Lago MD-80 "Maddog" For FS2004

By Andrew Herd (26 May 2005)

Note: this is an initial review and we will probably go back and have another look when the final patch has been released, but Maddog looks good to us so far.

ne of the things I like about reviewing is seeing old products updated and upgraded - a mere handful have stayed on my hard disk through three successive versions of Flight Simulator, many more having fallen by the wayside, casualties of progress. The downside of each new version of Flight Simulator is that we have to say goodbye to old favorites that won't run any more, although nowadays a flood of new releases more than compensates for the losses. That being said, some addons are so good that they transcend the simulator and it isn't unusual for simmers to stay with an old version of FS purely to run a favorite product. However, one thing I cannot ever recall happening is seeing an addon skip two complete generations before reappearing, phoenix-like, even better than before - but that is exactly what has happened with Maddog.

We reviewed Lago's MD-80 back in November 1999, at which time it was an FS98 addon. It made quite a splash because it was one of the very first 'procedural sims', which meant that most systems were simulated and you could probably start a real MD-80 if you knew how to fire up the sim from a cold cockpit. Reading the review again made me grin - there weren't so many payware addons available in those days, FS98 more or less marking the coming of age of the third party market for FS, which had done nothing much until then, and the reviewer (long departed from FSC, but one of the best) was bowled over by the package. I was too, though for different reasons, because I never got it to work properly, but that's another story (-:

The original Maddog came in a cardboard box that was jam packed with goodies, including a printed manual with hard plastic covers, and a spiral bound reference guide - and the only product that came anywhere near it as far as style was concerned was Papa Tango's Austria Pro 98, which was one of the first photographic sceneries to be released. The one time I did get the FS98 Maddog into the air, I unwisely loaded the plane at Innsbruck and flew it straight into the side of a mountain I didn't even know was there because Austria Pro's textures hadn't loaded yet. You win some, you lose some.

Austria Pro died with Papa Tango and despite the occasional see-through mountain, I have always missed it, because it was such fun to use, and it for a long while, it seemed that Maddog had gone to the great FS addon graveyard in the sky too, but now it is back.

And wow, is it back.

It would have been funky to fly the new Maddog over Austria, but I'm still a little wary about those invisible mountains, so I did my testing over New York and England, courtesy of PC Aviator's MegaScenery and the VFR photographic scenery for the UK we reviewed a while back. The packages make quite a combination and as you can see, flying a realistic jet over a photographic landscape results in the kind of shots that make you wonder if you are looking at a simulator at all.

The package I tested was a 62 Mb initial download, updated with a 57 Mb version 1.2 patch, which included the documentation, and the 14 Mb 1.40 patch, which fixed most of the issues, which was then succeeded by the 1.41 and the 18 Mb 1.42 patches. Lago been kicking out patches on a regular basis since initial release, butI presume that once the addon has been stabilized new users should be able download the plane as a single file. Having to download and install 85 Mb of patches on top of a 62 Mb download is one of the penalties of being an early adopter of new releases and there is usually a thread somewhere in the forums bemoaning such things, but I can recall very few complex FS addons which haven't had to be patched at least once - even Microsoft can't produce perfect code to order. While addons stay priced at around the $30 mark and piracy continues at its present level, it is hard to see how we will ever get away from this situation since developers will continue to be unable to afford the resources to pay large enough teams to get product out the door cleanly within a reasonable timescale. That being said, this number of patches is more than I would normally expect for a product of this class, but I didn't have any problems with either the downloads or the installation, so let's get on with the review.

Finally, they all say.

Well, okay, but this is a real trip down memory lane, right? I can still smell that FS98 manual. And the mountain.

