Just Flight Dash 8-300 Professional for FS2002 and FS2004

By Andrew Herd (8 July 2006)

he last time I flew as a passenger in a Dash 8 was on a fishing trip to Ireland - as it happened, on the very last direct flight British Airways operated from Newcastle (EGNV) to Cork (EICK). I don't remember much about it, but that's the thing about the Dash 8, it is such a dependable, stable aircraft that you almost forget you are in it. The crews love it, the engineers like it and all in all it isn't terribly surprising that it has become the world's second most popular regional turboprop after the Fokker F27.

Though it is a radically different design, the Dash 8 draws heavily on de Havilland's experience with the Dash 7, which has a similar configuration based around a high wing and T-tail. Both aircraft have advanced wings with sophisticated flap/spoiler systems, but there the likeness ends - the most obvious difference being that the Dash 8 is a twin, powered by Pratt and Whitney PW120 series turboprops. Design work began in the late seventies, with first flight in June 1983 and while the 100 series sat up to 40, the fuselage was stretched to seat up to 56 for the 300 series. There is a flight crew of two and depending on the engine fit, cruise is at up to 285 knots and range around 900 nm.

Given the ubiquitous nature of the Dash 8, it was only a matter of time before one of the major software developers released one for Flight Simulator and Phoenix Simulation Software (PSS) stepped into the breach a couple of years back with an excellent add-on that is now marketed as a boxed product by Just Flight. Yeah, I know, a Dash 8 does ship with Flight Simulator as standard, but it is an AI plane and although there are plenty of hacks and panels available to make it flyable, it isn't on the same planet as the PSS design.

When we last reviewed the product, the planes and the liveries were available as separate payware downloads, but Just Flight have taken a different tack and the addon installs with seventeen liveries included. A search of the file library didn't turn up any more and there don't appear to be any on the Just Flight site either, but the range supplied should cater for most tastes.

Installation is very straight forward, with few choices to be made after you have put the CD in the drive, other than which version of Flight Simulator you want to install the plane into. There is an option to install some addon airports: London City, Frankfurt Main and Milan for FS2004; and the same three plus the Lago Amsterdam Schiphol for FS2002 only. I didn't test any of these, although I remember the Lago Schiphol as a neat product, albeit a little heavy on the frame rates, as all large airport sceneries of that era tended to be. London City is by Gary Summons, so it should be good and the remaining two are by SimFlyers, who need no introduction.

The visual model is by Graham Waterfield and was very good by the standards of the FS2002 era although it is average by comparison to the best FS2004 sims. Though there are two planes in the pack, a -300 and a -Q300, which externally look very similar, which means that from a simmers point of view, the differences are largely confined to the panels. Greg German's textures are okay if slightly soft, but the team have paid a great deal of attention to detail and virtually all the markings you can see on a real Dash 8 are there, right down to the panel lines. Just about the only area that hasn't had the full treatment is the inside of the wheel bays, but only sad people like reviewers are likely to look in there (-: The best news is that the add-on is reasonably kind to frame rates and ran fine on an 1.7 Ghz PIV under Windows XP Pro and even better on a 3.0 Ghz PIV when I checked the package out again for FS2004.

Johann Dees' flight model is very good indeed and captures the feel of a regional turboprop perfectly. The Dash 8 is a pilot's aircraft, which is just as well, given some of the places it has to get in and out of, so it is relatively maneuverable, but you do have to watch out for lag on engine spool up. The approach phase is where the plane can bite you - they don't call it the Smash 8 for nothing - and in the sim this is compounded by the fact that the 2D panel is a fraction too tall compared to the real thing. The solution is to use the VC and adjust your eye position up slightly. The plane stays in turns, and most of all, it is really enjoyable to fly, with very realistic handling at the flare, in particular. On the debit side, it has twitchy pitch and accelerates a little too fast on the runway, but this is minor stuff, really.

