Just Flight/Aeroplane Heaven Avro Lancaster

By Andrew Herd (7 November 2006)

he Avro Lancaster was an outstanding aircraft which arose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of its predecessor to become one of the most famous bombers of all time. The Lancaster's sire was the Avro Manchester, a much-unloved twin whose career was dogged by mechanical troubles, most of them down to the fact that each of its Rolls-Royce Vulture engines was made from two RR Kestrels siamesed together in a common crankcase. It must have seemed like a good idea on paper, but the 24 cylinder X configuration Vulture was a bundle of trouble and to cap it all, on a single engine, the Manchester couldn't maintain height; despite this, the aircraft had to remain on front line service until as late as 1942. Meanwhile, Avro's chief designer, Roy Chadwick, had managed to beg, borrow and steal four Merlins, redesign the Manchester's wing and produce a four engined heavy which played a significant part in the winning of World War II. The astonishing thing about the new plane was that it was as good as its predecessor had been bad.

What was so special about the Lancaster? It was singled out for public attention early on in its career for the part it played in the famous 'dam buster' raid, but the main reason for the Lancaster's fame lies in its amazing flexibility - the plane was capable of carrying up to a 22,000 pound bomb load and the airframe was subject to innumerable modifications aimed at allowing it to carry special weapons, ranging from the bouncing bombs used in the dam attack, to the enormous 'Grand Slam', the largest conventional weapon used during World War II. Much has been made of the Lancaster's ability to withstand battle damage and still return home, without which many more crews would have been lost on operations - as it was, the chances of a Bomber Command crew surviving two tours of duty was slim. When it comes down to it, there was probably no more dangerous place to be than the rear gunner's seat on a Lancaster flying at night, because the tail turret was the first target many that night fighter pilots selected.

The majority of Lancaster operations were flown at night, as a result of RAF casualties on daytime raids earlier on in the war. The most dangerous phase was the so-called Battle of the Ruhr, which began in March 1943, with the aim of destroying Germany's industrial capacity - the RAF bombing by night and the USAF by day. The effectiveness of this campaign has sometimes been questioned, but by the time the invasion was launched in June 1944, Germany was already half paralysed because of the destruction of its rail links, manufacturing industry and communication network, with the result that production was being strangled by shortages of key materials, particularly fuel. A typical Lancaster mission involved flying to the heart of Germany and back, carrying out a mixed load comprising a single 4000 pound 'cookie', four 500 pound general purpose bombs, and a dozen 'SBC', which were small bomb containers usually holding incendiaries. Most of the guys involved were no older than 22 and once the wheels stopped rolling, it was rare for a crew to see another plane, except for brief moments over the target - they operated completely alone in a completely hostile environment and yet they kept on flying, night after night. My father-in-law remembers watching an apocalyptic scene at what is now Southend airport as plane after plane scraped in one two or three engines, gear hanging down and with gaping holes in the fuselage, some with several crew members dead or wounded. Many simply crashed on the pavement and once the crew were out - assuming they could be got out - the hulks were bulldozed off the runway to make room for more stricken planes. And yet, young though those guys were, they went back to do it all over again. That is what heroism is made of, ordinary people who wouldn't ever be decorated, doing what they knew had to be done.

The Just Flight boxed Lancaster was developed by Aeroplane Heaven, who should be well known to FSC readers, thanks to their specialization in warbirds. The product is packed in a DVD-style case, containing a single DVD (not a CD - note that it really does have a DVD in there) and a printed manual, designed to resemble the well-known RAF 'Pilot's Notes' series. According to the box, installation requires a 1.7 Ghz processor, Windows XP, 512 Mb of RAM, 1.5 Gb of hard disk space and a 64 Mb video card. As usual, your mileage may vary depending on which cocktail of addons you have installed and how you have chosen to configure your FS setup, so the usual rule applies and a faster processor and more RAM will do no harm at all. For what it is worth, complex FS2004 addons aren't usually happy on less than a 2.8 Ghz processor in my experience.

Installation was straight forward and should present no problems as long as you can find your DVD drive, insert the disk and close it. When everything was done, my PC had grown a new addon group under the start menu containing a pdf of the Just Flight Mosquito manual - which looked like an interesting addon, but doesn't help much with my understanding of the Lancaster. Instead I turned to the printed manual, which is 46 pages long and includes useful sections on the cockpit, how to fly the plane and a reproduction of an interview with Bill Wareham about what flying an operation at night in a Lancaster was like.

Checking out the FS9 folder showed up no less than seven different variants of the Lancaster, including the second prototype, a Mk 1 B, a Mk IIIB, a Mk II, a Mk VII, a Grand Slam plane, and (inevitably) a 617 Dam Buster aircraft, and... hold on... a de Havilland FBIV Mosquito, in the markings of the Pathfinders, who were employed to mark targets in order to maximize the accuracy of the main bomber stream. So you actually get two planes - and you get RAF Scampton, a major operational base during the Second World War and the present home of the Red Arrows display team.

