Carenado Cessna 337H "Skymaster"

[Mark Hargrove]

For those of you who like to fly different aircraft from time to time, I'd like to suggest adding Carenado's Cessna 337H "Skymaster" to your hangar. This is a venerable, pretty old airplane that first flew in the early 1960's. It's a retractable-gear, tandem-engine twin that's really fun to fly as sort of a "next step" when you move up from single-engine airplanes to twins. It's incredibly stable in flight and has a full IFR panel (dual VOR + Garmin 530 GPS receiver), so you can fly /A or /G. The plane rotates at 80 kts, climbs at 100-120 kts @ 1200-1500FPM, and cruises at 150-155 knots. Approach speed is about 95-100 kts, with touchdown (full flaps) at 85-90 kts.

The systems from the real aircraft are well-modeled, especially the engines. Following the real Pilot's Operating Handbook suggestions for power and mixture settings produces pretty much exactly the right results. The only major system not modeled is the fuel-tank selection -- but I suspect that's because there really aren't any changes needed throughout a flight.

There are only two small details that I wish I could change: you must have the GPS receiver on to see your COM1 and NAV1 frequencies (those radios are integrated with GPS receiver), and the OBS heading knobs on the VOR receivers are kinda touchy.

There are versions of the airplane for both FSX (which is what my mini-review is about), and for XPlane 10.

Nice airplane, fun to fly.

-M.

[Ryan B]

I bought this plane for their Christmas sale for ultra cheap (I think it was around 15 bucks).

It's really well done, as opposed to some of their older models... the fde was done by Bernt Stolle, the sounds are incredible, I fly it with my RXP GNS530W. It's got great visibility from the cockpit too for VFR flying.

I also picked up their new Cirrus. A little faster than the mixmaster, but the G1000 is different, not as smooth as the C337 gauges. Hand flying the cirrus is just as good as the 337. Technically their G1000 rendition doesn't have recent navdata but I put in a 530W popup and with the new rxp.ini linkgps=on I can get legs of my route on the G1000 MFD. I'd recommend the Cirrus too...

[kamarad]

Agree that the Skymaster is a very nice addition to hangar.

I also purchased it during Christmas sale and it became rapidly my favorite one for IFR as it id fully eqiped with double VOR, DME, NDB, GPS so you can pretty much use it for any approaches. You can also slow it down easily if you need to build time for preparation for a procedure.