feelThere Cessna Caravan! Deluxe for FS2004

By Andrew Herd (26 July 2005)

f any airplane deserves the epithet 'modern classic', Cessna's Caravan is it, yet the plane could hardly have had a less auspicious start. In the early '80s, the general aviation industry was staring into the abyss and thoughts were of survival, not development; yet John Berwick and Dave Ellis set out to take the bushplane concept to the next level. What they had spotted was a gap in the market for an easily maintained, heavy hauling, airborne pickup that would replace ageing Beavers and Otters and extend the Cessna line where the 206 and 207 left off. In a textbook operation, Cessna despatched researchers out to the boonies to talk to pilots and fleet operators about what kind of a plane was needed, and to gain experience in the type of operations involved and sort of loads that had to be carried. The engineers learned a good deal more than they ever wanted to know about bush work and by all accounts some of them still wake up screaming from their sleep, but the end result was one of the best airplanes ever built.

At first glance, there doesn't seem to be anything remarkable about the Caravan at all - I still read occasional posts in the forums from simmers wondering why Microsoft included it in FS2004. True, the $650,000 Cessna wanted for one in 1985 blew most bush operator's minds, but it wasn't long before they were queuing up to buy Caravans, because it turned out that once you had gone through the pain of buying one of the danged things, you could afford to keep on running it until it was too old to fly any more. In service, Caravans are fabulously reliable, with despatch rates exceeding 95% - some operators achieve 99%, which is unheard of in the cargo business.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of owning an airplane, the downside is the need to keep it serviceable and safe. The regulations vary from one country to another, but most require you to have the airframe and engine checked out every 50 hours, have a more extensive check done every 150, a really thorough check once a year and have the whole airplane near enough taken apart every third year. On top of that, you must have the hull checked for corrosion annually and you have to completely overhaul the engine at the 2000 hour mark. I paraphrase, but you get my drift. The expense lies not so much in the cost of the inspections themselves, which is bad enough, but the problems they turn up - over any three year cycle, many older airplanes are capable of running up bills which equal the residual hull value and can spend so long in the workshop getting fixed that it is easy to gain the impression that the maintenance organisation sees more of the plane than you do. On top of that, you can find yourself dealing with Airworthiness Directives (the dreaded ADs), which can pitch you into a whole new world of hurt by compelling you to replace major components and sometimes even place a total hours limit on the hull. Oh - I forgot that if you have a constant speed prop, it has its own service cycle and then the radios have to be recertified and if the hull is pressurised...

It isn't easy to make a profit when you are faced with this kind of stuff, but there is no getting away from it, either, unless you happen to be a Caravan owner. It turned out that Berwick and Ellis had designed the Caravan so well that virtually nothing ever went wrong with it and most hulls sail through service cycles and let their owners get on with the business of flying pax and freight and making money. But, as I indicated above, it took a while for this extraordinary characteristic of Cessna's new baby to get out, because many potential customers got no further than looking at the turbine - dangerously expensive to service, very sophisticated, Hank can't just pour oil all over one of those, hit it with a hammer and get it going again - and the nose wheel. The good ol' boys supplying oil rigs down in Lousiana didn't do nose wheels and neither did their buddies up in the Yukon and Alaska, but when they pushed their glasses up their noses, hunkered down and took a real good look, they had to admit the strut was as tough as all got out. It had to be; Cessna had braced it with the drag link off a 172 and those have to cope with student pilots. The nose wheel was there because Cessna originally had aspirations to making military sales and the turbine was there because Avgas was getting hard to find in a lot of places even then, but most importantly there was the attraction of long TBOs (= Time Between Overhaul, in the case of the Pratt and Whitney PT6A-114, something like 4000 hours, or six years) compared to piston engines. FedEx bought a hundred Caravans straight off the drawing board, no questions asked and that, combined with the obvious toughness of a plane a redneck could load with a fork lift, decided everybody else.

The feelThere Caravan comes in two flavors: standard and deluxe. The standard version is $6.50 cheaper, the major difference being that it lacks the SimFlyer Garmin GNS v4.3 gauges that are fitted in the deluxe panel. Whichever version you purchase you get two wheeled variants, each with a single livery; the passenger Caravan having a white, blue and red scheme, while the cargo plane is decked out in burnt orange DHL colors. A quick check of the feelThere website turned up another eight free liveries, all of which have automatic installation routines, so there is no lack of variety.

I reviewed version 1.1 of the deluxe Caravan, which was a 39.5 Mb download and a selection of the free liveries, which average 5.5 Mb apiece. Installation is no more complicated than double clicking the executable and when it was finished, I found a new feelThere program group which contained links to a software license and an uninstall routine. The manual is available as two separate downloads on the feelThere website, split beween a 399 kb Word document and a 322 kb pdf explaining how to operate the Garmins in the deluxe panel. At twelve pages, the Caravan manual is necessarily concise, but in truth there isn't that much you need to know about the plane to fly the simulation - after a brief history of the plane, the remainder of the text is devoted to V-speeds and checklists. The pdf is even shorter than the operations manual for the plane at ten pages, but the GNS 430 and 530 units supplied with the deluxe version of the feelThere Caravan were developed by SimFlyer, but these only partially implement the real units' functions. Essentially, all the SimFlyer manual does is tell you how to use the mouse to work its gauges - owners of the ordinary version of the Caravan will find the default Microsoft GPS gauge fitted in the panel and will have no need for the SimFlyer pdf.

