Freeware Focus - Daviator Stearman

By Andrew Herd (21 April 2005)

Click here to watch a video of the Daviator Stearman Kaydet in flight

've written about addons with staying power and here is another one - the Daviator Stearman Kaydet has been updated. Last time we reviewed the package was back in June 2002 at which time it had already gotten itself all kinds of awards, but now it is back, even better, for FS2004.

Lloyd Carleton Stearman began his aviation career as a mechanic in 1919. He was in good company - one of his colleagues was called Walter Beech and the pair of them joined up with another complete unknown by the name of Clyde Cessna to form Travel Air Manufacturing Company in 1924. Needless to say, a partnership of such giants could hardly last and Stearman left after a couple of years to found the Stearman Aircraft Corporation. In '29 the company was absorbed into the gigantic United Aircraft and Transport Corporation which ran not only Boeing, Sikorsky and Vought, but also United Airlines, Pratt & Whitney and Hamilton Standard. UA&T was broken up in an anti-trust case five years later at which time Stearman became a division of Boeing.

The Kaydet, designed by Harold Zipp and Jack Clark, first saw the light of day under the unromantic designation of "Model 70" and it was yet another lucky seven for Boeing, though things might have turned out differently had World War II not come about. The 1933 design had built in obsolescence with its fabric-covered wooden wings, single-leg landing gear and a heavy welded steel fuselage, but it was as tough as old boots and very cheap to build, which made it the ideal trainer for student pilots.

The Stearman became the first completely standardized primary training plane to be used by both branches of the U.S. armed forces. In the process this simple design acquired a bewildering variety of classifications, being known by the Army as the PT-13, PT-17, PT-18 and PT-27; and to the Navy as the N2S-1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

After the war the Stearman saw widespread service with recreational flyers, crop dusters and barnstormers, becoming a particular favorite for wingwalkers, who still use the plane today. Hulls were churned out at such speed that no-one is sure how many were actually built, but between 1936 and 1944, Boeing built 8,584 Kaydets, in all versions, plus the equivalent of 2,000 more in spares, so the total production almost certainly topped 10,000. In addition to sales to the US military, Stearmans were sold to China, Canada, Argentina, Venezuela, the Philippines and Brazil for military and civilian purposes and many are still going strong. Power plants included 220-hp Lycomings and Continentals or a 245-hp Jacobs engine, which saw the cooking Stearman flat out at 124 mph, cruise at 106 mph, climb to just over 11,000 feet and fly a little over 500 miles. Slow the Stearman might be by today's standards, but there is no doubt that it is fun to fly and as I hope the screenshots show, it is big. Pulling one out of the hangar single handed is not for the faint hearted.

The package has a long history, having first appeared as an FS2000 addon over five years ago, the package weighing in at under one megabyte and scoring nearly 9000 downloads, which was exceptional by the standards of the day. When we reviewed the Daviator Stearman three years ago, it had grown to a 7 Mb package with an automatic installation routine that installed four different liveries. There was very little to find fault with and in retrospect (as if it wasn't pretty clear at the time) it was one of the best biplanes ever produced for FS2002. Now it is back, with an almost completely rebuilt visual model, new textures, a new panel, new flight dynamics, a new engine and wooden prop on some models, a rebuilt VC and an extra livery. The download has grown to 17 Mb, but if that is the price of progress, I'm a believer.

The team has changed along with the simulation. Back in 2002, David Eckert did most of the work, flight dynamics being by FSAviator and sound by Mike Hambly. As prime mover, David did the aircraft, panel and XML gauges in the new version, but it includes a scenery package by Mark Smith and flight dynamics by Dennis Seeley. The installation routine works extremely well and all you have to do after the download is get in and fly the thing, that is, apart from following the instructions in the \fs9\aircraft\stearman docs folder on how to activate the Eagle Field scenery.

As you can see from the shots above, the visual model, which was good in the FS2002 version, has improved out of all recognition and the detail on the engine alone deserves some kind of award. The chunky lines of the original plane are extremely well captured and the attention that has gone into stuff like the rigging wires and even the pitot head - which is complete right down to the strut fixings and the split lines attached to it - exceeds that seen in many payware addons. If you switch to spot plane view and look into the cockpit from above, the front seat has scratches on it where the passengers' shoes have scuffed it as they got in, and the welded tube structure is modelled, along with the twin boards that serve as a floor. If you drop something in a Stearman, you just have to cross your fingers and hope it doesn't slide aft and get jammed in something vital.

