DreamFleet Boeing 737-400 First Look

By Andrew Herd (6 August 2001)

o say that Greatest Airliners, aka the DreamFleet 737 is one of the most keenly awaited products for FS2000 is something of an understatement. The forums have been buzzing with rumors ever since the project was announced - but the waiting is over, with the product available for download from Flight One Software's e-commerce site. A CD version will follow later, but if you want this plane now (and you will) Flight One's servers have been specially beefed up to cope with the demand.

If you are concerned about purchasing the 737 with the forthcoming release of FS2002 on the horizon, don't be. DreamFleet's Lou Betti has indicated that the 737 will be compatible with FS2002, and even if a small patch is needed to accomplish this, there will be no extra charge for it.

The 737 was developed jointly by Flight One Software, DreamFleet, Terry Hill, and others, and there is no doubt that it is the best 737 available for FS2000. Thanks to Lou Betti of DreamFleet, I had an early alpha of the product to play with and even in its unfinished state it was clear that the aircraft was going to be well up to the team's usual standards. I am going to give you a quick run through the product here, before making a more in-depth review available later.

Getting hold of the 737 is pretty simple. The main .exe is approx 45 Mb and can be downloaded from one of several servers slaved to the Flight One site. This is big package, but the site supports resumable downloads, so even if you have a poor connection it should be possible to get it given patience. In addition to the main file, you will need the Quickstart manual, which is a 9 Mb zipped .pdf, and it is also worth visiting the support page, where patches will be available. Once you have downloaded the file, you will run the provided "ga737-1.exe", which will launch Flight One's E-Commerce software. Here you will provide the pertinent information, and upon purchase of the product, installation will take place. During this process, a "key" is deposited in a Flight One Software folder in your computer, and this key will allow you to re-install the 737 should you ever need to. Once you are up and running, you may also want to visit the DreamFleet technical support forum.

After installing the plane I was a bit foxed to discover that only one livery was available, British Midland, but soon discovered that a US Airways livery texture was also available for processing with the included Text-o-Matic utility to create an additional aircraft. Should you require more airlines in your 737 fleet, check out the DreamFleet web site, where there are dozens of free liveries available, covering operators in every part of the globe. Judging from the rate at which liveries are being added, there is going to be an enormous choice before long. As of my last check, there were 52!

As is usual with products where DreamFleet have been involved, a top quality digital camera has been used and not only for the main panel, but all the subsidiary views are extremely crisp, as you can see from the screen shot alongside. The exterior visuals were exceptional on all the liveries I downloaded, and the aircraft is fully animated with a transparent cockpit, and cabin, with seats, passengers, and even the overhead luggage bins, as one would expect from a Terry Hill plane. The flight dynamics (by Steve Small) comprehensively blow the default 737 away. Needless to say, the main and subsidiary panels are fully functional, and there is a complete EFIS system and realistic AFDS.

An excellent Flight Management Computer (FMC), with built in navigational data base, help files, and audio tutorials is available, developed by Tom Main. The FMC can be run outside Flight Simulator, in order to make learning to use it easier, and it is so well specified that I can imagine that some users will want to run it on a second monitor.

Sounds are courtesy of Mike Hambly (who else?), and were recorded from a real 737 with CFM engines.

The other freebie is called "Text-o-Matic" and it is a key part of the freeware livery system. Given the appropriate graphics software, it should be possible for amateurs to design attractive new liveries, and several are already available on the DreamFleet web site.

Documentation includes an 80+ page "Quick Start" manual, which should be enough to get you going, and a free 200+ page aircraft operations manual, which details the various systems, and even includes schematic diagrams of many of them. The FMC has its own built-in help system, and a printed version of this is soon to be released by the developers. Finally, there are the checklists: The "normal" checklist located on the FS2000 knee board is augmented with a printed .pdf version, along with some 20+ "abnormal" checklists, which cover everything from "uncommanded rudder", to flight through volcanic ash! All of these manuals and checklists are available for free, to anyone who visits the DreamFleet 2000 web site.

What do you need to run the DreamFleet 737? The developers advise a Pentium II-400 with a 16 MB 3D graphics card and 128 MB system memory as a minimum. My early trials of the software confirm this, and although people are claiming to get good performance using 300 MHz Pentiums, with any product this sophisticated, the more power you have, the better. If you have a sub-733 MHz machine, I would recommend having a look at the freeware FSUIPC utility, and updating your video drivers might prove helpful.

Do I like it? You bet. After you fly the DreamFleet 737 I guarantee that you will not want to use the default 737 ever again. Sure, there are a few bugs in the package, and the developers have already issued an interim patch, and their high profile in the forum means that other problems should be fixed before long. The service and support the team compares very well to that offered by other suppliers - most developers don't even reply to their email. Ironically, the up-front way things are being discussed in the forum has led some users to shy away from this product in the belief that there is something wrong with it! Granted, my experience with Flight Simulator goes back so far I can make most things work, but my experience of the software is that in reliability terms it is as good as, if not better than, most recent complex airliner releases for FS2000.

The 737 may not be prefect, a characteristic it shares with its real-life counterpart, but it has character in a way that very few other FS2000 airliners do. The moment the instrument panel came up and I saw the scratches and wear marks, and took in the years of hard use to which the cockpit had clearly been subjected, I felt right at home. Real airplanes do not sparkle the way so many simulated aircraft do; they get dirty and scuffed and develop their own personalities, and this 737 is as unique as any one that you might step into at an airport near you. Given the huge choice of free liveries, there really isn't any excuse for not buying it.