The 2D panel is excellent. In the past, Phoenix's 'house style' has definitely detracted from their packages, but the Dash 8 has one of the nicest 2D panels I have ever seen. The bitmap is crisp, with standard-setting perspective effects and it conveys the feeling of 'being there' extremely well, even if the lateral and rear views are all 'stills' from the VC. This is where you will see the most obvious difference between the two versions of the plane in the pack, which is that the 'Q' has a semi-glass cockpit, while the standard 300 relies on an ordinary analog ADI/RMI set. Having the two types of panel available should make the package attractive to beginners, as it makes it possible to learn how to fly the plane using the familiar analog gauges and then switch to the glass cockpit of the Q300 later - the two panels are shown in the screenshots below, with the Q300 panel on the left. A good deal of thought has gone into the layout, with logical positioning of the hotspots and best of all, when you want to shut a secondary panel, you just click again in the same place you did to open it. Maybe it is just me, but I find having to right click on a panel and then choose 'close' from a menu to shut it down a real irritation and always mentally mark down panels that call for it. Easy thing to fix, but many developers don't see it as worthwhile, so kudos to Phoenix.

Now it is possible to fly the Dash 8 without so much as turning a page of the manuals, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you are used to sims of aircraft of this class. The default installation creates a program group under the Just Flight header which contains links to two utilities - load manager and panel config and the documentation, which is available in English and German. The docs are organised differently depending on the language chosen, but include check lists, tutorial flights, and a manual which describes the functions of the panels and flight management computer. Even a brief read is enough to confirm that they haven't been proof-read for the new release as there is a smattering of errors and developer's notes that have been there since the addon first appeared.

The neat thing about the Dash 8 is that while it is much more complex than say the King Air, it doesn't take three days' solid reading to get your head around how it works. If you have got the hang of flying the King Air, then you will have a head start on the techniques which are necessary to deal with a turboprop and the higher approach speeds that are involved when flying this class of plane - but there the similarities end.

Yep, the King Air definitely does not have an overhead like that - and the Dash 8 has a bank of caution and warning lights that has few rivals in the FS world. Virtually all the switches you see there work; for example, if you throw the wiper switch, they leap into action in spot plane and VC view. Even the battery temperature test switch makes the LEDs light up. If you run the panel config utility before you load the plane there is even an option to start off with the engines shut down and a dark cockpit, but if you do that, make sure you have read the manuals first, or you are gonna be a looooong time working out which order to do stuff in.

Incidentally, the best reason I can think of for going through the startup routine - everyone should do it at least once, or all that programming will go to waste - is the opportunity it gives for listening to Mike Hambly's sound set, which captures the balance between turbine whine and the grunt of the compressors particularly well.

Just about everything you want under normal circumstances is on the main panel, with the exception of the COM radios, which are hidden away on the pedestal, and the flight management system (FMS) - but we'll get onto that later. Depending on which version of the plane you are using you will have to contend with glass intruments, but common to both is a useful feature: a speed control indicator. This is a variant on the theme of the green speed cue you see on Boeing EADI's and it shows the difference between the speed the aircraft is doing and the vRef calculation once you are on approach. This assumes that you have programmed the FMS properly, as failure to do so will lead to the bug showing the wrong indication.

The panel also boasts an HSI, which is selectable for either VOR if the NAV radios are tuned, but only one NDB - because Flight Simulator only supports one ADF. The other slightly non-standard bit of kit is the PFCS... that's a powered flight control surface indicator, no kidding. The justification for the existence of this particular instrument is that the Dash 8 deploys spoilers to assist the ailerons (these are animated if you look in spot plane view) and the PFCS lets you know what they are up to at any given moment. Just try not to fixate on it on approach.

PSS have provided two more main panel views in addition to the flying view. The first of these is effectively an IFR panel, which positively blots out the sun, but lets you fly using instruments which are a more natural size - one problem common to all FS panels is that if you get the perspective right, the instruments are too small. In a real plane it is relatively easy to fly one 'wing bar' down on the attitude indicator, but try doing it on a standard FS panel and it is a whole different ball game. Every developer seems to have a different solution to this problem and while none is ideal they all have their merits. If you have the PSS Airbus, you will smile at the screen shot alongside, but this time PSS haven't made the IFR panel the default, which is a wise choice. You can pop this view up by clicking on the face of the ADI or HSI - and put it to bed again by repeating the process. As you can see, this isn't just a zoomed version of the standard panel, with all the blurring that would entail; it is a completely different bitmap. A similar panel is available to let you see the engine instruments in large format, the only problem being that there isn't a quick way of switching from one to the other, which is exactly what you need to do on approach. There aren't any simicons and swapping between different panel views is done by clicking on hotspots.

