Saab JA-37 Viggen (Flightgear Jet Testing)

I've been a test pilot for the Saaba JA-37 Viggen lately. The plane is made by Anders Lejczak (3D model & textures) and Nikolai V. Chr. (Aerodynamics, animations, sound, effects, HUD, coding), and can be downloaded here. 

Now have to bear in mind this plane is under development, and I probably don't make a good test pilot.

Because:

...I kept crashing it.

Testing is done at KOAK, and embarrassingly, I never really left the airport compound and poked three holes in the area.

So, a little about the plane, for the brave souls who would like to try it out. First off, I wasn't able to control it with a keyboard, I'm sure others have better luck doing so, but the developer did recommend it would be better with a joystick. It requires a long runway, and afterburner takeoffs are recommended.

Being in development there are some minor issues with it, such as afterburner sound stuttering and all, hoping that it would eventually be fixed.

UPDATE : 30th May 2014 - I found the reason why I can't fly it. With a keyboard, the "5" key to reset all controls to center is not there, and because there is also no standard HUD I am not aware the plane controls doesn't reset when I hit "5" on the numeric pad. This explains why the plane is unflyable, as I kept thinking I had reset the controls. (It didn't help that the jet gave impressions that the center key was pressed when I do so mid-turn). Once I found out, and flew with a mouse, the plane was actually completely flyable. I contacted the author of the FDM about this and he said it's been fixed in a new version. I will try it out and blog about it. 


Model :

While the FDM is being sorted out (I'm confident it will be), I will talk about the model. It's a nice model, with nice livery, you have two sets of livery with it, one is the standard gray (I can not remember the names of the liveries!) and the other has a nice camouflage scheme that I quite like. The HUD is standard, showing altitude, attitude indicator and angle of attack, but I can not say how accurate this is to the real jet though, because I hardly know about Saab JA-37 Viggens. The cockpit is a bit sparse at the moment, but all the necessary items for flying are there to use, and with the radar screen(?) in the middle like all jet fighters should have.

Crashing :

I feel I should write about crashing it because I am already an expert. I don't know how others fly it with a keyboard, but I can't, and the jet seemingly won't respond to my key commands. So I just lose control and crash into the ground. The crash not only have an explosion sound effect, it also has the pilot gasping his last breaths. Hmm. Becaue I am an expert at crashing the plane, I came to dread hearing it .  My last few flights, when losing control and about to crash, I just pause and quickly reset it. Didn't want to hear another pilot getting killed :) .

A (Very) Brief Overview of X-Plane 10

 I have downloaded the X-Plane 10 demo lately.

All I can say is -- WOW! The dynamic lighting makes flying the night scenes so realistic! This, combined with the cars moving about on roads, it looks just like when I'm on a real plane, looking down towards the ground. Austin Meyer, founder of Laminar Research and maker of X-Plane says in an interview that the roads are based on OpenStreet Map, and based on that street map data they auto-generate the buildings and roadways in the sim. The effect is wonderful - even though the city we're flying over won't be exactly the same, the the sim loads up buildings in what it thinks are suburban areas and cities and place buildings accordingly. That means roads near a waterfront will have waterfront houses, densely packed areas will have tall buildings, etc. It is a wonderful result.

The dynamic lighting also makes the sim realistic, how the lighting looks depends on time of day, and it is dawn or dusk that is especially interesting, especially when all the light on the aircraft comes on, and all the city lights and cars went on.

The clouds are even better, never have I seen so convincing clouds in a sim yet - like in real life, you can have cloudy areas in one direction and clear areas in another direction.

The sim does have some problems though - if you treat it like a game, then it will be like a toy. For example, most obstacles and buildings don't have collision detection, you just fly through them. Landing on water, you will just float like a child's bath toy. You can even take off again from water....

But ultimately, we don't get simulations to do things such as those, we use simulations to fly, and the planes provided that I tried so far have been great.

Needless to say there are a lot more things to write about X-Plane 10 which I don't have time to (I'm working as I type this!) and it is my latest interest so far- other than Kerbal Space Program, and FlightGear of course.

The simulation runs quite smoothly in default settings on my late-2012 Mac mini. The demo will disable joystick input after 15 minutes.


X-Plane 10 Demo can be downloaded here

Boeing 787 Maiden Flight!

After a long delay, the Dreamliner is finally going to take off !! I can't wait to watch the video of it taking into the skies!



"At 10 AM on December 15, 2009, chief pilot Mike Carriker, joined by engineering pilot Randy Neville, will push the throttle levels on the first 787 full forward and rocket down Runway 32L at Paine Field in Everett, Washington, marking the commencement of Boeing's flight test program that sets the new composite aircraft on the path toward first delivery late next year."

http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/flightblogger/