Most of the Lancaster variants come with several liveries, each of which is available in four separate versions, labelled with the letters 'A', 'B', 'C' and 'D'. While all four versions have a 2D panel, the letters indicate different virtual cockpit loadouts, the D being the 'lite' model, which has a virtual cockpit (VC) only; the C has the VC, the bomb aimer's position and the front turret; the B has the VC and navigator's position; and the A the radio and navigator's position, in addition to a limited pilot's VC, which you can admire, but can't touch. Of particular interest are schemes for the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight Lancaster B1; 'G' for George, a B1 which has been preserved in Australia, honoring the many Antipodean crews who served in Bomber Command during the war; 'S' for Sugar, a BIII exhibited in the RAF Museum; and Guy Gibson's B1 Special from the 'dams raid'. Just in case anyone doesn't know what the dams raid was, check out this link.

The visual model is good, capturing the workhorse-like lines of the bomber very convincingly with plenty of detailing. Depending on the variant, the rear and upper turrets are manned, the front turret being empty to allow the bomb aimer to occupy his position in the nose. The Lancaster has quite large areas of plexiglass and if you pan around the plane, it is possible to examine most of the interior, which has been recreated with Aeroplane Heaven's usual thoroughness - suffice it to say that it will take a long time to see every last detail on this addon. The textures are also good, allowing for the fact that the FS2004 graphics engine isn't exactly kind to matte blacks, greens and browns, and all the rivet lines are present, although a little more obvious than they appear on real Lancs I have seen. At least one of the planes has some textures missing on the mid-upper and tail gunners, but otherwise there were no problems.

Then the animations start... before everyone emails me, only the 'C' versions can drop bombs, but they drop 'em in style and as part of the bombing run you can make fine adjustments to the heading of the Lanc from the bomb sight exactly as the bombardier could in real life. Dropping the bombs resembles one-armed wallpaper hanging, because the doors have to be opened by the pilot and no key stroke can be allocated for doing that in most of the versions, with the result that unless you open a new windows as I did to take the shots, you have to pull the lever in the cockpit and then rush down the stairs to press the tit, as RAF-speak went (-: The bouncing bomb variants have an animated bomb that can be spun up by a pulley system mounted in the bay and you can also switch on the pair of searchlights that crews used to keep the planes at sixty feet on the approach to the dam. No I am not kidding, that is how low they went - just try it in the dark, while you imagine someone taking a no deflection shot at you with a ground mounted AA gun and you can imagine what flying the raids must have felt like. The front turret can be rotated in the C model, which will maybe occupy about thirty seconds of your time before you have exhausted the experience, the pilot looks around, shift E opens the cockpit windows and shift E 2 (not shift E 1 as stated in the manual) rotates the upper turret and elevates and depresses the guns. I hardly need to add that you get all the usual other animations.

Frame rates deserve a mention, because sat on the runway at Scampton, running FS2004 on a 3.3 Ghz dual core system with 4 Gb of RAM and a Radeon X850, the D models gave me about 24 fps in VC view, the A dropping to around 20, with clear weather, 90% air traffic and most of the quality sliders maxed. The 2D panel gave me 24 fps and in spot plane view, I was getting between 16 and 20, although it is worth noting that like many very complex addons, the Lanc was slow to skin, so be prepared to be greeted by expanses of featureless gray fuselage when you first switch to spot plane view. Flying the addon into a complex modern airport with large amounts of AI traffic and lots of cloud saw those rates halving, although they never dropped into single figures for too long; again, depending on your system spec and setup, and the state of your swap file you may see better or worse than this. Broadly speaking, the high level of detail on the Lancaster results in it making roughly the same level of demand on a system as you would expect from a complex airliner addon.

The same 2D panel is common to all the planes, which near enough represents the way things were in real life, although the Hercules-engined Mk II had feathering switches rather than buttons; Aeroplane Heaven have taken a few liberties with the arrangement of the gauges, but this is understandable given the limitations of computer screen format. The panel graphic is based on artwork rather than a photograph and while it is not in the class of RealAir panels, it is perfectly okay, with neat editing and convincing gauges that look as if they belong together as a set. Somewhat surprisingly, the printed manual has zilch to say about the 2D panel, the developer's intention apparently being that the addon should be flown from the virtual cockpit (VC), but despite this, there are several 2D sub-panels which can be accessed using the shift key and 2,3,4,5 etc - including the right side of the main panel, the engineer's panel, the cowl flaps, the radios, electrics, compass and fuel system. Overall, the 2D cockpit is acceptable but it could be better, given that I couldn't find any hotspots and that none of the sub-panels appear to have click spots for closing them, leaving the shift keys as the best option unless you want to do the business with the mouse. One annoyance is that if you don't close the left hand panel first, the right hand panel popup overlays it, which looks strange, and the quality of the sub-panels is variable - reinforcing the impression that this part of the package was done as an afterthought, perhaps because of the challenges posed by the virtual interior.

