DreamFleet Beechcraft Bonanza

By Andrew Herd (29 April 2005)

Watch the DreamFleet A36 in action in the FlightSim.Com Cineplex

f any plane currently in production can claim to be a classic, the Beech A36 surely deserves the name - few aircraft can rival its production run of nearly sixty years and if most GA pilots were asked to name a single-engined IFR platform, the Bonanza would be high on the list.

The Beech 35 Bonanza that went into production in 1947 stood apart from other planes of the era because it was the very first high performance GA single to go into volume production. Until its appearance, most private flying was done in relatively slow sub-150 horse, high wing, rag and tube airplanes and it doesn't take much imagination to see how this new kid on the block turned a lot of heads, although a new one would have set you back nearly $8000 in those days. It seems cheap now, given that today, a suitably equipped A36 costs nearer to half a million bucks, but that's inflation for you.

The 35 was distinguished by being one of the first GA planes to have retractible gear and it was fast because it was streamlined, made extensive use of flush riveting and had a 165 hp Continental which let it cruise at an astonishing 175 mph. Ralph Harmon, the designer, endowed it with a signature V-tail, a feature that still makes 35's stand out from the crowd, but which led to problems with Dutch roll and a string of fatal crashes due to empennage failure back in the eighties. However, the basic concept was a good one though and once the bugs were out, Beech concentrated on refining the airframe and shoehorning in larger and larger engines until the turbocharged V35TC ended the line.

The A36 saw the light of day in '68, in the form of a stretched version of the A35, with a conventional fin and a 285 hp Continental IO-520-B. It still retained much of the spirit of the older models, with a throwover control column mounted on an in-your-face pedestal that could have been used to tie up an ocean liner and the plane's handling was more sedate than the sporty V35, but it exuded class. As a true six-seater, the A36 was a triumph of design, in that the airframe only weighed something like 35 pounds higher than the A35 - which was best described as a 4+2, since the rear seats were only really suitable for kids. The new model was intended to compete with the Cessna 206, which had cornered the air taxi market and it proved to be an immediate success, apart from the fact that early hulls only had 44 gallons of tankage. By 1980 a program of continuous improvement had upgraded this to a more reasonable 80 gallons and the plane was well on its way to evolving into the workhorse IFR platform we know today. In the mid-eighties, the unloved IO-520 was replaced by the more powerful (and considerably more reliable) 300 hp IO-550 and this model remains in production with more than 3000 A36's flying today. One little known fact about this plane is that the military T-34 trainer shares virtually the same hull, which explains why the Bonanza's gear is so over-engineered - it had to be able to cope with the military landing it.

It goes without saying that the performance of the A36 is more than adequate. You can expect to cruise at 190 mph and climb at a thousand feet per minute and although the control forces are higher than they are in a V35, the plane tends to stay where it is pointed, allowing the pilot to concentrate on navigation and communication - the 35 series demands to be aviated, which makes it less suitable for IFR. Despite this, most pilots would only fly an A36 IFR for any length of time using the autopilot; it just makes good sense to do so. The A36's inherent stability is reflected in a c of g range which is almost triple that of the V35, some models of which can theoretically be loaded within range at takeoff, but wander out of it later due to fuel burn. The only snag with the luxurious A36 is that it feels a bit nose-heavy unless it is reasonably well loaded, yet if you seat six people inside one there isn't anywhere to put their luggage, but then life wouldn't be so interesting if it didn't present the occasional challenge.

Various after market mods are available, many owners of early A36s opting to replace the IO-520 with an IO-550 and to replace the original two bladed prop with a three, or even a four bladed unit. Inevitably, Colemill are in the forefront of conversions and owners can also look for support to the American Bonanza Society, which offers a magazine and merchandise in addition to their website.

The package is a 52 Mb download and I tested it with the 1.1 update applied, which is another 5.45 Mb. DreamFleet have chosen Flight 1 as their marketing partner and so the A36 uses the Flight 1 packaging system and key, which has never failed me yet. The installation creates a new program group with a link to a 139 page orientation manual and an uninstall icon, not that many users are likely to use the latter. Checking out FS2004 revealed that two variants of the plane had been installed, one with tip tanks and one without, together with a couple of liveries - there is an opportunity to further customise the plane via an option to add a radar pod on the wing, although to be fair, I can't ever recall seeing one fitted to this particular model. Since Text 'o Matic is included, additional liveries are very easily installed, and a quick check of DreamFleet's website showed up another nine waiting to be downloaded. A few have also appeared on Flightsim.com.

