variation on the default FS2002 autopilot; to stack 3, which has beaten-up old radios and a single-axis autopilot. Everything in there works and European readers will be glad to see that stack 2 includes a fractionally tunable ADF, although in reality it is usually possible to tune "decimal" NDBs by going for the next "whole" frequency up or down (this piece of magic doesn't work in FS and sometimes doesn't in the real world either).

There is a choice of two autopilots, the FS2002 standard Bendix-King KAP140 and a Navomatic 300A, which is less sophisticated, but rather nearer to the sort of autopilot that mere mortals like you and I get to use. The 300A is a single-axis autopilot, which means that it only controls roll; the pilot has to control pitch and manage airspeed - to accomodate this, the convenient FS feature which engages heading and altitude hold mode the moment the autopilot is switched on has been deactivated in the Cardinal. Lest anyone should feel hard done by here, you might bear in mind that I have never logged any hours P1 in a plane with any kind of autopilot at all and would be deleriously happy with a unit as sophisticated as a 300A. Autopilots are rare things in GA planes!

No less than eighteen pages of the manual are devoted to the "GPS SL320", a thinly disguised sim of the popular Garmin GPS150XL. The 320 offers a wide range of functions including moving map, direct-to, trip time, fuel usage, wind velocity and direction and who-knows-what-else; I could spend about a thousand words on this unit, you definitely get your money's worth. There are two versions of this unit included in the package, a simplified version which appears in the avionics stack, and the fully featured pop-up, which is shown here cut and pasted actual size from a 1280x1024 FS2002 window. Although the original graphic is pin sharp, it has been resized in the panel.cfg, leading to blurring - this is easy to kill if you edit the file so that the GPS is displayed at the original graphic's resolution. Click anywhere on the face of the stacked unit and you will get the pop-up.

With an FS flight plan loaded, the SL320 displays active leg information, with the screen updating in real time. The LCD can display more than one page of data at a time, this being controlled by mousing the outer knob on the right side of the unit. The inner knob changes the selection and allows you to highlight and view various data fields; once you get the hang of this the unit is remarkably easy to use. Like all good GPS boxes the SL320 calculates basic stuff like the distance and track to the active waypoint and it also displays a course deviation indicator and ground speed. Moving map display range can be set to anything from 5 to 200 nautical miles and there is an option to control the amount of clutter. You also get a couple of timers and a fuel calculator which displays useful stuff like endurance, range, remaining fuel and remaining time to zero fuel. Why the latter? Well, in the UK, running out of fuel is one of three things for which the CAA always prosecutes if it gets to hear about it and I imagine the FAA doesn't find it very amusing either. "So what?" I hear you say, "All you have to do is look at the gauges." Well, yeah, but in most aircraft the fuel gauges are worse than wildly inaccurate and the first thing you learn is to dip tanks if you can and rely on every other method of reckoning if you can't.

Direct-to navigation is the bread and butter of every GPS from the GPSIII Pilot up and the SL320 is no exception to the rule. To go direct, you just hit the appropriate key on the unit and type in the code for the place you want to head for, be it an airport, an NDB or a VOR. As far as I know, on the GPS150XL, you can enter user defined waypoints, and while this function hasn't been implemented on the SL320, it isn't that likely to be of interest to simmers other than hardened bush pilots - who will most likely navigate using two nails hammered into the cowling anyway. All in all, this is one of the most fully featured GPS units I have seen in Flight Simulator.

84 Charlie includes a virtual cockpit and cabin, around which you can roam by resetting the viewpoint. You wouldn't do this in a real 177, or at least, you wouldn't if I was flying with you, but it is a nice demonstration of the sim. All the gauges work although I sometimes found them a little jerky. You get moving throttles, yokes, rudder pedals, flap lever, cowl flap and sun visors. The panel graphic is excellent and although some of the cabin structures are a little boxy, the whole thing works well and pans were very smooth on a 1.7 Ghz PIV. I would have said that the default setting for the pilot's viewpoint is a little high in the VC compared to the real thing and while it gives a fine view forward, I got the feeling when I was using it that I was having to hold the nose too low to sustain level flight because of this. It does, however, give an accurate forward view for a full flap approach.

The sales blurb on the FlightOne web site states that, "...while it is impossible to create 100% accurate flight dynamics for FS2002, you'll find the flying characteristics of the DreamFleet Cardinal to be quite satisfying." Well, you can't argue with that. Though the real 177 has comparatively docile handling, getting one down on the runway involves hauling back on the stick until you feel like standing up to see over the panel - a feature which must be quite tough to capture, because I haven't seen it done properly yet for any of the bigger Cessnas. It might be worth pointing out that for a realistic take-off in the sim you have to set the top of the trim indicator just below the bottom of the white mark, or you will have to really pull the nose off the ground. The sim also shows a slight tendency to roll out of steep turns, which is something I have seen from air file developers who fly with a joystick rather than a yoke; the result being that it is hard to keep the ball centered in turns and sideslipping isn't as easy as it might be. Finally, the plane yaws the wrong way in a climb (real ones need right rudder) and the rate of roll is a little high, but on the other hand it doesn't share the squirrelly pitch that curses the default Cessnas. So some pros and cons in the flight model, but overall it is fine within the limitations of Flight Simulator.

