Abacus Flight Deck 4 For FS2004 And FSX

By Andrew Herd (22 March 2007)

guess Top Gun must be to blame - few simmers can have watched that film without wondering what it is like to land a fast jet on a big carrier, but for most people, a dream is all it will ever be... except that it is possible to capture a little of the magic thanks to Flight Deck 4. Flight Deck has about as long a pedigree as an Flight Simulator addon can have, given that the first version came out ten years ago, for FSFW95 and FS98; John Goodlow reviewed the package and he liked it a good deal. Three versions later, I still like it, so let's take a look.

As John remarked in his review, landing on a deck is a big change from touching down on a runway - from even a couple of thousand feet, a carrier looks an impossibly small target compared to five thousand feet of pavement. You can forget everything you learned about conventional landings, because the Navy 'plant' their planes on the deck, flying them on and catching the wire before slamming to a halt. Neither is there anything gentle about landing, the skill lying in absolute control of the approach parameters, because there isn't any margin for error at all when you are aiming at less than 300 feet of flight deck. An undershoot ends in a fireball on the fantail, a bounce can take you over the side and if you come in too high and miss the wires, the engines are unlikely to spool up fast enough to fly you out again, leaving you to stall over the bow and get run down by your own ship. Add to that the fact that there is very likely to be another plane thirty seconds behind and that if your ship is in a war zone the captain won't steer a straight course into wind for any longer than is absolutely necessary and flying with the Navy adds up to one of most challenging tasks known to man.

Flight Deck 4 is available boxed - in two boxes, as it happens, a cardboard box containing a plastic DVD style case. The contents included a CD-ROM, a 47 page manual, a registration card (don't lose this) and a quick start reference guide. I couldn't find any minimum system requirements, but the planes aren't that much more sophisticated than the default aircraft, so if your system can run FS2004 or FSX, you shouldn't have any problems as long as you have 270 Mb of hard disk space available.

The installation is straight forward apart from the need to enter a registration code; on my system, a dialog popped up early on asking if I wanted to cancel the FSX installation and when I clicked 'no' I had lost the focus on the setup window, which had retreated behind the banner. However, once I had dragged it blinking into the light, the rest of the installation went without a hitch, the only other caution I would give being that you must watch out for prompts to install the Flight Deck scenery and the Catapult launcher, without which you will find yourself up the Indian Ocean without a carrier, or at the very least, a method of getting off it.

I did the review on XP using a 3.2 Ghz Pentium D based system; a quick check of the Start menu revealed a new 'Flight Deck 4' entry under the Abacus group, within which were links to a pdf version of the printed manual; a - concise - panel guide for the Hornet; a useful pdf describing how to use the Improved Fresnel Lens Optical Landing System, aka the IFOLS, and best known as 'the meatball'; and links to the installation programs for the scenery and the catapult, just in case you missed them first time around. The main manual makes a good bedtime read, but lacks any detail whatsoever about v-speeds and configurations for the planes, abandoning the user to the time-honored system of trial and error if he wants to find out what works and what does not. Don't bother looking in the aircraft kneeboard data either, because mostly this is completely blank and in the few cases where you are favored with any words, they are pretty generic. Since landing an aircraft on a carrier is one of the most technical and difficult tasks known to man, it would have been a tremendous help to have a couple of pages describing how to set up each plane on a stabilised approach and I don't think it would be asking too much of the developers to have had a few more talking generally around the subject of how to pull off a successful touchdown. This could be remedied on Abacus' website for minimal cost and it would add hugely to users' enjoyment of what is otherwise a sound product.

