Phoenix Simulation Software's 747 Panel

By Andrew Herd (16 December 2000)

I have taken the unusual step (for me) of applying very little compression to these images - this will increase the download time for the page, but it will give you a much better idea of what is on offer.

The Boeing 747 first flew in 1969, and quickly became a style icon: it was big, it had an unusual look, and it packed in more people in greater comfort than any passenger aircraft ever had done before. It flew high and it flew far and it took a raft of records, including the distinction of being slightly longer overall than the distance the Wright brothers covered in their first powered flight all those years ago. Within a year of the first one rolling off the line, everyone knew what a 747 looked like, and as a kid I can remember knowing one was overhead just by listening to the deep sighing noise the aircraft made as they flew over my parents' house to make the turn at the HEMEL intersection. I used to dream about those planes, and the places they were going to.

It isn't surprising that the 747 has been a popular target for flightsim developers, although it hasn't attracted that much attention from commercial developers of flightsim products - it has always surprised me that Microsoft didn't include such a popular aircraft as a default plane.

A quick search on FlightSim.Com shows more than fifteen hundred 747 planes, but only about a hundred different panels. The reason for the fifteen to one ratio is that the 747 has one of the most complex panels imaginable, even on the early 200 models, and I take my hat off to all the amateurs who have had the courage to roll up their sleeves and have a go. But, with the exception of Data Becker and AETI, payware developers have tended to stay clear - until now.

The first thing to say about this panel is that it is the best big iron flight sim I have seen yet. Within the limitations of FS2000 it offers about as realistic an experience of flying a 747 as it is possible to get, and Phoenix' rivals will have to work hard to surpass it. The glass cockpit of the 400 series is extremely well simulated and the developers have clearly conducted their beta program extremely thoroughly as the only criticisms I have to make are minor ones. The FMC in particular is a tour de force and it is several orders of magnitude better than anything else on offer. Were Phoenix to offer this with an interface for other panels, I am sure it would sell very well in its own right.

The panel costs £10 (about $16 U.S.) and is available on the Phoenix web site from where it can be downloaded after purchasing an emailed 'key' which allows you access to the 15 Mb installation file. 747s in several different liveries can be purchased for £5 each (about $8 U.S.) and there is an excellent sound set by Mike Hambly available for the same amount. This is an absolute bargain when you consider that a real 747 costs $187 million, although I believe at that price you do get a choice of paint scheme.

The installation routine is quite straight forward, although you do have to input a registration key before it can take place and I had no problems with it at all. Once you have installed the aircraft, panel and sound set, I recommend that you download all three manuals and the tutorial which are provided free of charge in Adobe pdf format.

This is not a panel for newcomers to flight simulation and if you are not familiar with flying the default 777 at the very least I would save your money for another day. Although this simulation can be flown manually, it is really designed to be flown using the Flight Management Computer (FMC) and the Flight Director (FD) and it has a state of the art glass cockpit that contains instruments that will be unfamiliar to simmers who are used to flying smaller aircraft. However it isn't impossible to learn how to fly this aircraft from scratch and if you do want to take the plunge and graduate to some heavy metal from the Cessna 182, I suggest you read my glass cockpit conversion tutorial - it will help to make sense of what you will see when the panel loads.

My first impression of the panel was that it was (a) big and (b) awesome. Looking at the screen shots now, I am not inclined to change my mind; this is definitely one of the most visually impressive panels ever designed for Flight Simulator. There is very little to take issue with here (don't worry, I did find some things that needed attention) and the package shows that Phoenix have clearly learned many lessons from their 777. In particular, the Primary Flight Display (PFD) is a nearly perfect copy of the real thing, and at 1024x768 resolution, it was easily legible. All the functions I could think of were there, right down to echoing the V speeds from the FMC and even the speed trend vector is reproduced. The Navigation Display (ND) has been programmed equally thoroughly and it reflects every mode present in the original, including flight plan step mode which is invaluable for checking that SIDs and STARs don't produce any track funnies.

The panel does impose a performance hit and Phoenix have thoughtfully included an applet which lets you adjust refresh rates on the instruments and also to initialise and save different states of the panel. Dropping the refresh rate will gain a few frames, but drop it too far and the autopilot can struggle, so use this tool with caution. In general the frame rates are surprisingly good, but there were noticeable dips at times, with the rate roughly halving and there were also some occasional pauses that I think were due to the panel rather than the scenery.