The visual model is very neat and shows planes which have been used but aren't too noticeably weathered. All the usual animations are present, along with flexing main gear - interestingly, Cessna designed this to break off cleanly in the event of an obstructed landing, the idea being to minimise damage to the plane, so it is a bit more complicated than the tube and fairing arrangement on the 172/182 family. Additional animations include the cabin and pod doors, which open to reveal a representative load in the cargo version; this being a great attraction of the feelThere Caravan, as the Microsoft plane has a passenger interior which looks a little out of place in bush strips. Out of interest, the cockpit ladders that you can see in the screenshot above left fold up into the real plane to form the outboard armrests of the pilots' seats, one of those clever pieces of design that makes you wonder no-one else thought of doing things that way before. One peculiarity the feelThere sim does not share with its Microsoft sibling is any texture bleed throughs - try opening the rear cabin door on any of the default Caravans and then pan around and wonder it got missed on the beta.

The first view we get of any simulation is the 2D panel and users will instantly be struck by the difference between it and Microsoft's Caravan, which uses the same, slightly odd panel perspective adopted for all the default Cessnas - I often wonder what experienced non-flying simmers make of the view out of a real airplane the first time they sit in one, because it doesn't look anything like the way FS2004 would have you believe. As you can see, the graphics are on a par with the default Cessnas, but with an adjusted viewpoint to give more of a real-world pilot's take on things. The screenshot on the right, below, shows the SimFlyer Garmins popped up and enlarged along with the transponder (Garmin's basic GTX320) and the GMA340 audio panel - otherwise, the DME, ADF and autopilot are the default units.

Apart from the SimFlyer Garmins in the deluxe Caravan and the new viewpoint, the main differences between the feelThere Caravan panel and the Microsoft sim lie in the instrument layout. The feelThere plane has the ADF moved into the standard six, with the turn and slip indicator demoted to the bottom of the panel - if I was flying one of these in the bush I would definitely have 'em the other way around, ADF's being more useful for listening to music than navigation. The engine gauges have been slid over under the center of the glareshield where they belong, so that space can be found for the annunciators and you get most of the Garmins, the extreme right hand side of the instruments being cut off, so that the range rocker is just out of reach and can only be operated if the gauge is popped up. A row of simicons at bottom right allows you to enlarge the engine instruments so that they cover the same area as they do in the default Caravan and also give access to the whisky compass and the quadrant, along with the ATC window and the standard stuff.

The Garmins can be enlarged by clicking on their faces as shown in the screenshot above right. Although these are a great pair of gauges, one of their peculiarities is that the 'popped up' gauges don't sync their displays with the panel units, so for example, altering the range on the enlarged display leaves the unit in the panel showing the original range setting. As I remarked above, these units only partially simulate the real Garmins, so for example, they can't be used to build flight plans, though they will display an FS plan; and pressing the MENU button with the NAV page display on screen brings up a box saying 'no options', whereas it should allow you to disable autozoom and change the fields. The SimFlyer Gauges have all the functions the default GPS does and more, and they look much tidier, so they are a definite bonus.

The virtual cockpit (VC) compares well to the default planes and is fully active, which means that you can use it just as you would the 2D panel, with the added benefit of being able to pan around as much as you like. feelThere have avoided a failing of many VCs, which is that you can pan back a good way before the mouse hotspots vanish and leave you unable to alter the gauge settings. You also get a good looking virtual cabin, shown in the shot below right.

The flight model is a definite improvement on the default planes and shows off the stability and balanced controls of the Caravan very well - in particular it captures the well-known tendency of the plane to develop a thrilling rate of sink below 80 knots, which means that it is advisable to carry some power all the way into the flare. Just as in the real plane, the development of this sink is insidious and a potential trap for the unwary, a situation in which it is likely to cause trouble being a mistakenly high approach to short strips; the Caravan is too streamlined and doesn't have enough flap to be a true STOL aircraft, yet if you chop the throttles in order to lose height, considerable judgement will be needed to have enough airspeed to let you lift the nose into the flare. Apart from watching the airspeed indicator and the VSI like a hawk, the best way of working out that this situation is developing is when you run out of trim on short final - the next stage being that you will run out of elevator, followed by the AutoGen getting rapidly larger.

Cessna gave the Caravan a high aspect ratio wing to extract the required cruise performance, which meant that most of the trailing edge had to be devoted to flaps in order to keep the stall speed down to something respectable, an undesirable result of which was that they ran out of space for the ailerons. Not having enough roll control was a bad thing in a utility plane designed to scamble in and out of short strips, so the engineers came up with the clever solution of 'slot lip' spoilers that start to deflect once the ailerons move more than five degrees. The obvious effect of these is that they kill any adverse yaw stone dead, but a little known fact about the Caravan is that the spoilers are primarily responsible for roll control and the ailerons are mainly there to provide feel - you can see these in action if you move to spot plane view and close in by hitting the '=' key until you have a good view of one wing from behind, then putting the stick over fully towards the side you are viewing.

Newbies shouldn't have any trouble flying the sim, its one peculiarity being the stall, which is announced by the nose pitching up; this isn't right, but I suspect it is an unavoidable side effect of correctly modelling the way the plane sinks at low airspeeds. The only other debatable point about the flight model is that at most gross weights, the sim will fly itself off the ground if the trim is set on the takeoff marker, while the real plane needs a good pull to persuade it into the air. Apart from this, the feelThere Caravan makes a great IFR platform, just like its real life counterpart and it is just as enjoyable to fly.

feelThere have included a sound set that captures the famous PT-6A whine very well and all in all this is an interesting package, especially for simmers who enjoy cargo operations with the Caravan. There are some excellent free liveries available on the website as self installing .exes, although last time I checked, most of them were for the passenger version; more cargo liveries would be much appreciated. Owners of Reality-XP gauges can look forward to saving themselves a bit of cash by purchasing the ordinary Caravan version and downloading the panel.cfg feelThere have made available on their download page.

I can't help thinking that if feelThere really wanted to cover themselves in glory and make this a truly unique package, they might just consider doing a taildragger conversion? What about it guys?