The pedestal is divided into two, the lower part being occupied by the engine/flap controls and the upper by the FMC, audio panel, weather radar, the com radios and the ADF - the NAV radios are on the glareshield. I am nitpicking again, but there are two problems with this arrangement: first, the COM radios are too small for ease of use, even on a 19 inch monitor; and second, the bitmaps on the upper part of the pedestal are blurred. Neither is the audio selector panel up to the standard of the rest of the package and stuff that you need to use - like the bearing source and HSI selectors - can is tricky to read.

And then we have the flight management system (FMS). There are two ways of getting to this: either you can pop it up direct, or you can access it by clicking the static FMS graphic top left on the pedestel. Although the principles of the workings of all flight management computers are generically the same, the Dash 8 FMS belongs to neither the Boeing, nor the Airbus baselines, so even if you know the PSS' previous releases inside out, prepare to do some homework. The good news is that if you are reasonably familiar with the basic principles it shouldn't take you too long to work out what needs to be done and a big plus of the unit is that it can load FS flight plans, thereby saving you having to work out your favorite routes all over again.

The FMS can handle everything from procedures to radio autotuning and while the sim doesn't duplicate every last function, it does as much as most users will want - note that the VNAV page is not implemented, and that only US units are modelled. One thing you have to do is to remember to initialise the unit, if you want to see accurate fuel planning data, and that means running load manager and noting down the zero fuel weight and cargo weight, but if life seems too short, the FMS will happily fly a route without any weight info at all - in fact I found it would accept a route even if I loaded it in mid-flight. Data entry is no problem, thanks to the generous size of the FMS pop-up and there is an option for keyboard entry, though in practice I found it easier to use the mouse. The Direct-to function was slightly buggy (I managed to enter the POL VOR seven times without realising I was doing it) but on the whole I found the unit worked reliably enough in practice. FMS systems are fabulously complicated in real life and contain millions of lines of code, so I don't expect to see perfection at this price - though you can always hope!

Once the Dash 8 is in flight, the FMS guidance can be displayed on the ADI/HSI and coupled to the autopilot, but one gotcha here is that you have to have the AUX button depressed on the autopilot controller, as well as having the autopilot engaged and whichever modes you require for that phase of flight. On a real Dash 8 you can tell if AUX or the NAV radio is selected just by looking at the state of the switch, but in the sim, just about the only way of knowing is to look at the EHSI in the Q300, which can be puzzling until you work it out. While I remember, vertical speed is controlled using the pitch wheel on the glare shield, a feature which isn't immediately obvious on first glance at the panel.

The autopilot works pretty well, although it suffers all the usual FS defects that are so hard to breed out - for example, the nose tends to dip immediately after the unit is engaged and approach mode is none too reliable. One thing I noticed while I was testing the approach modes was that the speed control indicator on the ADI needs a bit of tweaking; with less than full flaps the bug position nearly always indicates that the plane is travelling too fast and if you throttle back to center it you end up dragging the bird in on the edge of a stall.

I dropped in a picture of the virtual cockpit above, which reminds me that there isn't a virtual cabin to go with it - 'walk' back through the cockpit door and you are treated to an unexpected view of thousands of feet of absolutely nothing beneath your feet as you teeter on the brink of a long fall back to earth. No passengers, no trolley girls, no seats, just clouds and space. Now if you like to visit simulated cabins often, this is clearly a bad thing, but the more I see of those things, the more I realise what a massive waste of programming time they are, time that could better be spent on the cockpit and the rest of the visual model, so I am with PSS here. The VC itself is somewhat simplified compared to the 2D cockpit, the major drawback being that it is an old style 'passive' FS2002 era panel and can't really be used to fly the plane unless you confine yourself to watching the gauges and looking out the window.

When it was first released, the PSS had a definite 'wow!' factor, but by comparison to the better FS2004 products, it is definitely beginning to show its age, largely because of the lack of a fully working VC, but also because development ceased to all intents and purposes a couple of years back and little appears to have been done to the original FS2002 product beyond making it FS2004 compatible. However, this doesn't make the Dash 8 a bad product - quite the reverse - very few FS planes manage to successfully tread the tightrope of looking real, feeling real and flying like the real thing. The Dash 8 does all of that and although experienced big iron addicts are likely to turn their noses up at it, it makes a good introduction to the world of passenger turboprops and more complex airliner simulations; so if you are looking for a step up from the King Air, or the default Boeings, and don't want to be challenged too much, this addon would be a great place to start. Just Flight have discounted the price some to reflect the age of the product and in my opinion, it is a good buy.