First look at the Boeing Stratoliner in Microsoft Flight Simulator

hello so Microsoft have released the Boeing strato liner for Microsoft flight simulator so I recorded a live stream with it earlier and I've written up a checklist so I thought I might record a proper first look at it just to go around the airplane get it up and running take it for a quick flight just to show it and put it through its Paces a little bit so we're going to have a look around it first with the drone camera you can see the material modeling is absolutely stunning so as we move her any airplane this is one of the deliveries that comes with it it's the the polished delivery so you can see the the engine blocks propellers everything about it it's absolutely gorgeous material modeling of all the surfaces around the aircraft and nuts and the bolts you really can't fault it so if we come underneath the airplane and go look at the wheels everybody seems to be obsessed with looking at the wheels of these airplanes so you can see it's very nicely done and the Hydraulics as well all the cables and very very good okay so if we go and come back up to the cockpit we can go and have a look around inside so if we come through the cockpit so the modeling of the instruments is very very nicely done so you can see inside the cockpit we've got all various levers and switches not everything is operable and it's certainly not study level you know you can get away with an awful lot but I guess they're aiming it towards a mass audience so I'm not going to complain too much about that but what is here is great fun to play with and it's very easy to fly it's very easy to operate so it turns out though the the um the position or the pre-programmed views aren't great for starting the airplane up so it actually makes more sense to drag yourself around the copy using the mouse to get things fired up there's an engineer station so the original aircraft would have had a crew of a pilot co-pilot and a flight engineer and a Communications officer as well so you've got a morse code set here but it's entirely decorative it doesn't actually work neither does the com radio up there so there is clipping if you use the normal views so you can't go and wander straight through into the uh The Galley but sorry into the um passenger compartment but if we use the drone camera we can so we can go and fly down through the passenger compartment and you can see it's a shame because the the modeling in here is wonderful as well and if you didn't know about using the drone camera you wouldn't ever see it so we can come down and fly down through the the cabin and you can see it's really really nicely done obviously you can pretend to get the experience that a passenger would have got the windows have all got you know slight marks on them and things it makes it very authentic okay so we'll put the Xbox controller to one side for the moment and we'll press insert to go back into the cockpit away from the drone camera so let's go and see what's involved in getting this airplane up and running so it's worth pointing out I've seen a few bugs where I couldn't start the engines and I restarted the simulator and it worked fine so there are a couple of little bugs in it I'm not sure what causes them it could be something I've done so anyway we're not going to worry too much so a couple of things straight away then above the pilot you can see there's a refuel switch and a Services switch if you go and look outside now the refuel puts this petrol tank out the front which is really lovely and the services puts a stewardess stood on the stairs and some bags on a trolley so it's just some nice little touches there so over on the engineer station we can go and switch the switch to ground power at the top of the station the light comes on so we've got power to the aircraft so then over on the co-pilot section we can then go and turn some lights on so if we go and look overhead we've got the position that's already on I've already done it so you can see I've been meddling around with the airplane before we actually started recording and the rotating Beacon light is on I've already done that previously I forgot to turn it back off so then engineering section again we can go and switch all of the fuel valves on to Main so it's done then we can go and turn on the Pito heat so I don't really agree with the ordering of a lot of these things but we're not going to complain too much about it so the inverters we can go and switch to auto we can calibrate the ultimators just by pressing B to do that as we can normally in flight simulator now we're going to start the engines so to start the engines it's pretty straightforward so what we're going to do you can see there's a banker switches up here that do engines one two three and four so the switches can flick in either direction so to start engine number one we go boost Prime start count to five two three four five turn the magnetos to both and then if we look outside you'll see smoke come pouring out and the engine burst into life okay so same again for engine number two so we go boost Prime start two three four five magnetos to both his smoke out and then we get up and running so engine number three