DreamFleet/Flight1 Boeing 727 for FS2004

By Andrew Herd (4 January 2005)

he latest addition to DreamFleet's 'Greatest Airliners' series is the Boeing 727 - which must also qualify as one of the most eagerly awaited addons for FS2004 of all time. News of this simulation first broke nearly three years ago, almost simultaneously with the announcement that Captain Simulations were to develop a a simulation of the same airliner. For a while, the race seemed to be on, but Captain Sim released towards the end of the FS2002 era and after the usual cycle of patches and updates theirs is now a mature FS2004 product, available in both download and boxed format. With the debut of the DreamFleet/Flight1 727 (effects - roll of drums), we have an almost unprecedented situation where two first rank developers have put their products head to head in a very competitive market. The good news is that this new 727 is a truly excellent simulation, so if you can't decide which of the pair to buy, read on...

Although the history of the 727 is available in the Captain Sim review, I am going to recap here for the benefit of DreamFleet fans. The prototype 727 flew on February 9th 1963, against a background of serious doubt concerning its viability. Boeing needn't have worried, because the customers didn't take much persuasion. 571 of the -100 series were sold, the majority in a dedicated passenger configuration - the 100C having a side cargo door which allowed it to carry mixed loads. The early variants were considered to be a bit tight on payload, so the 727-200 was stretched to take up to 189 passengers and just ran off the lines, with 1,245 sold. Perhaps the most noteworthy variant was the Advanced 727-200 which had "wide-body" restyling, more powerful engines and bigger tanks; considerably enhancing its payload/range capability, improving its takeoff performance and reducing - despite the 'whisperjet' promotional tag - its awe inspiring noise footprint.

Some idea of the performance improvement can be gained by comparing the gross weight of the 100 series (160,000 pounds) with that of the heaviest variant's gross weight which was 30% greater at 210,000 pounds. They type gained numerous records and when production ended in August 1984, the 727 fleet had carried four billion passengers in total, which makes you wonder why there were any initial doubts about sales - but passenger jets were new fangled things forty years ago. The only airliner which sold more hulls was Boeing's next model, the 737, which is available to simmers in the default aircraft set and in various commercial addons, but in January 2001, thirty-eight years after that first flight, nearly 1,300 727s were still in service and you can still see the first Boeing built, which flew continuously with United from 1964 until its retirement in 1991, earning a well earned rest in the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

Boeing are justifiably proud of the fact that 101 different airline customers purchased new 727s and while the major U.S. airlines have retired their oldest airframes, many are still operating their younger 727-200s. Forty years after the plane first took to the skies, the Achilles' heel of this old lady is high fuel consumption and the racket she makes; so many 727s have been retro-fitted with "hush kits" to keep them legal. By 2005, the majors will have retired their fleets completely, but there is little doubt that 'twenty-sevens' will continue to see service with second and third tier airlines for decades to come, because in many respects the 727 is the DC-3 reincarnated.

The developers make a good point in the documentation about the handling qualities of the 727, so before beginning the review in earnest, it might be worth taking a look at this. The 727 was a world away from the sophistication of modern planes, its design being only a generation away from the introduction of simple autopilots and at the time of its introduction, many of the other planes with which it shared the skies were powered by normally aspirated engines, along with a scattering of early turboprops.

Jets had the obvious attraction of offering higher speeds and operating altitudes, but had the drawback of much less docile handling and higher approach speeds, thanks to their swept wings. They were also new - not necessarily a good thing when the client was a very conservative industry, with fresh memories of the de Havilland Comet disaster. Boeing answered most of their questions by using a sophisticated wing with triple-slotted trailing edge Fowler flaps and leading-edge slats, giving the 727 the sort of low-speed landing and takeoff performance which allowed it to operate with ease off the shorter runways that were in use in those days - increasing the safety margin and reducing demands on pilot skills, a necessary concession at a time when jets were relatively few and far between. But sophisticated though the wing and engines might have been, the avionics still belonged to an earlier era and to my mind, this is one of the attractions of this type of simulation - admittedly the 727 has a simple autopilot, but it lacks any kind of vertical navigation or autoland facility and the result is that this simulation has to be flown. Once the plane is airborne, you will not be able to remove the yoke from the desk, engage the nav modes and go away and make a cup of coffee; to make it home in this one, you will actually have to use the controls. Imagine that?

The package is a 115 Mb download, which would have attracted comment at one time, but is par for the course nowadays where complex airliner sims are concerned; and it costs $34.95, about which much the same comments could be made. FS addons of this sort of complexity require vast amounts of programming effort and the time has passed when they can be sold at bargain basement prices, if users' increasing expectations are to be satisfied.