DreamFleet products are distinguished by a general commitment to quality which extends to the documentation. A hundred and thirty nine pages might seem like a lot, but this is a very complex little plane and the advantage of the hand-holding approach taken by the manual is that a relative newbie could operate most of the avionics, having given the docs a thorough read. Every aspect of the plane and its systems is covered, including a thorough tutorial on autopilot operation by Peter McLeland, a retired British Airways captain - the autopilot included as part of the avionics stack being a somewhat simplified Bendix-King KFC 225, the defining feature of the original unit being that it seems to have been intentionally designed to make the user think hard before pressing anything, so just be grateful that DreamFleet haven't reproduced the box completely authentically.

Moving onto the plane, the visual model is extremely neat, as one would expect from the experienced team that coded it. An unusually wide range of animations is included, starting with conventional stuff like moving sun visors and arm rests and a pilot with a turning head, but after that, all I can say is that if you try clicking on a thing, it is almost certain to do something. The pilot's ventilation window opens, as does the glove box and the cabin doors, the passenger table can be folded up and down and the leaves open and close, the rear seats can be collapsed and the reading light switches work. Gadget freaks need look no further (-:

It has been a long while since a DreamFleet plane hasn't included a right hand seat panel and the Bonanza is no exception; although the split has meant cutting the avionics in half in the left hand seat view, the arrangement works. The 2D panel is depicted from a lowish viewpoint in order to get all the gauges in and so a 'landing panel' is included, which improves the forward view (see the shot on the left a couple of image rows down). Surprisingly, in view of its sharpness, the main panel graphic is based on a 1024 x 768 graphic, but nonetheless it looks good at 1600 x 1200, apart from a little dithering at dawn and dusk. A full set of 2D cockpit views is included, which I like - most developers seem to opt either for the Microsoft approach and leave all the views other than forward 'open', or use VC views, which more often than not looks strange, given the inevitable textural mismatches.

The first thing that greets you when the 2D panel loads is the configuration control, a seriously neat idea, which allows you among other things, to remove the VC on the fly, or to remove just the reflective glass, or zap the virtual cabin. Since virtual cockpits are notorious frame eaters, this should allow near enough anyone to run the addon. The applet also lets you mute the engine sounds as if you are wearing noise reduction headphones, and set the visual model up for a pre-flight inspection, by removing the pilot, opening the tank caps, tying the plane down, and opening the cowling and the fuel sump drain door. As DreamFleet state in the manual, you cannot do any of this stuff while the A36 is in flight, a shame, since it deprives reviewers of honest enjoyment, but it is a clever piece of coding nonetheless. Once you have the plane fixed the way you want it, the configuration control can be set to remain hidden, until you recall it via the FS menu - and one of the really good things you can do with it is to adjust the volume of the audible warnings and the switches. For some reason, developers always give FS switches the most astonishingly loud clicks; enough to compete with the engine noise in some addons.

Multiple pop-up panels are available in the 2D view and the panel is littered with hot spots which trigger them. The full list includes the Garmin GNS 430, the avionics stack, throttles and trim, switch panel, fuel selector, weather radar, clock, default GPS, and zooms for all the major instruments, but that ain't the end of it. Top left of the 2D panel view is a slim icon which controls the Reality-XP drop stack - Reality-XP developed the GNS 430 and the radar, which are linked to the A36 and can't be used for other planes on your hard disk.

The standard of instrument programming is incredibly high, as the screenshots show. All the gauges have reflective glass effects, the faces and needles are very fine and DreamFleet haven't fallen foul of the common fault of including gauges from previous generation releases, unless you count the stack, parts of which have appeared in other DF FS2004 planes. Since it is a particularly fine stack, this reviewer has no complaints, but other developers should take heed of the way all the needles are in proportion and how all the legends stay crisp right up to the highest resolutions Flight Simulator can support.

We have reviewed the Reality-XP weather radar before, so I will pass over this excellent unit, beyond saying that purchasers can look forward to having a great deal of fun with it - the screenshot shows the expanded view of the gauge shown over the landing view panel. The GNS 430 is a simulation of Garmin's 'baby' GPS nav/comm unit and is as an exact simulation of one of these fabulous little beasts as you can hope to find for FS2004. Were space and time not a consideration, it would merit several paragraphs, but it makes the default GPS look sick and if you can learn how to operate the unit in Flight Simulator, a real one won't present any problems, as long as you have $6750 to buy the unit.

Yep, it is true that if God had meant man to fly, he would have given him more money.