boost Prime start two three four five engine number three is up and running and then engine number four boost Prime start two three four five and magnetos to both the engines up and running so if you experience the same bug I saw the engines would just turn over slowly and they won't fire up I didn't get to the bottom of what caused it I just restarted the Sim and it was all fine okay so back inside the aircraft we're gonna go and turn the generators on now this is a Miss I think this is missing from the the checklist so generator one on generator two so pilot position so press F then in the refuel section we're going to go and turn off that refuel and services so they'll go away so when we look outside now just got the grand power unit so then we are going to go back over to that series section over here or the engineering section and we're going to go and switch over to battery name so the grand power unit will have been pulled out of the way okay so in front of the pilot we can go and turn the avionics switch on which is up here so the it's got a modern autopilot look which is quite novel thank you and we can then do some basic pre-takeoff checks around the aircraft so we're going to check things like mixture levers are all fully Rich the propeller levers are on maximum rpm the throttle levers are good we can just check around the manifold pressures RPMs pressures and so on and so forth just to make sure everything looks good and it does it's all fine to be honest this aircraft is not super accurate in terms of engine management so you don't need to worry too much okay so we're going to go and taxi app let's go and see where we are in the world we're at Monterey so we need to take off from me to eight so we're gonna double back on ourselves here so to get it our parking brakes off big old lump isn't it we're going to double back on ourselves so we're going to open the engines up it takes a bit of thrust to get it moving but then once it's rolling it rolls quite happily so there we go because it's a tail Drinker you can actually turn around quite easily just have to be aware if you do lose momentum you're going to have to use a lot of power to get the thing rolling again and we'll go for a little flight around the area and come back in for an approach so it has a gyro pilot it also has this modern autopilot so I would argue it's much easier to use this the one thing you have to bear in mind is to set your direction you have to use the the rudder knob on the gyro pilot which has now started rolling all on its own look so you have to be careful about it so you use the rudder knob and then you can tune for the autopilot it has got nav radios so if we press Ctrl and four you can see they're on the back of the central pedestal so you've got comradios and nav radios down here so you can tune them in and then the um the nav instruments up here will work so they've just got a normal Omni Berry selectors on them they work really nicely okay so we're just taxing down quite quickly we'll go out to the runway on the next intersection so it has got flaps but you don't need them to take off so I'll just show you them see that animating down there it'll take a while to travel so it's something to keep to bear in mind as well it's a big old lump of an airplane isn't it So reading the documentation about it it was designed to cruise at twenty thousand feet which gave it a huge leg up on competing aircraft at the time like the DC3 so because it could climb above you know weather basically okay so let's open the engines up see what it sounds like sounds fantastic so we'll just hold the center line it has got a control to lock the tail wheel but you've got very good Rudder Authority so you don't typically need it so we're just coming up to 120 miles back so the manifold pressure's not over the red line let's go here outside and we'll lift the wheels up so you get to see the animation sorry button somewhere here the latest Airport information visibility one zero 1 800 feet temperature that was an interesting one day so let's go and get rid of that so if we go and detune the com area just by flickling the latest Airport information [Music] [Music] [Music] lovely looking airplane [Music] so I mentioned that it has a gyro pilot so we'll just go and unfortunately the clouds are not playing ball with us today we can see that so thankfully we have got an attitude indicator we'll show you how this works so we will match our heading so at the moment we're traveling along about 60 degrees so you can see the white arrow on the gyro Compass over here so we will match that over here with 60 degrees [Music] please name towards 40 degrees so it does move around so there's 40 sorry 30 40 degrees over here so if we go and engage the autopilot over here [Music] let me say heading mode obviously it's not going to waver too much because we were almost going the same direction but then we can control the direction we're flying by turning the knob on the gyro pilot which will control the heading that it's flying towards and obviously you can use this as a guide so this doesn't actually control anything it is purely a guide so if you are flying by hand you're trying to keep the compass within the guides