Installation requires use of the Flight1 copy protection key, which will be familiar to many simmers and has always worked reliably in my experience. Once downloaded, the addon installs automatically and creates its own program group under the Flight1 banner, with links to an aircraft operations manual, quick reference handbook, tutorial flight, configuration manager and text-o-matic help, and the configuration manager and text-o-matic programs themselves.

Configuration manager is a complex, but pleasing little app which allows setup of numerous features and parameters, including the fuel flow rate necessary to trigger engine smoke; the windshear alerting system; engine and brake failure probability; enhanced/basic sound set usage and effects volumes; choice of cockpit state (cold and dark/ready to start engines/ready for taxi); choice of co-pilot voice from a selection of five; aircraft model (passenger/cargo); avionics fit (interesting one this, as a semi-glass cockpit is on offer, including the excellent weather radar, which had to be a bargain in anyone's money, given that the radar costs $24.95 as a stand-alone item from Reality-XP); VC/no VC and VC resolution; use of all round 2D panel views; and passenger and cargo loading, the latter using a graphical manager of the kind that seems to increasingly becoming a standard nowadays - I would be interested to see if Microsoft don't offer something similar in the next version of Flight Simulator, assuming that is, that the sales of FS2004 are good enough to encourage them to develop a new version.

When all is said and done, configuration manager doesn't leave much about the aircraft that you can change, apart from the livery, which is handled by the new version of Flight1's text-o-matic, in itself a huge improvement on the old version, even if it still doesn't quite conform to windows conventions. The choice is truly endless and I guess no two simmers will end up with quite the same setup, which is one of the attractions of the package.

The manual makes much of the fact that it is sensible to load the default 172 at a default airport before selecting the 727, the reasoning being that it avoids the potential for a previously loaded addon introducing problems with the setup. A total of sixteen liveries are included, in the usual DXT3 format, and the Flight1 website mentions more detailed, but memory hungry, uncompressed 32 bit textures, but I was unable to find any despite a search around my hard disk and the F1 site. With the -100 model, the choice varies from Alaska to UPS; and with the -200 from Condor to Varig Log, but if your favorite livery isn't included, just wait, because the chances of it turning up as a freeware text-o-matic addon are pretty good. The visual model is nicely detailed, with the exception of non-transparent passenger windows, though these have been neatly painted and no doubt contribute to the excellent frame rates I saw. As with the real 727, flap deployment is for the connoisseur and with everything down it looks as if all you have to do is unscrew a few panels and the whole wing should come apart. The gear is there is all its glory and you get all the usual animations, including forward and rear air stairs and cargo doors. Before anyone asks why the thrust reversers don't work, the answer is that there wasn't much to see on the early 727s, which were built before clamshells became de rigeur. As mentioned above, at the appropriate trigger setting for fuel flow in configuration manager, the aircraft trails smoke like a good 'un, explaining why you don't see 727s so often nowadays. Despite all the detail and animation, frame rates hovered around 30 in external view using DXT3 textures with the plane on the threshold at EGNT, which is more than acceptable. One peculiarity the 727 shares with many other FS2004 addons is that the nose gear 'bounces' several times after external view is selected, which makes it look kind of goofy until it settles down.

The 2D panel is the first place where the F1/DreamFleet addon offers something extra over the Captain Sim plane as both left and right hand seat views are included. A mind-numbing total of nineteen views are supplied, including normal and landing views for both seats; the overhead, pedestal and throttle stack; upper and lower flight engineer's panel views; engine instruments and APU control panels; the flap and gear panel; paired left and right passenger views; autopilot panel; compass; and of course, the weather radar, which is something else the Captain Sim 727 does not offer. The panels can be selected using the panel window controller, accessed by clicking a switch bottom left of the captain's view, there are numerous hotspots and of course the usual key combinations can be used to find your way around. The quality of the panel graphics are at least as good as those of the Captain Sim 727 at 1024 x 768 and although they are very slightly grainy at 1600 x 1200 (warning, this is a large file), they are perfectly acceptable - and better quality than anything else you are likely to see outside the Flight1 and Captain Sim product lines. To my unbounded joy, the autopilot panel is considerably larger than the Captain Sim equivalent, which at least means at last you can see what you are doing when you are trying to tame the beast.

