Carenado Bonanza

[scottcame]

Does anyone have experience with the recently (Sept.) released Bonanza F33A from Carenado (for X-Plane)?

http://www.carenado.com/CarSite/Portal/index.php

[lwilliams]

I have a little.

It is one fo my favourite planes to fly and use it frequently for FS Economy flights too within the PilotEdge area.

I am not sure what you are asking, but if you are asking if it's worth the money, then I am a wholehearted "YES".

[muzz]

I got it for FSX and had to get my money back - no 2d cockpit is included, and I fly almost entirely with 2d.

[Keith Smith]

If I understand correctly, they have a habit of releasing planes without alternators for X-Plane. This will cause your radio to die after a while if you fly on PE (our plugin checks the bus voltage and eventually kills the radio if it drops below a certain % of the nominal value). I submitted a bug report to them about this, but never heard back.

To find out for sure, use the data input&output screen to output the battery voltage. Begin your flight and see if you can get it to stabilize at either 14v or 28v. If it's 12/24v and dropping while you're in flight, then you're in trouble

It's easy to add an alternator switch via Plane Maker, though, or simply map a button or keypress to the 'toggle alternator' command.

[Steven Winslow]

I have the F33A Bonanza and I love it! As Lee says, it's one of my favorites to fly on PilotEdge. I have not experienced any problems with the alternator while on PE....or anywhere else. The X-Plane version has both 2D and 3D cockpits.

[Keith Smith]

I have the F33A Bonanza and I love it! As Lee says, it's one of my favorites to fly on PilotEdge. I have not experienced any problems with the alternator while on PE....or anywhere else. The X-Plane version has both 2D and 3D cockpits.

That's great to know, Steven, it sounds like they got it right for the Bonanza. If the plane HAS a switch, it'll work great no matter which environment you're in. The problem is that one or more of their other aircraft have been released without the alternator switch on the panel.

[Steven Winslow]

Keith,

I'll have to go check out my other Carenados. I have all 6 of their X-Plane aircraft. As you are painfully aware, I've flown the C152 on PE and never experienced an alternator problem. Plenty of other problems, but none with the alternator.

[DrZGard]

I have the new xPlane Carenado F33 as well as many of their aircraft in FSX.

Probably the best visual depiction of an aircraft cockpit in xPlane, on par with the best of FSX and I like the night lighting better.

That said here are the problems I have discovered and reported to Fernando Herrera who assured me it would be looked into.

1. Battery is 12 volt 1,000 ampere hour, alternator is 24 volt 60 amp. This creates a situation where the charging system sometimes works fine as indicated by the ampere gauge in the panel, other times the needle is 90 degrees to the counterclockwise and I am not sure what the charge/discharge situation is. You can remedy this by opening the aircraft in Plane Maker and modifying the battery to 24 volt and modifying the max charging to 100 amps leaving the redline at 60 amps.

2. Prop rpm has a minimum governed rpm of 1,750 which works fine for in flight but if you are going to simulate a ground run-up and cycle the prop at 1,700 (POH recommendation) the rpm won't budge. In Plane Maker you can alter this figure to 750 rpm and it will then work fine.

3. The flight director appears to exaggerate movement doubling the input sent to the autopilot making its use for hand flying difficult to control. You can turn on the flight director while in autopilot flight, make a couple turns and climb or descend and see this. The autopilot itself works very well and better simulates autopilot operation than in FSX.

4. The flight director button itself on the panel requires mouse click to make it operate and will not respond to hardware such as my PFC Cirrus II. I am not sure if GoFlight or some of the other hardware works, the other autopilot functions do work and in fact after mouseclicking the flight director the hardware will enable/disable it but it never retracts out of view. Since its deflection is doubled I just don't use it presently but hopefully both of these annoyances will be fixed in the future.

5. If you have Reality XP's Garmin 430 or 530 they will work but the HSI will red flag the Nav when in GPS mode. The CDI will still work so you will get deflection (and glide slope functionality on WAAS approaches). For a simmer this probably isn't a big deal, for a real pilot you would be training yourself to ignore a red flagged nav gauge, not a good thing to do!

6. Once again there is an incompatibility with my PFC hardware. The CRS knob on PFC hardware won't rotate the CDI on the HSI. Now the OBS1 knob will also rotate the CDI needle on the HSI which is in keeping with other aircraft in xPlane. There is a partial workaround, you can modify the 3d panel by placing one of the default general aviation HSI's into the panel and having it out of view and this will cause the CRS knob on the hardware to work properly but only in VLOC mode, switch to GPS with RXP Garmin and it stops working.

7. The 3d gauges look super nice but for the RMI you lose the needle swing which xPlane actually does quite nicely. Probably not as big a deal for simmers but in real use this needle swing will get picked up in your peripheral vision during an instrument scan and is used to identify crossing a station (NAV or ADF) and is much easier to notice when there is an actual swing. When the needle just swaps ends you don't really notice it unless looking right at it. This is a wish list item but I hope they find a way to incorporate it.

For most simmers these probably aren't a real big deal. For a real world pilot the flight director is a no go item, would require label INOP in the real aircraft. The RXP problem is more concerning since this is a valuable tool if you are wanting to gain more familiarity with its operation. Of course you can just fly dual NAV, DME and ADF and not use the flight director and get a really nice simulation experience.