um otherwise this this works the same as any other you would ever see so we're coming up to 3000 feet for example so if we went for three thousand feet and did altitude hold it will it's gonna there we go like it's leveling as we speak so we'll come back off the autopilot because it's pretty standard how that works I'll pull the throttle back a bit and we're going to fly back around to Monterey and do an approach so the airfield's just over here [Music] so obviously if you're doing a longer flight it's got um if we're going to look over here you can trim the engines out to Auto lean once you're in cruise and you can control RPM so obviously we're running Max RPM at the moment [Music] but it's all predictable and it's very very docile very easy to fly so no surprises really at all with it it's very good [Music] turn back in towards the Airfield I'm trying to lose some speed on the way so we'll cut the power back doing about 150 miles an hour [Music] [Music] makes it a bit more realistic having to deal with a little bit of weather [Music] okay so there's the Airfield speed's coming down which is good so let's get the undercarriage out [Music] don't want to get much slower than about 120 at the moment so I'm just opening the engines up a little bit more we're going to drop the flaps as well but only to the first stage we're not going to go for full flaps just yet we will once we get lined up so the airfield's over here so obviously you have got no instruments so you can fly ILS it'd be a bit awkward to have to look up the whole time so you might want to think about you know your positioning within the cup approaching this airplane below 120 knots so sorry 120 miles an hour so obviously this is a big heavy lump of an airplane so you can't throw around the sky acrobatically I want a full flaps there so it's going to have a look to see what that looks like great big barn door flaps [Music] firm finish on this is really quite stunning isn't it [Music] it's just Frozen wait for it to unfreeze itself it's some sort of data feed problem with the servers I think that causes that late again it's just quarter [Music] [Music] really really nicely model isn't it is something else [Music] so here comes the wrong way let's go and jump inside so the default camera view when you press f is a little bit so a wide angle so I always find myself adjusting it slightly my PT use Rudder to keep the nose pointing in a straight line it does wander and wallow you end up looking you know just tipping yourself sideways to see beyond the pillar that to be right in front of the Pilot's line of sight so we'll just deal with that so if you can see I'm doing lots of small inputs on the control column it's a shame you can't see the indicated AirSpeed if you're you know also if you move sideways you can't then see the indicated AirSpeed which is a little bit of a problem but not too bad so we're a little bit High looking at the puppy lights there so we'll just send down Two Reds and two white so nearly there we go Two Reds two whites let's let it fall [Music] for the center line like I said the rudder Authority is very very good get the tail wheel into the floor and back pressure on the control column to keep the airplane going in a straight line we can raise the flapsody so no real dramas it's very very easy to fly so the wheel brakes don't seem to tip it forwards so you can be quite aggressive on the wheel brakes as well and taxi back down and park next to the hangers down here it's a lovely looking airplane isn't it it really is okay should we go in between the Kodiak and the bird dog over here oh parking brake on so you've got several ways you can cut the engines the the safest way I think is just to pull the mixtures which will obviously use up any fuel in the real world in the the pipes obviously once the engines have stopped spinning so you can see that happening it's got some nice animations about them turning over once they've stopped spinning you can obviously go and turn off the magnetos and we can go and turn off some of the lights that we had on so the Beacon Light position light to turn the generators off now uh turn off the Pito Heat we can go and turn off the Avionics go over to the engineer station and shut off the fuel valves and we can turn the battery power back off and that's pretty much it there's not a lot to do obviously when you're in flight you can if you're you know if you're concentrating on cruise you've got radios to play with you've got the um de-icing controls to play with there's a lot to play with inside the airplane but it's very very straightforward to fly so there you go that was the Boeing strato liner so I will put a link in the notes to the checklist that I've written up it's very much a work in progress so expect it to change over the coming days as we figure out more and more about how to more correctly operate this airplane I don't agree with the checklist that comes with it so we'll see how we get on anyway I'm going to leave it there I'll see you again soon

Channel: Jonathan Beckett

Views: 59,818

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Id: TyrfyaU3yU8

Length: 26min 10sec (1570 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023