Just Flight Piper Arrow III available for purchase

Hello all! The much awaited Just Flight Arrow III has just been released!

https://www.justflight.com/product/pa-28r-arrow-iii-microsoft-flight-simulator

Have it and love it so far. Seems to have a lot of torque that you have to account for.

Read a lot of reviews, some by real-life pilots. All are favorable. Decided to take the plunge.

Just bought it myself. I have a concern. On parking I tried to used the mouse to bring mixture full lean and the lever wouldn't go lower than midrange. The rpm lever and throttle were free and easy to move over their range, but not mixture. Funny

 

The other concern is with my old logitech extreme 3d pro joystick, the elevator controls were "sticky", so the control was poor at approach speeds.

 

The elevator smoothness could be a fps issue, didnt check.

 

Tomorrow I'll look if a sensitivity setting could be adjusted. But I cant make sense of the mixture control.

 

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I really enjoy this creation quite a bit. It probably has some kinks to still work out but by and large it's great.

 

They have some work to do on the VR though. It actually seems like they've kind of ignored VR. First, since MSFS and Oculus have not perfected the resolution for VR in Flight Simulator, most of us are unable to easily read dials on the dashboard without zooming into them. But for some reason, my zoom function on the mouse refuses to work for the Piper. This hasn't happened with any other plane I've flown on VR. The Piper being new to me this made things pretty hard.

 

Second, when flying at night, the view looking out of the left glass windshield appears to be weirdly diminished. Looking in front everything looks normal. Looking left, diminished in brightness. This reduces the realism factor a bit. Not sure if it will happen in daylight flying which I mostly do.

 

Third, since I couldn't zoom, the lighting was also a problem. In the C172 at night, MSFS gives me an automatic headlamp on my head to more easily see the dash--if the interior lights are off. In the Piper, no headlamp showed up, and the dash was too dark for me to find any switches to turn additional lights on (if there are any).

 

Fourth, the mouse cursor is showing up twice, indicating a problem with how the plane has been reconciled with VR. With the cursor not being synced up with my eyes, I don't actually have a mouse cursor with which to hit switches etc. I have two, so I have to guess which one is the correct one, each and every use.

 

That's a lot of gripes but I am just pointing out the defects that show up in VR only. Other than these it's a really cool airplane, and I especially enjoy the realism of it being "aged" a little not and very high tech.

Edited March 14, 2021 by neilends

I figured out by RTFM, that there is a lock on mixture lever, never knew about that so the mixture issue is user error.

 

Other issue with control persists, with fps being pretty constant.

 

Tonight I flew for a few hrs and attempted to set the controls for max power, without success.

 

Perhaps it's me again, but no matter what I tried to do but at 8000 with 65% power nothing I did could produce 20 inhg on the egt. Best speed I managed was about 112knots at 8000.

 

 

 

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I figured out by RTFM, that there is a lock on mixture lever, never knew about that so the mixture issue is user error.

 

Other issue with control persists, with fps being pretty constant.

 

Tonight I flew for a few hrs and attempted to set the controls for max power, without success.

 

Perhaps it's me again, but no matter what I tried to do but at 8000 with 65% power nothing I did could produce 20 inhg on the egt. Best speed I managed was about 112knots at 8000.

 

 

 

Sent from my SM-A205U using Tapatalk

 

But DO tell us what you did? Mixture would have to be optimised, even at 8,000 ft ASL.

Any idea how it compares to Carenado version?

so I've flown around 6.7hrs with it so far for the review, and from what ive heard with people that own both carenado and Just Flight, the Carenado is like a toy. what i've found so far:

 

the night lighting could be improved, though it has that "hard to see" feel you get from many aircraft of the period. I always use a headlamp when flying at night in aircraft with just a red light.

 

2nd, for some reason, Just Flight decided to leave out the entire US in terms of altimeter setting. no Inches Hg to be found, only QNH. that could use an update.

 

the HSI also recesses, something it should not do, so you have to switch back to the heading indicator, reset the heading, and then switch back to the HSI... ruins the immersion

 

and lastly I could not figure out the GPS100. I read the manual, but couldn't get anywhere with it.

 

those are the negatives. I absolutely love flying the airplane, and for those struggling with speed issues, you need to lean the mixture to peak EGT, and a good setting for the prop and power is 25/25, or 24/24. at high altitudes, 20/24 or 20/25 work well too.

2nd, for some reason, Just Flight decided to leave out the entire US in terms of altimeter setting. no Inches Hg to be found, only QNH. that could use an update.

 

Haha, I hadn't even noticed that! When I modified the barometer, the popup data showed up in US measurement so I only looked at that. I did not look at the actual numbers on the dial, which as you note are QNH (I don't know what that is, but it's not US inches). I guess the plane is what it is.