The new package - and this is a new package, rebuilt from the ground up - simulates the MD-80 only. The visual model was developed by Jet City Aircraft and the remainer of the coding is by Leonardo, the two working extremely well together. Two versions of the plane are included, one with a virtual cockpit and one without, the latter being suitable for slower systems. Minimum system requirements are a 2.0 Ghz Pentium with 256 Mb of RAM, 200 Mb hard disk space, a 64 Mb video card and Windows 98 or better. I did the tests on a 3.0 Ghz Pentium with two gigs of RAM and a 256 Mb video card, frame rates never dropping much below the low twenties unless I duked it out with the baggage trains in the depths of the more complex airports. On the threshold at EGKK with AI traffic up full, Maddog returned about 10 fps with the VC version loaded, so it could be iffy on approach on lower specced systems at big airports. Ten liveries are provided, including Alaska, Alitalia, Delta, Meridiana, Scandinavian, Finnair, Spanair, Aeromexico, Swissair and TWA and all of them look good.

The manual is split into no less than 27 sections, accessible from the Maddog start menu group. Clicking on the link to the manual loads a pdf menu which in turn links to the introductory manual and ultimately, the other 25 sections. This arrangement works quite well once you are familiar with the addon, but isn't exactly the ideal way to start learning about the sim, because each pdf deals with a separate aircraft system and putting together an overview of how the avionics work together, just to give one example, involves reading several pdfs at once. For the same reason, I am sure many eager users will engage the autothrottle and click the TO button on the thrust rating indicator on the far right of the panel, before trickling off the end of the pavement wondering what has gone wrong, when the answer is that they haven't clicked the gray area between the thrust levers to engage the TO/GA button - the section dealing with this being buried at the bottom of page 3 of the 'automatic flight' pdf. A tutorial flight would greatly enhance the package, the documentation being better suited to an experienced user who needs reference information than a newbie. But although the manuals are a little on the concise side, all the information you need is in there - I just wouldn't suggest buying Maddog as your first glass cockpit airliner addon unless you fancy a challenge. An enjoyable challenge, but still a challenge.

A Load Manager applet is included, which is a fairly vital part of the sim, since it isn't possible to program the flight management system properly without using it. The applet is divided into three parts - the first allows you to set passenger, cargo and fuel loads, from which load manager calculates the c of g. The second tab takes you to a very useful route planner, which calculates fuel burn for you and even downloads the forecast - although to use this, you will need to be able to read TAFs and Metars and experienced users should note that upper winds have to be sourced as usual given that they aren't downloaded with the TAF. The third tab takes you to the setup section, which can be used to adjust everything from the chance of an APU fire occurring to the type of background music the passengers board the plane to (seriously). Using load manager is an integral part of every Maddog flight; once it has been set up, it is a simple matter to print off the weight and balance sheet, flight plan and met. If you do not set the plane up using Load Manager, beware that it will load overweight enough to make a 6000 foot runway look uncomfortably short, so make sure you take out some fuel or pax before you fly. And if you do use Load Manager, make sure you allow sufficient reserves and don't forget that you have to set the fuel and the pax load for the plane manually using the FS2004 menus.

The aircraft is reasonably well modelled without the designers - Jet City Aircraft - having gone overboard on detail, so for example, Maddog lacks transparent cabin windows and areas such as the flaps and gear bays have been kept relatively simple. This keeps the frame rates up, a consideration given the complexity of the 2D panel and virtual cockpit. There are some fine airstair animations and depending on which version of the plane you are using (there is a choice of loading Maddog with or without a virtual cockpit), you can open both the forward and aft cabin and galley doors and no less than three cargo doors, although doing so means assigning the tail hook, wing fold and water rudder commands. The textures are very fine, right down to the weathering you can see in the center shot above and Maddog looks great in spot plane view.

Leonardo's 2D panel is outstanding and looks fabulous even at 1600 x 1200, showing that Flight1 and Captain Sim aren't the only developers to have realised that using very high resolution graphics incurs little or no performance penalty in Flight Simulator. If you exclude the ATC window, there are ten subpanels in addition to the main view, accessed via a very clever stack of simicons on the left of the main panel. The neat thing about the simicons is that they only appear if you move the mouse over their hotspot, leaving the panel clear the rest of the time. Although I have come to regard simicons as a necessary evil, they do lessen the air of reality that the best panels create and so full marks to Leonardo for coming up with such a simple and elegant solution to hiding them when they are not needed.