DreamFleet have taken the IFR tag attached to the A36 seriously and the plane they have simulated is stuffed with so much avionics it is hard to imagine how it gets off the ground. In real life, your chances of seeing a panel like this one are virtually nil, because if an owner could afford this level of kit, he or she would almost certainly have bought a twin, single-engined IFR being something of an acquired taste, but in a sim there is nothing stopping a developer fitting the kitchen sink and I am sure there must be one somewhere in back. Beyond the Reality-XP gauges, the instruments of particular interest are the JP Instruments EDM 700 cylinder head/exhaust gas temperature monitor, developed by Bill Leaming from Eaglesoft - the real unit makes leaning a cinch, because all you have to do is keep turning the vernier until the hottest cylinder reads peak EGT, then screw it back in again until the temp falls around 20 degrees. Describing this as a no-brain operation is an understatement, because the 'lean find' function identifies the peak for you and due to the limitations of Flight Simulator, the hot pot is always number five. If you want a real one, the instrument is a steal at $1900, but having owned a plane which wouldn't have had a forced landing if we had had something similar fitted (an exhaust valve failed), I consider them cheap at the price - given that the top overhaul our O-235 required cost around $9000. Conventional EGT gauges are wired to a single cylinder and while this gives an idea of how the engine is doing, it being bad luck on you if it doesn't happen to be the hot one. By and large, Flight Simulator spares you the problems of real life EGT management and the real EDM 700 lets you monitor the shock cooling rate, minimising the occurrence of which is one of the keys to long engine life, although as far as I can see this isn't modelled in the sim.

The other smart gauge is the simulation of the Sandel SN3308 electronic horizontal situation indicator (EHSI) developed for the package by Coyote Avionics Design. This is a very fine instrument which costs around $9000 retail, but it offers much more than the radio magnetic indicator (RMI) more often found in well specced GA panels, due to the graphical nature of the instrument and the wide range of data presentation functions on offer. You can drive the CDI needle from any of the nav radios, or slave the instrument to the GNS 430, in which case the CDI will auto-slew to the next course set in your GPS flight plan as you pass a waypoint. A neat piece of kit in real life and it was the source of some serious entertainment for me in the course of writing this review. Want one.

The virtual cockpit (above) is as good as anything DreamFleet have ever offered, which means that it is state-of-the-art as far as FS coding is concerned and all the switches work - just as long as you don't move the viewpoint back too far. The temptation when using FS2004 VCs is to pull the viewpoint back until you can see enough of the panel to fly without continually shifting the POV, but the problem in many addons is that this stops the hand appearing when you move the mouse pointer over a gauge control. The solution is to move the POV forward until the hand appears again. Don't take this as a criticism of the A36, because the behavior is common to many FS packages.

The flight model is very good and reflects both the comparative stability of the A36 and the characteristics that make it such a pleasure to fly. Having so much power on tap means that it is possible to fly the approach at airliner type speeds and although the stall speed isn't that much higher than most of the spamcans, it does pay to carry some power into the flare, just like it does in the real plane. Test flights revealed that the avionics worked well together, the key to a trouble-free existance being understanding what the autopilot mode annunciator and the Nav/GPS source select switches are trying to tell you - because with so many nav sources available, it is extremely easy to think you have everything set up fine, only to discover that the autopilot is slaved to the GPS, rather than the Nav1 radial you have selected on the Sandel. So when you are setting course, triple check everything and then apply the law of reasonableness - if the sea should be on the left during the first leg, take a look out the window to make sure that is where it is. That being said, IFR gladiators will love the ability to fly a flight plan using the GNS 430, do cross-cuts with the SN3308 and then switch to the Nav radios to fly the ILS.

I flew several localiser intercepts with the A36 and it did well as long as I didn't try any right angle stuff - which is as expected, given that real world units can't handle insults like that either. With more normal 30 degree intercepts there was a minimum of fish-tailing and approaches were fun to fly, especially since the speed could be kept up to 140 knots. As I mentioned above, a bit of careful handling of the throttles in the flare will allow your virtual passengers to keep their lunch down. All in all, the Bonanza is a joy to fly and the sound set is great too, as long as you turn those switch noises down a little.

Verdict? With the 1.1 patch applied, very nice indeed, with no significant bugs, so the DreamFleet A36 gets an Armchair Aviator Award. We do our best to steer clear of reviewing products which don't make the grade, so the very fact that an addon gets a FlightSim.Com review means that it is a good one - but the intention of making AAA awards is to identify high-quality packages that can be bought without any fear of disappointment and I guess if any plane deserves a seal of approval, the A36 is a fine example. I look forward to seeing DreamFleet's next project.