On the analogue panel, the instrumentation includes an rather nice first generation HSI, besides the usual attitude director and you also get a tape display radar altimeter, but leaving aside the weather radar, that is pretty much it over and above what you would find in a modern club Cessna. The glass panel, on the other hand, features a custom built electronic attitude and direction indicator and an electronic HSI that not only fit in the in their bezels like they belong there, but use fine graphics that run absolutely as smooth as silk. The EHSI is a particularly neat piece of programming that not only displays a track line if a flight plan is loaded, but has a built in traffic collision and avoidance system, along with all the usual bells and whistles, like adjustable range. Frame rates in the 2D cockpit once again hovered around 30 with the aircraft in the same location.

The virtual cockpit is sharp and bright and pretty much everything you can see is functional, with the notable exception of the flight engineer's panel, which is a static bitmap. Getting around the VC can be facilitated either by downloading Flight1's free 'view' tool, or by using ActiveCamera, which should need no introduction to readers by now. Night lighting is available in both the VC and the 2D panel.

Operating the addon is reasonably smple as long as you take the precaution of reading the documentation first. Although the operations manual is a chunky 172 pages long, it is extremely well written - as is the 57 page tutorial flight, which takes you from Budapest Ferihagy to Franz Josef Strauss Airport, Munich. The tutorial includes everything you need to know to navigate a DHL 727-200 between the two airports, including using configuration manager to set the loading and fuel, right through engine start up, taxiing and the flight itself. If you are new to complex FS addons, reading the tutorial is pretty much compulsory, though if you are an experienced turn and burn flyer, you should be able to get away with loading the aircraft hot and working out how everything works once you are in the air (if you have been given a real 727 for Christmas, please do not try any of this before getting your ATPL). One of the small bugs I came across involved some of the electrics switching off while I was running the APU on the ground, but a workaround has been posted in the DreamFleet support forum. Various apparently random beepings in flight can be traced to the pressurisation horn, which can be turned off using a switch on the Flight Engineer's panel, or cured by turning the air conditioning packs on.

Full engine starts are achievable, which is all you would expect, given the type of sim this is, after which dropping some flap and firewalling the throttles will result in a takeoff of a kind, though with an annoying alarm clanging in your ear, which is the trim warning shouting that you are outside the green range on the pedestal and that 727s do not like to fly in an out of trim condition, Sir. Working out what the hell was making all the noise distracted me from the co-pilot, who was patiently talking me off the runway, but once the trim was right, the sim virtually flew itself off the ground (no pun intended, though I reserve the right to use that one later). We eventually got airborne, after which I spent a few minutes trying to remember why the autopilot wouldn't engage, which was because the yaw dampers were out, a situation which results in an instant disconnect. The autopilot feels seriously retro after the mode control panels which are standard on modern airliners, but it is made even more interesting by the fact that it isn't coupled to the flight director. This apparently defies sense, given that most modern autopilots won't work unless the flight director is switched on, but electronics only went so far in those days and the joys of solid state lay some way in the future; so it is quite possible to set one mode on the FD and another on the AP, with the plane following the autopilot while the flight director bar climb into a corner and sulk. Needless to say, testing the approach mode on the autopilot was simple, given that there isn't one and though you can use the unit to follow the FD bars, it is generally easier to do it by hand.

The flight dynamics seem to be fairly on the mark, bearing in mind that 727s were reasonably maneuverable while tending to remain where you last pointed them. Once in flight, the hallmark of this bird was a significant excess of power at the lower flight levels and the sim delivers precisely that, so watch those throttles when you level out at the first altitude restriction. As usual, I didn't sit down and check power settings against every combination of speed and climb, life being too short, but on the whole, the 727 felt right.

The sound set is another excellent piece of work by Mike Hambly and suitably growly. The noise levels in the cockpit and cabin are low, as befits this rear-engined jet, so if you want to listen to the JT8D-11s at full chat, you will have to swap to spot plane view, where they do not disappoint.

All in all, the Flight1/DreamFleet 727 has a great deal to offer, making a worthy rival to the Captain Sim package. If you discount a few bugs (before you send me an email, this is a review, not a beta test, so I haven't attempted to document every single one, but compared to the usual state of FS addons on release, the 727 is remarkably bug free), which should be easily fixed with a patch, the package works well, returns extremely high frame rates and is serious fun to fly. 'Extras' over and above the Captain Sim fit include the co-pilot panel and the weather radar, which make this an exceptionally attractive addon - another classic from the DreamFleet hangar. Needless to say, it also gets an Armchair Aviator Award, because they don't make many sims as good as this.

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