Honeycomb Alpha Yoke Review

[Music] the sim market on pc is alive and well and with the release of microsoft's latest flight simulator has been a smorgasbord of software and hardware products hitting the market but finding or getting hold of some of these things has been about as hard as finding unicorn what so the honeycomb yoke really has had widespread availability problems during all of the pandemic people have been at home they've been wanting to gain they've not been able to go out the story sort of tells itself but i've managed to get hold of one of these yokes finally and today we are going to do an in-depth review and my first impressions of this yoke is it had a smaller footprint than i was expecting now i say this in a positive way it doesn't take up anywhere near as much space on my desk as i was anticipating and i have to say that the overall build quality is really very good it's it's made of plastic of course like many of these products but it's made of a very high premium feeling plastic it's not covered in really tacky shiny stuff it's got nice matted finish to it and the unit feels really sturdy overall there's nothing moving around there's nothing creaking and the shaft that connects the yoke into the main base of the unit really doesn't have very much movement travel or play at all it's got that very characteristic honeycomb pattern there behind the yoke itself which is subtly illuminated with some red leds those red leds have got different brightness settings you can switch them off if you'd like and it's got five individual levels of brightness uh that you can adjust to your taste now that's not hugely realistic you don't find backlit honeycomb patterns in aircraft but i do have to say that the aesthetic is uh is very nice indeed the real selling point of this yolk though for me is that it has a full 180 degrees rotation and by that i mean it rotates fully 90 degrees to the left and fully 90 degrees to the right lots of the yolks in other manufacturers line up certainly those that are a bit cheaper but indeed some of which are many many many more times more expensive than this yoke only rotate 45 degrees left and 45 degrees right you would expect in a real aircraft a full deflection of 90 degrees left and right and that prevents over controlling the aircraft with a yoke that only turns 45 degrees left if you look in the sim it will actually deflect the sims yoke a full 90 degrees to the left so you think you're putting in a small subtle amount of control and actually you're putting in far more sure if you want to invest the time and the effort i'm sure you can adjust this within the sim but it's nice to see a more realistic deflection that's more accurately reflected within the sim itself the yoke feels really robust as you push it forwards and backwards there's a really nice amount of resistance really makes you feel like you're pushing something that's controlling large hefty control surfaces and whilst it does have a spring that returns it to the middle it does this quite quickly and it's quite nicely dampened it doesn't rock backwards and forwards when you let control of the yoke when you twist the yoke left and right doesn't have quite that level of resistance and to an extent not sure that you would expect it to but again it feels really smooth and premium and again that lack of movement within the within the rod that connects the yoke to the base that helps that movement just feel slick and smooth um and really controlled actually it's got uh a dual trim button on the left hand side of the yoke and you do have to deflect both of these buttons either up or down to adjust the trim in the aircraft again that is what you would expect to see in many modern aircraft and on the right hand side you've got a rudder trim again with dual activation buttons that you need to press both in order to adjust the trim both of those sets of buttons feel really robust it feels really premium when you press those buttons actually again it feels like you're pressing on uh a real device that's really controlling a real aircraft it does also include three uh momentary switches and i think it is an eight-way hat disappointingly and somewhat surprisingly these felt pretty cheap actually the wobble and the movement on them was pretty bad particularly on the smaller momentary switches but not exclusively and the hat switch didn't feel as premium and it actually felt out of place against all of the rest of the aesthetics and just how quality and premium the rest of the yolk felt so it would be good to see those improved also included on this yoke's a great switch panel it includes slightly different buttons for things like the battery uh the alternator the avionics etc and then slightly different switches for the lights underneath all of these fell really premium robust with a really satisfying uh clunk particularly for the avionics battery and alternator switches the light switches are organized in the same order that you would find on a cessna 172 that was really good to see and when i was playing in vr it was much easier to find the correct switch because i could look at the vr representation of the cessna 172 dashboard and i could just feel across the switches using what i could see as a reference and i