Update on my concern about speed control:

 

I am a licensed pilot, but my PIC experience is limited to fixed prop simple airplanes. My understanding of a variable speed prop is from “book learning”. My simming experience began flying the early Bruce Artwick AFS2.

 

I’ve owned the new Just Flight PA28 Arrow III for a few days, and starting to fly my new purchase. I have been generally observing performance. As previously mentioned, on a recent flight over India, I took it up to 8000 ft, and tried for 65% power, 21.5 mp, 2500 rpm, per the supplied POH. No go, simply couldn’t reach those numbers. And the airspeed and ground speed were disappointing. So I went to bed saying, hmm. Re-read the book on flying the prop, and I seemed to be doing it right.

 

So today, I decided to take another flight with the express purpose of testing all the best power settings on the power setting table of the POH. For this flight, I flew at 5300 ft over Japan. The air pressure was standard, so I’m using the 5000’ Pressure Altitude line of the chart.

 

For 55% power, I succeeded in nailing the controls to perfectly meet the suggested settings. This was true both at 2200 rpm, and 2500 rpm.

 

At 65% power the results were mixed. First try for 65% was for 2200 rpm, I was at 24.3 mp with the throttle all the way in. But it was not possible to reduce the rpm to 2200. Closest I could get was nearly 2300 rpm.

 

The settings for 65% power, at 2500 rpm were easy to achieve.

 

And finally, 75% power for which we seek 24.6 mp at 2500 rpm. This was very close to possible. I’ve got the throttle in 100% but can’t quite get the mp up to 24.6, but its close. Actual best mp is 24 while at 2500 rpm. All in all, I’m most impressed. One final note, at 75% power the airspeed has climbed to a respectable 127 kts indicated, which is pretty sweet for this old bird.

 

I need to return to my 8000 ft altitude to explore what was wrong. Logically, I should be making better gs than at lower alt, but I wasn't being diligent about what the atm pressure was on the previous flight.

While I was doing all that testing, as I wrote above, I was putting the sim on active pause a lot as I documented the results, and at first I was taking screenshots of each test, all of which menat the sim was on active pause for quite a while.

 

Once complete, I attempted to finish my flight. Removed the autopilot, and for some reason, the aircraft could not be controlled. Uncommanded bank angles were extreme, and simple corrections with the yoke resulted in massive overcorrection. I'm certain the flight would end in a crash, and I hate denting a new/old aircraft, so I quit.

 

Memory Leak??????

 

Inadequate computer perhaps to run at ultra high.

 

To experiment, I reduced the setting to high, and I then took a short flight using the nearly successful 75% power setting, and I had a fine 30 minute flight with only a small control problem on final.

 

The problems on final persist on every flight. This being the elevator over controls pitch at slow speed, which has me bobbing my nose until luckily a descent landing.

 

My next experiment will be to adjust the y axis sensitiviy on my old logitech extreme 3d joystick to make a flatter curve near the origin. Will report back.

Starting the next flight and I'm watching the plane in the animated taxi sequence dance around as though the throttle in in and the plane is straining against the parking brake.

 

Never saw a real plane do that. Anybody else see that?

 

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Tried a suggestion I read on avsim for a twitchy elevator, in the flight_model.cfg is a parameter called "elevator_effectiveness". Its set at 1. I changed it to 0.1 per the op at avsim, and found the slow flight much easier to control. Made my first smooth landing.

 

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FYI, the company has announced an update to the Piper. “We're letting you know that new software is now available for the aircraft, providing many updates and fixes. These include new icing effects, improvements to the flight dynamics, VR compatibility fixes and much more.”

I can confirm that the VR tweaks they've made are a great improvement. Most importantly, I can now zoom in on the instrument panel.

All I know so far is the altimeter adjustment window is now in in-HG, which is great. Bad news is every weather update from flight centers report standard pressure.

 

Perhaps a msfs 2020 bug. Until buying the just flight plane, I wasn't motivated to pay attention to such a detail, so I hadnt noticed this.

 

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First try, no joy. Full throttle for takeoff, but its stuck on the ground as though the parking brake is applied. Been toggling the brake with no impact.

 

Wheels are turning like crazy, but no motion. I'm even reading airspeed! Crazy.

 

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Uninstalled and reinstalled, and now it works.

 

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Uninstalled and reinstalled, and now it works.

 

Sent from my SM-A205U using Tapatalk

 

Pain in the butt to do it but so often that's the magic that was needed!

Brand new update from the Just Flight folks. Among the tweaks are even more VR improvements. Cool!

 

https://support.justflight.com/support/solutions/articles/17000115071