The subpanels comprise: a full overhead; a 'short' overhead (essentially the bottom half of the full panel); the annunciators - available on both overheads, but on this popup they obscure less of the forward view; the radios; throttles; flight management computer; v-speed card; enlarged flight instrument display; engine instruments; and the trim wheels. Apart from the radios, the quality of the subpanels matches the main 2D panel in every respect; the radios would be acceptable by most developer's standards but look a little out of place against the tour de force that the other panels represent. All the legends are crisp and readable - which might seem a simple thing to ask, but happens to be something which many panel developers do not seem to view as the necessity it is. Virtual cockpit graphics are used for the other directions of view in the 2D cockpit, but as it happens, these are more than acceptable.

When the MD-80 is first loaded, the primary flight display (PFD) and navigation display (ND) are blank, and a row of messages on the screens tells you that some work is going to be needed before the bird will fly. The main instrument displays can be switched on using the controls to the right of the analog altimeter and VSI/TCAS, but getting rid of the crew alert messages on the panel involves opening up the overhead and flicking some switches. Having to do this even from a 'hot load' with engines running on the threshold certainly adds to the realism of the simulation and it is possible to firewall the throttles and takeoff at this point if you wind the trim into range alongside the green bug, but ideally, the flight management system should be programmed and the flight systems armed, as this lets you set up the speed bugs and optimize trim and other settings. Cold starts are also possible and all you have to do is follow the checklist.

The panel is a pleasing blend of analog and glass instruments - I say pleasing, because airliners of this generation seem to make the most absorbing sims, partly because it is still possible to fly and navigate them using ground based navaids. The PFD and ND are glass, while the airspeed indicator/mach meter, VSI and altimeter have regular dials and needles and all the displays are crisp and readable. As I remarked above, quite how so many developers still manage to deliver blurred panel graphics when it is well known what good results very high resolution images give in Flight Simulator, I do not know, but I have seen 2048 x 1536 images used as panel backgrounds without any performance penalty at all and with exceedingly good results. Leonardo's panel is easily up to Flight1/Captain Sim/DreamFleet standard and this developer looks set to become a major player - the fact that the panel is so good was a big surprise to me, because some of Lago's past releases haven't quite made the grade in this area in times past.

As befits an aircraft of its era, Maddog's flight management system is complicated and interfacing the different parts of it to produce the desired results requires considerably more thought than flying the default 737. The general principles remain the same, however, as the MD-80 has the usual combination of flight management systems (FMS), linked through a flight director (FD), autopilot and autothrottles. This combination of gizmos comprises the automatic flight control system and your input is via the flight guidance control panel (FGCP), aka all the knobs, dials and readouts in the center of the glareshield. Nav feeds are via the VOR radios and, in a real MD-80, from the attitude heading reference systems, which provide inertial position data. The autopilot is a very capable unit which provides full autoland and reports back to the pilots via a flight mode annunciator (FMA), located just above and right of the PFD.

To give an idea of the depth of this sim, trust that I could go on for many paragraphs about the autothrottle alone, which has EPR limit (mostly used for climb out) and FMS VNAV override buttons in addition to the usual speed and mach ones; and the manual lists a whole page of annunciator readouts for the unit. For this reason alone, Maddog deserves to be popular with online ATC flyers, as it makes it easy to comply with virtually any descent profile imaginable.