could get the right landing switch on it's also got a rotary switch on the right hand side for starting the engine or selecting the magnetos the left hand magnetos or right-hand magnetos normally find this on the left-hand side in an aircraft but i'm not going to make too much of a fuss it's really nice to see this included on the yoke and for those of us that do this in vr as far as fumbling around in your setup to try and find the controls that you're looking for doesn't include a throttle and the price point certainly higher than some other yokes you could find on the market around about the 249 mark about the same in uk pounds 249 pounds a bit less if you're lucky um so arguably you're going to have to you're going to have to dig deeper in your pockets because you will need a throttle to go with this as well now you can mix and match between different providers you can go with a logitech scitec throttle if you like so don't feel obligated to go with the equally expensive bravo throttle quadrant you can settle for something a little bit cheaper and perfectly adequate actually with the setup it features the same mounting system on the top that you find on the scitec yoke so if you do have some of its panel lineup whether that's the radio panel the multi-panel etc you can attach that to this device the same is also true on the bravo throttle so i think they've called it universal mounting system for this device let's call it they copied the spacing pattern so that you could mount logitech scitec devices to it but i think it's good that they've done that lots of people mix and match in there in their sim rigs now let's talk about the mounting plate because i i've really found with the scitec one the mounting of this to my desk has been quite pinnickety it comes with quite a quite cheap feeling uh plastic mounting system actually has got quite a lot of flex and bend in it this comes with a really nice set of metal clamps two metal clamps included the mounting plate actually is separate from the main unit and you use these metal mounting plates to mount the metal base plate to the desk and then you slide the yoke onto that and effectively it's got two two wheels that spin at the back that lock it to that plate and it feels really robustly connected to that surface now if you've got a particularly thick desk and you and you can't get the included clamps around that desk they it does have a very very sticky 3m pad included so you can effectively stick the plate to the to the desk you can still release it's got a couple of tabs that you can pull up that push the plate off of the desk but if you can get the clamps around your desk and that's probably what i would recommend it's absolutely no need to use the clamps and the sticky pad at the same time the clamps are more than adequate so is this yoke worth your hard-earned cash 249 slightly higher price point than some of its competitors i'm gonna go out on a limb here and say a very very very big yes i really did notice the improved quality over the logitech and scitec yolk and i'm not sitting here bowed mouthing the logitech yoga it's a perfectly good device you'll have a perfectly good experience in that but the the premium feel the 90 degree rotation in each direction the lack of travel on the uh for the shaft inside the base really was very noticeable actually as i was flying and i did find the altogether more compact setup of having the uh the switch panel behind the yoke really helpful in vr actually yes this is definitely going to cost you more money should you upgrade if you've already got the scitec yolk as i say the scitec yolk is a perfectly good device it's going to give you a perfectly good experience but if you have got the cash and you're looking to improve some of your gear it is a nice upgrade and for those that are doing real world training i think it's going to give you something that's going to feel not entirely like but slightly more like what you would find in a real aircraft it's going to stop that over control tendency it's going to allow you to relax back and let the art of the aircraft really begin to fly itself so despite some fairly cheap feeling wobbly single push buttons and are not great hat which i definitely think honeycomb air nautical should improve i'm actually going to go out on a limb i'm going to break my tendency to give everything four out of five and i'm going to give this five out of five stars a really great product whilst it could be conceived of being a little bit pricey i think for the quality and overall build of the device at this price point really is pretty hard to beat so there we go guys the alpha yoke from honeycomb aeronautical as always i hope you really will wherever in the world you are please like share and subscribe and i will see you in my next one [Music] you

Channel: Virtual Reality Pilot

Views: 83,971

Keywords: honeycomb aeronautical, honeycomb yoke review, flight simulator, flight sim, honeycomb alpha, honeycomb aeronautical flight controls, honeycomb aeronautical yoke, honeycomb aeronautical alpha flight controls, honeycomb aeronautical alpha flight controls & switch panel, honeycomb aeronautical alpha, honeycomb alpha yoke

Id: _AfDfxbOG3M

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021