In real life, the RG is a completely different animal compared to an ordinary, fixed gear 177, and getting into a 200 hp RG after flying in one of the early 150 horse 177s is quite a shock. To give you some idea, the RG climbs effortlessly at a thousand feet a minute or more and if you are cleared to say 1500 feet by tower, levelling out at the top of the (brief) climbout involves pushing the yoke forward as hard as you can to get the nose down and keep it there. Fail to do that and the RG will gain another 500 feet in the twinkling of an eye, leading to the dreaded, 'Can you come over to the tower to have a chat when you get down?' request. And when I say push hard, I really mean it, because the RG is a beast of a plane, perhaps one of the most powerful GA singles you are likely to come across.

If the RG's power takes a little bit of getting used to, so do the procedures you need to learn in order to fly it well. Given that the plane can cruise at over 150 knots, a certain amount of forward planning is necessary - you can't just hope to arrive in the circuit, yank the throttle and hold the nose up to bleed off the airspeed, turn base and land, because the RG has about as much in common with a cooking 172 as an eagle has with a chicken. The biggest and most obvious difference is the gear, which has a retraction sequence all of its own, perfectly captured by DreamFleet. One trick you can do with an RG - if you lack imagination - is to select gear up while you are still on the ground, relying on the fact that the wheels can't actually retract until the plane leaves the ground. This looks really impressive when it works, but much less so if the plane hits wind shear or the engine quits and settles back onto partially or fully retracted gear. Yeah, I know it sounds wacky, but you still hear of people doing it.

Beyond coping with the greater overall speed, engine management is slightly more complicated on the RG. If you look carefully, the panel is very slightly different, having a dual fuel flow/manifold pressure gauge where the fixed gear 177 has a single manifold pressure instrument. The crucial instruments on the RG are the cylinder head temperature (CHT), exhaust gas temperature (EGT), manifold pressure (MP) and tachometer, with fuel flow used to cross check. On takeoff, you open the cowl flaps depending on outside temperature and roll with the throttle firewalled and rpm set to fine; then once you have a positive rate of climb and 80 mph showing, you retract the gear; then (at sea level) wind the manifold pressure back to 25 inches and the prop back to 2500 rpm using the verniers and drop the nose until you have 100 mph to climb to the first altitude restriction.

Cruise settings depend on how high you are, what speed you want and what fuel efficiency you require, which means using the tables at the back of the Pilot's Operating Handbook (POH), which is why most flights are planned in detail before getting in the plane, but just as an example, cruise at 4000 feet at 23 inches of MP and 2300 rpm gives you 158 mph, which should be fast enough for most people. At that setting, fuel consumption is 9.5 gallons per hour, which gives an endurance of 5.3 hours - down to dry tanks.

Once you are established in the climb the fun starts, because now you have to pay attention to the manifold pressure, the CHT and the EGT. As you climb in a real 177, the MP tends to fall, leading to loss of power, and the EGT goes down with it, because the mixture needs leaning as the air rarifies. The bottom line is that if you leave everything alone, the engine will start to struggle sooner or later. First thing you do is close the cowl flaps, which will pull up the cylinder head temp a little - though I can't find a CHT gauge on the DreamFleet panel - normally it sits where the developers put the EGT. Then you wind the throttle vernier in a little to increase the MP up to 25 inches and wind the mixture vernier as needed (left, or anticlockwise is lean, right or clockwise is rich), meanwhile watching the EGT like a hawk to make sure that it isn't getting too high; and this dance continues all the way up to cruise level, and has to be done in reverse during the descent.

The reason you have to play this game is that normally aspirated piston aero engines rely to a large extent on Avgas for cooling - basically they spray a third of the fuel unburned out the exhaust, which is hardly kind to the environment - and as they run hotter, you have to enrichen the mixture to keep the temperature down. So as you climb, you lean, and as you descend, you enrich. If you leave the mixture fully rich and do a climb in the sim, the EGT should fall to virtually nothing and the fuel flow will rise to quite startling figures; equally, in real life if you lean the mixture correctly and then forget to enrichen it on descent, the exhaust will turn to molten metal and your engine life will halve.

Because the RG has a turbo, as the screen shot above left shows, it is possible to fly the plane at FL100 at 25 inches of manifold pressure, fully rich, without running the EGT down to nothing. A normally aspirated RG won't develop more than 20 inches of manifold pressure at that height and needs fairly agressive leaning. It would be great if DreamFleet could provide a flight model that made it possible to practice procedures for a non-turbo RG, as in practice these are far more common, but I guess the package is already complicated enough!

The sound set is courtesy of Aaron Swindle and is excellent, with a wide range of noises, ranging from the startup to that handbrake, as well as gyro, fuel pump and switch clicks. To get the most realistic possible experience, turn your speaker volume up all the way until the neighbors complain, then spend six months exchanging letters through the lawyers, before establishing a no-fly area over their house. Then join a VA and spend your idle hours writing letters to the all the other pilots reminding them where the no-fly zone is (-:

Overall, 84 Charlie is a very nice package indeed. I think FlightOne have got the price right and DreamFleet have once again delivered a very attractive sim. The visual model is excellent, which reflects DreamFleet's increasing experience with Gmax and if Mikko stays with them we can confidently expect to see some really eye-catching sims from this outfit in the future. The avionics freaks are in for a treat with the GPS SL320, which seems likely to turn up in future DreamFleet releases, and if the tatty old radios please me, then they will surely turn on a raft of other simmers too. The 177 has already proved popular and Text-O-Matic liveries are out there in good numbers, even if there are hardly any UK registrations, hint, hint.

With the RG upgrade, 84 Charlie makes for another great release from FlightOne and DreamFleet. Looking at their web site DreamFleet have a Cessna 310 and a Boeing 727 in the pipeline, so there is plenty to look forward to - FlightSim.Com will keep you posted.

Visit developer DreamFleet.