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Installation under FS2004 was straight forward and should present no problems as long as you can find the download and double click on it. When everything was done, my PC had a new Aeroplane Heaven addon group under the start menu containing a link to the uninstall routine - the 20 page English language manual is included in the zip and does not install automatically, so I dragged it onto the desktop. The 'Special Ops' pack contains the following marks of Lancaster: A.S.R 3 (Aeronavale, three paints, all black, which differ by registration only) While 'Heavy Duty' brings you these marks: The second prototype In the FS2004 select aircraft dialog, the Lancs are listed under 'AH_Avro'. Each plane 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 pilot 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 from a distance. Right from the start it was clear that this is the same basic plane that we reviewed boxed from Just Flight, although the way the package is made up differs and the Aeroplane Heaven instant downloads don't come with an RAF Scampton scenery or the freebie de Havilland Mosquito which is included in the Just Flight set. The visual model is good, capturing the workhorse-like lines of the bomber very well 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.
Then the animations start... 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 had 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. The DF loop also works, so if you are feeling particularly short of entertainment, you can use it to take ADF bearings and while all this excitement is going on, the pilot looks around. When I tested the frame rates sat on the runway at a moderately detailed airport, running FS2004 on a 3.2 Ghz Pentium D 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 on anything except the very fastest PCs, so be prepared to be greeted by expanses of featureless gray fuselage when you first switch to spot plane view on anything except a dual core PC with a fast video card. 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 Core2Duo ran all the Lancs flat out with no skinning problems at all. 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 more than acceptable, with neat editing and convincing gauges that look as if they belong together as a set. Surprisingly, the printed manual has nothing 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 OK 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 use 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 the virtual interior posed on less well specced systems.
The VC is the piece de resistance of this addon and is impressive at first sight, 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 on single core systems, and you will appreciate that swapping versions in flight isn't something you will be doing 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 Aeroplane Heaven must have had a beta at one time 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 developers 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 annoying, 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! Verdict? A couple of interesting packs. This is the best simulation of the plane available for any version of Flight Simulator, but the 2D panel could be improved and having to trog around four VC versions is kludgy, yet the virtual interior is very fine and this is one of the few FS addons I have seen where you can explore virtually all of an aircraft, both inside and out. You will need a fast system to run it properly, but once again, Aeroplane Heaven have delivered the goods.
Andrew Herd  Copyright © 2007 by FlightSim.Com. All Rights Reserved. |
ne of the most famous bombers of all time, the Avro Lancaster was a development of the Avro Manchester, a disastrous twin whose career was dogged by engine trouble. It must have seemed like a good idea when the Air Ministry wrote the spec, but the 24 cylinder X configuration Vulture was inherently unreliable and to cap it all, on a single engine, the Manchester couldn't maintain height; but the desperate need for aircraft meant that the Manchester had to remain on front line service until as late as 1942. In the meantime, Avro's chief designer, Roy Chadwick, managed to borrow four Merlins, redesign the Manchester's wing and produce the Lancaster. The astonishing thing about the new plane was that it was as good as its predecessor had been bad. 
