A2A Simulations Piper PA28 Cherokee Review for FSX / P3D 

Thanks. Sounds like an awesome place to have a lesson.

Thanks for the kind words. The difference between this one and Flight Club is like night and day.

Thanks. That's quite a complement :-)

Thanks for the kind words. My understanding, although I have yet to try it, is that the 182 is better yet, with more complex engine systems regarding constant speed prop.

flightsim481 Sounds like I am in for a fun time :)

Thanks for posting.. very professional :)

No problem, glad you enjoyed it.

Glad you enjoyed it. It is a marvellous plane :-)

I have spent more time in Cessnas and Da40's and I prefer the Pa28 to both. The Cessna's never really felt right for me and the Da40 is less about flying and more about being able to use the Garmin G1000. I haven't flown for 4 years due to losing my medical but am looking to get back in the air next week, ironically in a Pa28!

Glad you enjoyed it.

Thanks very much. although if you can pass on my apologies to your wallet, I would be grateful ;-)

Thanks for your support :-)

Thanks for the support :-)

+Sir SavesALot Thanks :-) I have to say that A2A's GA aircraft are superb both in terms of function, but also atmosphere.

Thanks

Thanks. I've got some more planned and waiting in the wings.

Will do :-)

Thanks for the support Gerry. The mixture was a slip on my part. If I could find the time, I would consider doing the doing more of the tutorials side of things although I do feel that my stuff would need to be a little bit more professional in terms of presentation before I would consider people paying for it. Thanks for the kind words though :-)

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it :-)

+GeminiJets ORD Thanks for the kind words. The scenery is FTX England in this case. As for aircraft, you can't really go wrong with their GA aircraft, but my favourite is the C182.

***** Hi, yes you are correct that the key factor affecting the straight and level element is the torque from the engine. There is also an element of the descending prop blade generating more thrust than the up going one generating an offset thrust line. In theory that would generate yaw, and thus roll through the secondary effect of yaw. But that is normally designed out through the engine being installed at a slight angle. So yes, the engine torque does cause roll. However, you can use the secondary effect of yaw, which is roll to counter the yaw. In fact, in many light aircraft, you can steer and keep wings level using just the rudder pedals without use of the yoke at all. Obviously you may well have side-slip, and thus your ground track would probably not match your heading. So there is no change to make if you use rudder. Hope that helps. An interesting flight to look at is the Sioux City crash involving a DC-10 - United Airlines flight 232, which lost most of it's flying controls. It's amazing to see just how few controls can be used to fly an aircraft.

Thanks for the support.

+NoPlanesNoLife Thanks. It's a long time since I made this video but if I recall correctly it's FTX England scenery with REX Softclouds. Thanks for the support, Rich :-)

I mean wich airport are you in ;)

Oh, really fast reply. Active youtubers that acually respond to their fans is what we want :) But i have a little problem here. I got REX Soft Clouds, and REX 4 (tested both). But still i don't get clouds that covers the sky. The distance between the clouds is extremely long away, and almost every cloud look the same. extremely unrealisctic... :(

lee thornton Thanks for the kind remarks. Yes I use REX 4 textures. I just chose one of the default colour palates. It's quite a while since I made this video, so I'm not sure exactly what I had set up.

Just watched your video where you compare FTX Global and England ... well I'm certainly going for the pure England one then. Looks great.

AxCYeR Yes it looks great, but if you fly a lot beyond the UK Global is more useful. However, Global is best with all 3 sets (base, vector and open land class) but very expensive. But just to fet England, Wales and Scotland is also very expensive.

