Establishing a Baseline - Flyable Aircraft

As I wrote earlier, here is the list of aircraft I currently have installed as user/flyable aircraft. At this point the entire list is freeware, but I have my eye on several payware packages (primarily for the panels and systems), and I've downloaded a few other freeware models I haven't installed yet, so watch for updates.

The aircraft are listed in alphabetical order by type. I'll flesh out this list with details on what panels and sounds I'm using when I get some more time.

A300-600R - HNAC
A310-200 and -300 - HNAC
A319, A320, and A321 - iFDG
A330-200 and -300 - Project Opensky
A340-300 - Project Opensky
A340-500 and -600 - Simubuild (they're no longer around)

B747-400 - Project Opensky
B757-200 - Project Opensky
B767-200 and -300 - Project Opensky
B777-200 - MelJet

CRJ-200 - Project Opensky
CRJ-700 - PAD
CRJ-900 - Project Opensky

DHC-8-200Q - Dreamwings

F-16 Viper - Kirk Olsson

Fokker-70 and -100 - Project Fokker

MD-11 - iFDG
MD-80 and -87 - SGA

PC-12 - AFG

As you can see, most of these can be categorized as airliners. Judging from what I have installed and what I spend most of my time flying, that's my primary area of interest. As far as the default aircraft go, I think most of them are terrible visually. I do like the panels and the Garmin GPS that Microsoft has provided, however, and occasionally fly the Beechcraft Super King Air 350 and the Cessna Skylane 182. Tooling along around 100 knots at 5,000 feet while flying VFR over a good photoreal scenery is quite a different experience than planning and executing an 8-hour intercontinental flight at Mach .82 and FL390.

The F-16 is in there because it's nice to get from one place to another at Mach 1.2 sometimes (although I have a Falcon 4.0 Allied Force install for serious combat simming). I've got another couple of military aircraft packages on deck as well.

I installed the PC-12 because I have a certain level of familiarity with it. Pilatus makes great airplanes - have you seen the new PC-21? I saw it perform at an airshow in the Swiss alps and it was pretty impressive - after all, what would you expect from a turboprop with 2 ejection seats that can go 685 km/h and pull 8 G's?

Establishing a Baseline - Introduction

In the forthcoming "Baseline" posts I will outline what I have added into flightsim at this point. These posts will cover the following areas:

• Flyable (aka "User") aircraft, including panels and sound sets;
• Scenery - both freeware and payware;
• AI traffic, including aircraft and flight plans; and
  
• Utilities and other modifications.
  

There is no way I'll be able to cover my entire installation with 100% accuracy. It would have been better to begin taking notes when I began adding things into the sim, but the idea of keeping track didn't strike me until very recently. However, since I spent no time on flight sim during 2006, this is probably the best time to start keeping track, as I get things updated.

Just some background on my history with this game: I've been using Microsoft Flight Simulator since version 2 in 1984. I've used almost every version between that and FS2004 (I have no plans to upgrade to FSX yet).

I estimate that I currently spend about 1/2 my flightsim time downloading and installing AI traffic, 1/6 adding new flyable aircraft or scenery enhancements, and the remaining 1/3 actually flying.

My hardware setup is the following:

• Intel Pentium 4 CPU at 3 GHz;
• Asus P5GD1 motherboard with 1GB of dual-channel DDR RAM;
• ATI Radeon X700 PCIe graphics card with 256MB of video memory;
• 2x 80GB WD800JD Serial ATA hard drives, configured as a RAID 0 array;
• Creative Sound Blaster Audigy LS, hooked up to the Inspire T5400 5.1 speakers; and
• Microsoft SideWinder Pro control stick.

There's more, but that's all that's relevant. All of this runs under Windows XP Pro SP2.