In what amounts to a stroke of genius, the panel saves it current status when Flight Simulator is shut down, which means that I was able save a flight when on approach, perform my usual crash landing, and then reload the flight with the panel as it was at the time of the save - something that cannot be done with the 777, as far as I am aware.

The height of the panel has come in for criticism, and Phoenix have clearly had their own concerns about this, because a 'pilot's eye' view is accessible from a hotspot and a hotkey. Designing big jet cockpits for Flight Simulator is a difficult task. Not only do complex panels impose performance constraints, but there is the problem of perspective to consider. If you ever get the chance to sit in the left hand seat of a commercial jet liner, the first thing that will strike you is how different the view is to the one we are used to in Flight Simulator. Cockpits are smaller than many people imagine them to be and the panel almost wraps around the pilot, with the majority of the instruments somewhat below the line of vision. The gauges we are used to are spread panoramically before the pilot and the outside view is usually excellent. By contrast, Flight Simulator panels have to be squeezed into a landscape format, with much less height and width compared to reality. This inevitably leads to some design compromises - multiple panels being one of them.

Until we all have widescreen high resolution displays we will have to live with 'squeezed' panels that have to try cram instruments which are normally spread over several feet of cockpit into a much smaller viewing area. In a very complex cockpit like the 747, the designers are faced with a tough choice: either make the instruments as small as they dare, and run the risk that they will be difficult to read; or to make the instruments usable under IFR and put up with a restricted outside view. Phoenix have settled for the latter course and the result is that flying an approach using the PFD is tough, because the runway vanishes under the top of the dash early on and you have to hot key the panel back and forth to see where you are going. The alternative panel view provides a much more 'real' perspective, but the trouble with it is that most of the instruments aren't visible, which limits you to flying visual approaches - there is a hell of a lot to do on finals even if you have autoland engaged. With a very critical eye, Phoenix could have trimmed the height of the panel slightly by moving some switch gear around and altering the proportions, but on the whole it was a reasonable compromise - I just think of it as an IFR panel. Phoenix does need to pay a bit of attention to the masking on the pilot's eye view, though; there is an ugly black area just above the FD in this view.

The FMC is vastly improved from the 777, although it obviously inherits much of the code. The biggest difference between the two aircraft is that Phoenix have moved the FMC from the pedestal (on the 777) to an on-screen window in the 747 and this makes it a pleasure to use. No longer does the user have to hot-key from the panel to the pedestal to consult the FMC and it makes all the difference when the aircraft is being flown under ATC control. Having the FMC right there in your face may not be true to the original cockpit layout, but it is in the spirit of the glass cockpit and if Phoenix ever issue a new version of the 777, my vote is that they move the FMC to a similar position.

This FMC is the most completely implemented version I have seen outside of the Enrico Schiratti's Project Magenta and Phoenix are to be congratulated on making such a good copy. One reason for this is evident in the virtual cockpit, if you look backwards and right - the development team have gone out and bought a copy of Bulfer and Gifford's FMC User's Guide, and it is sitting there right on the shelf. The real FMC is fantastically complex and the sim doesn't implement every single mode, but it has several times more functionality than the 777 FMC and all the commonly used functions are there, with one or two exceptions. Looking at the way the code base for this instrument has expanded over the past few months, it is hard to imagine that Phoenix don't intend to improve it even further and with a little more work it would almost be good enough to do the initial training for commercial pilots.

The FMC is the heart of the panel and many instruments will not function correctly unless you set up the computer properly first. To give you some idea, a complete setup involves inputting the origin and departure airport ICAO codes, the Zero Fuel Weight (ZFW) of the aircraft, selecting takeoff and climb thrust, entering runway condition and confirming V speeds. You also have to build your flight plan, which is where many beginners will come unstuck, because it can be a baffling task until you get used to it. Fortunately, Phoenix have included a facility for importing FS2000 flight plans into the FMC, but that still leaves you to enter speeds and altitudes. There is a full database included, with a complete set of cycle 12 SID/STAR data included. For those of you who are wondering why there should be any need to enter the ZFW, there is another applet provided which allows you to alter the passenger configuration and payload, which in turn alters the maximum fuel load.