You get six different planes, seven, if you count the F/A-18C and E as different aircraft. The remainder of the hangar comprises an E-2C Hawkeye, am S-3 Viking, an A-6B Prowler, a C-2A Greyhound, and an SH-60 Seahawk, which makes for a nice mix and provides plenty of opportunity to mess around and enjoy yourself flying Navy. If you didn't miss the installation dialog, you get the most modern carrier in the inventory, the 95000 ton Ronald Reagan, placed in four different locations: the Bay of Bengal; the South China Sea; the Mediterranean; and off the coast of San Diego. You also get a shedload of saved flights, which set you up to fly all the different aircraft on or off the carrier, at different times of day, in a huge variety of weather conditions - and since the whole point of buying Flight Deck is to be Tom Cruise and impress the girl (or boy, depending on your sex and orientation), these missions will form an essential part of your training. The one thing you don't get, of course, is the thrill of landing on the carrier when the deck is pitching sixty feet either way in bad weather, because FSX doesn't do waves.

The carrier being fairly essential to the enjoyment of the package, the whole point of which is to make incredibly noisy departures and landings on a flight deck without worrying about all the tedious stuff that happens in between, I guess a look at it wouldn't be out of order. As you can see from the shots, there is plenty of detail and lots of animation, including working blast ramps and catapults. The AI planes taxi into position, launch and fly into the wild blue yonder and the general effect is about as convincing as possible, as long as you can put up with the wave animations - which in FSX, at least, have a strong tendency to sweep right over the carrier. Another slight annoyance is that the blast ramps deploy over a fixed timescale, so that if you don't get launched quick, they have begun to retract again; as a point of interest, when they do retract, they progressively vanish into a smooth deck, leaving no sign of their former existence, which looks a bit odd. However, none of this matters in practice, because you ain't gonna be looking at the blast shields that much - what with the sound turned all the way up, the howl of 28000 pounds of thrust in back and Kelly McGillis on your mind.

All the planes have reasonably good flight models and the catapult gives you more than enough flying speed, although the turboprops have to be held in a shallow climb until have cleaned the plane up some - the F/A 18 on the other hand can be climbed out almost vertically with full afterburner, making for some epic moments. Should you decide to fly any of the in between bits and become uncertain of your position, the question of locating the carrier may arise, the solution being to tune in to the VOR the developers have located on the ship, talk to the tower on 128.7 and flying the ILS frequency.

Catapult launches are fun, but the hard part is getting back down in one piece. The first piece of advice I have is don't depart with full tanks, fly a circuit and expect to pull off a great landing, because none of the planes are that forgiving. The saved flights that come with the addon are the perfect way to practice approaches and landings, especially because the developers have turned on the old 'approach tube' of red rectangles extending out a couple of miles back from the carrier. This makes it a piece of cake to get lined up at the right speed and rate of descent, the problem coming in the final few seconds, where you have to do nineteen things at once, like easing back on the throttles, keeping on the centerline and holding the correct angle of attack so you can plant your steed on the deck and go find the girl. Actually, now I recall, the girls were on shore. Anyway, pulling off a textbook approach and landing isn't easy and has to be one of the most satisfying things you can do in FSX. One you have mastered the art of flying down the tube, you can go to the next stage and fly curved approaches, lining up the meatball on short final and riding it down like the pros do.

You will notice that I haven't said that much about the planes and for good reason. Allowing for some graphical glitches with the carrier and the almost total lack of any reference data on the aircraft, this is a neat product, which is different enough to stand well out of line with the average addon and fulfills the difficult aim of being fun for kids of all ages. The fun of Flight Deck 4 lies in the way sum of the parts that make up such a great deal. Sure, the planes are comparable with Microsoft's default set in that they have at best adequate 2D panels and passable virtual cockpits, with the result that none of them are good enough to stand out from the crowd - but that isn't the point. Flight Deck 4 is a real blast, as long as you take it the way the designers meant it - to be great fun and not the final word in FS aircraft design. The panels might be unsophisticated, but they don't need all the bells and whistles of the real thing, just enough to make 'em flyable on and off a carrier in the middle of a virtual ocean. And at that, Flight Deck 4 really, truly does succeed. I enjoyed playing with it more than I can say.