Its not generally called a side effect because that implies unwanted. The more recognised term is that the secondary effect of roll is yaw. Likewise the secondary effect of a yaw is roll. We then get into the realms of dynamic stability and most general aviation generally have good stability particularly in pitch and yaw. Often that stability means that secondary effects can be less than dramatic. As an example, you can fly an aircraft without using ailerons or elevator. By yawing with the rudder, you can vary roll and direction of flight whilst the couple between drag and throttle can be used not only to control speed but also rate of climb and descent. Indeed, many light aircraft pilots have spent time flying with just their feet whilst folding their charts in the confined spaces of a cockpit. Mild unchecked roll generally resolves itself due to the stability of simple aircraft. However, a significant disturbance eg. 30 degrees or more should cause the aircraft to sideslip. The air hitting the rudder and tail side on causes the yaw into the direction of turn, which results in more roll, more yaw, more roll and so on. However, an aircraft will then generally enter a spiral dive. A spiral dive is steeply nose down with roll and rapidly increasing airspeed and very high rate of descent. However, the aircraft hasn't generally lost airflow over any control surfaces so the pilot still has all controls available and they operate in the normal sense. A spin is different because the aircraft has one or more flying surfaces which have disturbed or absent airflow over them meaning that controls do not always respond to a pilots inputs in the normal manner. Generally characterised by high rate of descent and yaw. However some aircraft adopt a nose down spin, others a flat spin profile and some vary in nose attitude occasionally including a nose attitude above the horizon. Airspeed is not always high and often there can be airframe buffeting. Pilots must be able to tell the difference because the recovery actions are different and use of ailerons in a spin can make it much worse. A 172 and Pa28 have good stability so to best see the effects have all realism settings set to most realistic, put a significant roll input in and then let go of the stick and watch what happens. The caveat is that not all aircraft follow the same rules.

Thanks for the detailed reply! I agree with everything you've said, which accords with Pooleys. However, trying to get this response in FSX (and XPlane 10) has proved impossible. Here's what I do: I take either the standard 172 or A2A 172 up to a safe height, fly straight and level and trim. I then bank over, using ailerons only, to 60 degrees plus before centralizing the ailerons. The initial behaviour is as expected, the aircraft dives. But then it unwinds the turn and climbs out with no input from me. This is true whether I bank to the left or the right. (nb: A 60 degree uncoordinated bank to the left in the standard 172 exhibits bizarre initial behaviour. First, it turns right! ). I've also tried doing this with a 90 degree bank. Same outcome. I get the same response in XPlane10, even with its blade approach to aerodynamic effects. I'd be interested to know whether you get any different response. I had been going to produce a series of videos that follow through the standard flying lessons in Pooleys. However, the first lesson covers the further effect of aileron and I just can't model it so that series of videos has stopped before they've even begun :)

MrCobolman I get the same response. I suspect that whilst Pooleys (and most flight manuals for that matter) describes the theoretical process, aircraft designers are cunning in trying to avoid such problems through design and I can't recall ever having an incident where I've nearly gone into a spiral dive. I've nearly stalled, nearly overshot a runway, worried about fuel, flown in some borderline conditions, bounced an aircraft or two etc...but never thought 'oh crap, I'm entering a spiral dive'. Most GA aircraft have strong tendency towards good dynamic stability and most instructors (and examiners) will use unusual attitudes training to deliberately place the aircraft into a spiral dive. Design features such as dihedral often remove some of the less desirable aspects and thus reduce the probability of events such as a spiral dive. For example, differential ailerons minimise adverse yaw, whilst dihedral gives good stability in terms of roll. As I understand it, the aircraft rolls, a side slip develops, however, the dihedral results in the low wing generating more lift, preventing further roll and thus an increase in yaw. The most common cause of a spiral dive is mishandling by a pilot, commonly through disorientation in IMC weather conditions. In a simple light aircraft, it would take sufficiently long to develop in such that it would be a particularly poor pilot not to notice a problem. It should be noted of course that both X-Plane and FSX run on a home computer and don't use the vast computational powers available to real world aircraft designers and thus there will be limitations. Whilst the textbooks are correct theory wise and in real life the secondary effects are very visible, a propensity for an aircraft to naturally enter a spiral dive in a modern 'training' aircraft is I would argue quite low. I guess my considered opinion is that just because it's in a textbook, doesn't mean all aircraft exhibit that quality to the same extent, and that a home PC is always going to fall short of the real thing no matter how well programmed.

flightsim481 Thanks. You've helped remind me of the intrinsic safety of training aircraft. I recall that my instructors never wanted to spin the Cessna 152 I trained in (even though they had an aerobatic model) Likewise, my instructors with the Cherokee knew that getting an unintended spin was, to all practical purposes, impossible. One cherokee instructor however, decided to rise to the challenge (without telling me, I hasten to add). We were doing an IMC lesson after I passed my PPL and he wanted to show a stall. He climbed to a safe altitude, stalled the plane and then booted in a lot of rudder to force a spin. Bit of a shock when you're not prepared but a salutary lesson in how easily things can go wrong.