Input to the FMS is via twin mode control display units (MCDUs) although the developers have taken pity on us and it is only necessary to program one of them in the sim. The MCDU takes no prisoners on the 'as real as it gets' front and you will look in vain for an option to load an FS flight plan, although it is possible to access saved plans created using Load Manager when you are doing the weight and balance. Filling all the fields in more or less demands that you generate a weight and balance sheet using Load Manager, unless you have a good memory for five digit numbers. This being a fairly fully implemented sim of the real unit, flight plans have to be built up using the line select keys, with usual attendant risk of selecting a waypoint in a different hemisphere because you didn't clock the latitude. SIDs, STARs and transitions are all there and once you have created a route, it can be checked on the Legs page, or by stepping through it while watching the ND in plan mode. Lateral navigation output from the FMS is fed to the autopilot by pressing the NAV key on the FGCP and the vertical profile via VNAV; speed and altitude restrictions can be set up without any problem at all; you can do pilot defined waypoints using lat/long or place/bearing/distance; the fix page is implemented and direct-to's are in there, as are holds - charmingly referred to as 'holdings' in the manual, which has otherwise been very well translated from the original Italian. Which reminds me that an air traffic controller friend of mine recently remarked that despite all the fancy gear you see in modern airliner cockpits, approximately half the charter flights he handles can be relied on to set up holds anywhere but where they are supposed to. Apparently the crews usually get the flight level right, but not always. And these guys are the professionals - scary, or what?

The virtual cockpit (VC) is excellent, as you can see from the screenshot. You don't get a virtual cabin, but I can't quite see the point of including such things, given that most users only look at them once or twice and they kill frames faster than Conan did in barbarians. Just about all the controls I tried in the VC were clickable and if you have Active Camera it is possible to get around efficiently, though I still think that 2D panels with popup subpanels are the best way of flying FS planes.

The test flights I did went reasonably well, although I had FS freeze on me once or twice while using the 1.20 patch. This problem resolved with the 1.40 patch, which introduced a new bug on my system, causing only about a third of the enlarged flight instruments display to appear - so expect there to be a 1.50 patch. As usual, I am making no claims to have found every bug in the sim, but I didn't find any show stoppers and 1.40 is definitely buyable.

The flight model seems appropriate and Maddog handles like an airliner of its class should in Flight Simulator. I did several trips in it around New York and between EGNV and EGKK, using real weather - one of the landings being done in the middle of severe turbulence caused by a thunderstorm - and the avionics handled the trips very well, bar one occasion when the MD-80 flew straight through the selected altitude in descent. The FMS worked fine although the FS2004 ATC didn't give me much of an opportunity to test VNAV descent; one of the more impressive parts of the coding being that for once the sim doesn't overspeed during autothrottle descents, making it possible to execute realistic high speed descents without worrying about whether you are going to run out of spoiler or not. I tried out every mode on the FGCP, including ILS approaches, which worked well as long as I confined localizer intercepts to reasonable angles. The one problem with managing Maddog is that there is a lot to do configuring the plane for final, but the speed card helps a great deal here because in an inspired piece of programming, Leonardo have fixed it to display the correct V-speed for the current aircraft weight. Yep, that's right, if you dump fuel or start chucking passengers out the door, the speeds on the card change. As an innovation, that card deserves an award in its own right.

The sound set is good, albeit with slightly noisy clicks. The boarding simulation is worth going through at least once, not least because it gives you something to listen to while you startup the plane. If you get bored with listening to the cart tarts explaining what to do in the event of a sudden reduction in the number of wings, you can even load a .wav file as background music, my choice being Real Wild Child by Iggy Pop, given the way it contrasts so well with the measured tones of the girls. All kinds of other noises intrude into Maddog flights, including the aural warning system (inclined, like many FS AWS, to trigger for no reason on takeoff) and the virtual co-pilot, who calls the takeoff speeds and all.

Verdict? Despite the incredible number of patches, a few glitches and the slightly challenging way the manuals are organised, Maddog is heading towards being a truly classic simulation - the only problem being it hasn't quite got there yet. No, it still isn't quite perfect, but once Lago are done patching it, I will take another look and tell you what gives. Nearly as good as flying a real one..

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