The overhead panel is reproduced in classic Phoenix style, and is just as gorgeously lit as the main panel at night. Up here you will find enough switches to keep the most anally retentive simmer happy and if you use the 'dark cockpit' cold start, you will need to be familiar with the switch gear here, as otherwise you are likely to be earth-bound for a long time. Fortunately the starting procedure isn't too complicated and it only took me a couple of tries to fire the aircraft up from cold. If you opt to start your flights with a warm cockpit, you will still need to use the roof panel to some extent because it is necessary to switch off the relevant fuel pumps when the stabiliser and center tanks empty on long flights - the EICAS warns you about this. This panel can be loaded from an icon on the lower left of the main panel and it shuts with a single click on the 'X' in the upper right hand corner. For some reason the 'close' icon isn't present on all the auxiliary panels as it is really useful when you need to get things done fast.

The pedestal, which 777 users will know and love, is accessed much less often in the 747 thanks to the repositioning of the FMC. There are graphics here to represent the twin FMCs, but they aren't functional. Just about the only reason for accessing the pedestal is to view the multifunction display, which has eight pages of data relating to the aircraft, ranging from fuel to the environmental control system. This brings me to the first problem with the panel, which is that there seems to be a bug in the fuel control system logic. I have twice seen the fuel quantities in the two outer tanks jump up several thousand pounds while the two inner tanks drop by the same amount, and other users have reported the same thing - however there is no net fuel loss and it doesn't otherwise affect the aircraft. Another very small criticism of the pedestal is that there has been some hasty editing around the speed brake arm that could be fixed fairly easily in a patch, and the multifunction display completely missed the stuck bogie I suffered on one flight, but we walked away from the landing. Most of us, anyway.

The autopilot and flight director (FD) system are very complete and are easy to use. I tested the panel by flying it several times across the Atlantic and in general I had very few problems. One of the reasons for the panel being as high as it is, is that this particular section has been designed to be comfortable to use and I had no problems selecting any of the controls. Once the FMC is programmed, the pilot has the plane under manual control for a very short time after take off before the autopilot is engaged and after that, assuming a STAR is being flown, crew intervention is limited to making altitude alterations via the altitude selector. Interestingly, one function which doesn't seem to be implemented on the FMC is the facility to echo a prompt for flight level changes on the EICAS, which would be useful. In general the autopilot worked extremely well, but I had some problems with occasional fishtailing near waypoints.

The view on approach is rather better than you would expect it to be at first sight of the panel, as you can see from the screen shot of finals at JFK. It takes some practice to get this phase of flight right, and it didn't help that I had a few problems with the aircraft hunting around in localiser capture mode, which is something that probably needs fixing at a later date. The autoland is basically OK, but I also had some trouble with this mode and I suspect that it needs a little more work to get it right.

I had a huge amount of fun landing the 747 manually and I have to say that this is the first Flight Simulator aircraft that has ever made me want to have a second pilot present! In a simulation that is very close to reality, it pays to have the plane lined up and stable at least a dozen miles out, or you are likely to miss the runway. The original .air file made the plane skid a little unrealistically on turns, but this has recently been updated and hopefully has now been solved.

Now for the frame rates.

I ran the tests in clear skies. The 733 MHz machine was running Windows ME, and the 300 MHz box Windows 98 second edition, both had MS Flight Simulator 2000 Professional Edition, update 2b applied. Specs: 733: Intel Pentium 733 MHz, 256 Mb RAM, Creative GeForce 2 GTS with 32 Mb RAM; 300: Intel Pentium 300 MHz, 128 Mb RAM, Voodoo 3000 16 Mb RAM. I used a commercial add-on for Heathrow, chosen to reflect the type of complex scenery that many simmers are likely to use with this plane.

This is not a quick panel to load: the 733 took 45 seconds and the 300 nearer to two minutes, so be patient. Despite the frame rates being quite good, I wouldn't recommend running the plane on a 300 MHz machine as I think it would struggle with the panel/aircraft combination, particularly in spot plane view, but I haven't tested this extensively as others have reviewed the aircraft.

What more can I say? This package is about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on, and I can thoroughly recommend it to experienced simmers. There are a few bugs, sure, but Phoenix' track record on patches is pretty good and I am sure they will get ironed out. The only major problem is the occasional dip in frame rates, and I found that my 733 MHz machine struggled at times, but this is one great plane and the designers deserve to be congratulated.