This being one of the few sims I have seen which has managed to capture the fabric over rib effect convincingly, the Daviator Stearman was already getting high marks before I started looking at it closely, but the textures are to die for. Apart from the fact that the colors are spot on and the minor details that most developers are content to leave out, are in, like all the 'no step' decals and the notice on the empennage which cautions mechanics to disconnect the electrical wiring before removing the rudder.

Been there and done that. Ouch.

The schemes have been chosen to provide maximum contrast and although repaints are already beginning to appear, if you decide to stick with the original liveries, there is plenty to please the eye. My favorite is the USAAF PT13D scheme, which for all that it is gray, shows the lines of the sim off to advantage - but I took screenshots of all the planes in the process of writing this review and had a hard time choosing between them.

The cockpit is shown in the screenshots below, with the 2D panel on the left and the virtual cockpit (VC) on the right. As you can see, there isn't much to choose between them, beyond the inevitable perspective problem that the VC presents FS2004 developers - to get the eyepoint far enough back to see the instruments clearly, the pilot would have to be sitting astride the rear fuselage. This is something that Maddox got right in Il2 and it would surely be an improvement if it could be fixed in the next version of Flight Simulator, because it is one of the weakest points of the simulation..

Anyway, the main panel contains little more than the essential flight instruments, plus a combined fuel, oil pressure and temp gauge and a few switches. There is a handful of subpanels, including the default GPS and radio stack; the fuel primer and tank selector; a fuel gauge which is the only part of the addon which doesn't qualify for an award; the throttle quadrant; primer; and pitch trim. Strictly, a Stearman pilot could do without the radios and the GPS, since they fly by following roads and stop and ask when they get lost, but since Flight Simulator hasn't got as far as virtual farm hands, I suppose the GPS is gonna have to stay.

The flight model is just right for a plane which has two hundred plus horsepower pulling one way and two thousand odd pounds plus two wings and wires pulling the other. It takes a while for the tail to come up, during which time there isn't any forward view unless you do S turns to clear ahead. Taildraggers are fun and all flight simmers love 'em, but when you have a real one taxi into someone else's aircaft and lived through the recriminations surrounding the insurance clain, you learn to have a healthy respect for them. This is not a Pitts and the Stearman flies like a small ocean liner; but aerobatics are possible, they just take a little planning if you aren't to run out of airspeed at the wrong moment, and the rate of roll gives you plenty of time to wonder what might have been had there been another set of ailerons on the upper wing, but the airframe stays where it is put and you can easily understand why the Stearman was and is a popular airplane, though the hull only gives of its best if treated with the proper amount of respect.

It goes without saying that this package is going to be a very, very popular download and it has already been targeted for repaints. The FS2002 release was downloaded over 20,000 times, but the FS2004 version is so good, I suspect that figure is going to be exceeded by a comfortable margin with this new release. Taking a trawl through the archives shows that David Eckert has been designing FS addons for at least six years, the first file we have from him being a Waco CG-4A troop glider (WACOCG4A.ZIP). He has a wide repertoire, having done some CFS stuff and released some very popular choppers in his time, starting with a very popular Kaman HH-43B Huskie (HH43B.ZIP) and a Sikorsky Hoverfly (R4HVRFLY.ZIP), but his main interest is classic planes, proved by a string of releases such as a Lockheed Electra (ELECT10E.ZIP), Republic P-43A (P43.ZIP), Albatross D V (ALBATRD5.ZIP), and a Grumman Avenger for FS2000 (TBM_AVNG.ZIP). After that, the Stearman has been Dave's main focus of attention, although he somehow found time to code a superb visual model for the award winning Martin B-26 Marauder (HHIKER.ZIP) package released in May last year.

Although the Stearman is freeware, David has put thousands of hours into producing packages so that you and I can enjoy them and you can support his efforts by making donations at the Daviator website. Pay for freeware? Well, why not. If every user of the FS2002 release had paid a dollar into the pot, imagine how much more encouraged Dave would have been. As it is, we have a superb - and I really mean, superb - piece of freeware here, which is, without any doubt whatsoever, the best biplane addon of any description available for FS2004. If all commercial products were as good as this freeware release, writing reviews would be a real pleasure all the time. As it is, it is moments like these that make flight simulation such a great hobby - best wishes from the entire team here at FlightSim.Com to Dave, Mark and Dennis, and we can't wait to see what they are going to do next.

By the way, if you are wondering where all the great skies came from, they are courtesy of Flight1's FS Environment, which is the next package we are going to review. Stay tuned.

Click here to watch a video of the Daviator Stearman Kaydet in flight