The VC is the piece de resistance of this addon and it is very impressive, especially when you consider that it is theoretically possible to roam right around the front of the plane, but here we run into a snag which alert readers will have spotted a few paragraphs back. Although you can do a virtual walk from the radio operator' station, past the navigator's table, into the cockpit and then forward to the bomb aimer's (bombardier's) position, the gotcha is that doing so means loading the A version of your chosen Lanc to begin the journey and swapping to the C version when you reach the cockpit, because although you can see into the cockpit in the A version, you can't walk into it - and correspondingly, if you try to make a journey back through the closed cockpit door of the C version towards the nav and radio stations, you will end up with your ass hanging in thin air, because there isn't a shred of interior aft of the cockpit in the C loadout. Factor in the slow loading times associated with the complexity of the addon, and you will appreciate that swapping versions in flight isn't something you will be doing very often, particularly when you appreciate that although you can see the panel well enough to fly the plane using the A version, none of the switches can be operated because the viewpoint is set too far back, thanks to your inability to enter the cockpit.

I can only assume that at one time Aeroplane Heaven had a beta which let you do the entire walk in one go, but that low frame rates associated with loading all those polygons at once forced a rethink and the poor devils couldn't bring themselves to discard all the superb work they had done aft of the cockpit door, so a compromise resulted in it being kept as the orphaned A interior; the B, C and D versions being created to give users some way of controlling frame rates. Understanding this makes it easier to understand why all the different versions exist, but it doesn't solve the problem from a user's point of view. Having all that virtual airplane available and being forced to wait a minute or longer just to step in and out of the back of the cockpit is the best recent case I have seen of more seeming to be less, but that aside, if you stick with the C version, you get access to most of what is on offer.

All the click spots I tried in the cockpit worked, with the exception of the feathering buttons for the third and fourth engines, but I doubt that will upset many users and most of the controls you would want to use in the bomb aimer's compartment are functional, particularly the big red switch, although you will have to be damned fast at swapping views if you want to see those bombs go - ActiveCamera users are gonna love this sim, because they have exactly the right tool needed to change places fast. One thing that puzzled me for a while is that it isn't obvious how the front turret should be entered, but in the end I figured out that you need to take a deep breath and walk, Harry Potter like, through the back wall. Once inside, you can elevate and depress the guns and even rotate the turret, although it doesn't change its position if you swap out into spot plane view to admire your handiwork.

The flight model is in the ballpark for a WWII heavy, with a deliberate feel to it that encourages you to really haul the plane around the sky, which is exactly what many pilots had to do if they survived a nightfighter's first pass. The standard evasive maneuver was to initiate a 'corkscrew', with the gunners reporting the fighter's position if they could; experienced night fighter crews generally left planes alone if they did this and moved on to find another target, because the Lanc really could move and was very hard to hit if it was flown by a capable pilot. Sadly, most crews never saw the plane that attacked them and so the first firing pass was the last - but the sim flies a corkscrew well and does everything else a Lanc should - just make sure you don't try landing it fully bombed up and with brimming tanks! And while I think of it, the sound set is a good one, very evocative of the Merlin. There is much more I could say, because the developers have clearly gone to town on many of the subsystems in the cockpit and at the crew stations, but I have pretty much run out of space; just believe me when I say that this addon has real depth to it.

The Mosquito is a nice extra, but it isn't the sim you have been waiting for - overall, it has the air of a project that would have undergone much needed further development had FSX not been imminent, which is a shame, because it has the makings of a good addon. The 2D panel appears to have been assembled from a clutch of left over gauges and while the VC isn't bad, it isn't good either, with a couple of instruments missing their faces and a general air of having been put together in a hurry. A freebie it might be, but compared to the Lanc the Mozzy doesn't cut it, although it has precious little competition, given that the Mosquito has been almost totally neglected by Flight Simulator developers. Odd, that, given that it was such an outstanding airplane. Maybe someone will look at it for FSX?

Verdict? An interesting mix. The Lanc is the main feature and while it is the best simulation of this plane available for FS2004, the 2D panel could be improved and the four VC versions are cumbersome. On the other hand, you get some outstanding visual models depicting most of the major variants of the Lancaster, a freebie Mosquito and an RAF Scampton scenery, so you get what you pay for. Yes, it is one of the more expensive FS2004 addons around, but as usual with Aeroplane Heaven addons, there is a lot on offer.