Andrew Ayad the Comanche is incredible

GamingNinjaSheep Lol. awesome spot! I have to say I had never noticed it. Yes you are quite right, it should say 12.

flightsim481 haha, thought so, it completely screwed up my navigation since I don't like to fly with the GPS, no problem now that I know it's there but it still bugs me.

GamingNinjaSheep I'm done for now that you've pointed it out. Good to hear there are others who don't use the GPS ;-)

+Max V Thanks, yes it's FTX England from ORBX

Thanks for the kind words. Although I got my commercial licences, I am not by any means an accomplished pilot. In my opinion, there is a difference between being capable and accomplished. I was fortunate that I did some pilot training in the military who's scope and manoeuvres obviously goes far beyond civil training. With the Navy I flew with some truly exceptional people, and their skills are humbling in the extreme. The scenery is FTX Global with Rex 4 textures although I have since updated to FTX England for which I have a review coming soon :-) Indeed, the airfield in this video, Fenland, is going to be looked at more closely as a comparison.

Thanks for responding - any chance of a tutorial on landing the Cherokee, really struggling with approach and smooth landings Thanks again very well presented.

Ian Hillsdon I've got a video to edit for FTX England and then I'll try to look at a video for it. :-)

Thanks

+David Gough Hi David, yes you are quite right I shouldn't have missed the flaps.

Cheers:) Dino Catteneo's f14 and f35 are also great!

***** I have the F14. If I get a chance, I'll put soomething on my channel.

+Romulo M Hi, it does have an autopilot but it's a very old style of autopilot. The controls are on the yoke and the turn co-ordinator but it's hard to explain so the best thing is to watch this video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--96FkQ8LP50.html Hope that helps, Rich

+flightsim481 I had found found before u respond. But I wanted to thank you for your answer! Your video was of great help to learn other things about the plane. Thank you again! :D

Glad you enjoyed it, thanks for your support :-)

+flightsim481 Mate, Could you tell me what addons you're using in this video? At times I seemed to see the shadow of the trees on the ground! This is incredible!!!! You can reveal to me your secret of this amazing visual to your FSX?

+Romulo M I'm afraid there is no secret. The specs of my computer are in the description and it was FSX Steam edition with the only add ons beng FTX England and REX Textures.

Well because he has a shitdown of Addons, like ORBX, Landclasses, Vectors, Groundtextures, Mesh layers. addon scenery and addon planes, thats why

The key add on is FTX England from ORBX, REX Softclouds and then some UK2000 airports. FTX England is an ORBX region and is stand alone so includes it's own Mesh, Vectors, Landclass etc. Great if you onlt want to fly in England, If you want to fly anywhere else, it will still have default scenery unless you buy those areas as well and doing so can become very, very expensive. Sadly, making FSX look good costs. A key bit is to read the manuals with scenery products because the manuals often specify mesh resolutions etc. needed for the best appearance or performance and they look appalling if you can't meet the recommended settings (note NOT the minimum but recommended settings). However, meeting their recommended settings can often need quite a powerful PC, particularly if you are running lots of applications in the background. I don't dare to work out how much money I have given ORBX over the years just to make my sim pretty and when you need 4 products just to cover the UK, not including high detail airports, it becomes scary expensive. Likewise, good add on aircraft, such as this one, have amazing visual modelling compared to default aircraft but at a cost. It doesn't matter how good a computer you have, good add on's look good, bad one's don't. The caveat is that some amazing people such as Dino Cattaneo produce stunning freeware which look every bit as good as the more expensive payware.

Thanks, I kind of figured that. It probably doesn't help that the "Max Graphics Setting" defaults to something like 800x600 or something equally absurd, I don't remember. It looks better now that I have the native resolution set.

jonskowitz You should defintely have a look at FTX Sir ... it sounds expensive, i men its 100bucks for the extension but youll get absolutely almost photorealestic envoirements world wide ... and ORBX ofc ..