This is the Fairchild 24R with a Ranger engine inline 6. This is the plane my dad Francis (June) Ortis had restored a few years back. Registry is N77691. I have not been able to locate this plane these days, but found some drawings and have memories of it and thought it would be neat to make it for FS2002Pro.
This plane is equipped with full moving parts including doors, cowling, control sticks, working suspension, stearable tailwheel, working rudder pedals, and even flip down landing lights.
[Flight Notes]
This plane flies fairly docile. You will notice a moderate lift sensation when extending your flaps. Use alot of trim adjustment to trim her out and that will help you with the nose up/nose down tendencies. When on approach and slowing her down, she will need up trim, but with flaps, you will need ALOT of down trim. This is actually normal in alot of actual airplanes, so no worries actually.
Taxing is good but turning might be best with using the right or the left brake as well as the rudder to turn with. Give her a bit of throttle and a left or right brake as well as the rudder and your should be fine.
I have found that a good touch down speed with full flaps to be at 50 KIAS. Otherwise, she will try to just keep gliding down the runway. Easy on your brakes after touch down or you will flip forward and bite the runway with the prop. You can come in hot at about 100 KIAS but plan on taking alot of room to slow down.
[Landing Lights]
The Fairchild 24 used 'pop-down' landing lights. I did this as well. When starting the plane up the lights will be down already. To raise them you hit Control/Shift/C. To lower them, you hit Control/Shift/V. It is incremental so you can actually aim them better if you click them a couple of times when flying at night and on the ground, as she is a tail dragger and thus the lights normally aim up when sitting on her tail gear. Of course you can leave them down but its kinda cool to raise them after takeoff and after landing. At night, when parking, you can raise them and they end up pointing down and thus act as a ground courtesy light for entry/exit of the aircraft.
[Doors]
Hit Shift/E to open the doors. Shift/E again to close them.
[Cowling]
Hit Shift/T to open the cowling. There is a few engine details to look at under there.
[Virtual Cockpit]
In VC mode you have to bring your 'eye sight location' to the front. Sorry... Hit Control/Backspace until you are up front at the instrument panel. I usually just move straight forward until even with the front seats. You can really dial in your position by hitting Shift/Enter and Shift/Backspace for up/down adjustment and Control/Shift/Enter or Control/Shift/Backspace for right/left toggling.
[Instruments]
You will find a really cool radio that looks ancient. I dont know how I got it but it was in my panel program and FS2002Pro. I cannot take credit for it, but it is quite impressive for an antique transciever. I included a GPS for the sake of navigating in FS2002 Pro. Included is a simple autopilot panel on the right side of the panel, which can also be brought up in other windows as well, like the GPS. However, there is no 'heading bug' and heading adjustment knob. Sorry again.... What I do for heading setting is click it on or punch in Control/H and then use the manual heading bug increment/decrement buttons to adjust your heading. When you hit Control/H, you will note that your heading locks to straight ahead. Takes some of the difficulty out of it.
I still have alot to do on this. I wish to make a yellow version, red version and a float plane with a Warner radial engine. But that is later.
[Installation]
Open your Windows explorer and navigate to C:/program files/Microsoft games/FS2002/aircraft. Drop in the file Fairchild 24R. Now, go into the Fairchild 24R and double click the file, opening it. Now click open the 'panel' folder. In it is a folder called Guages. Click this open and take all those guages and drop them all into the Guages folder in FS2002. You cannot drop the hole folder in there as FS2002 wont be able to read them and thus they will not show up on your panel. It's easy.. No worries....
Your plane is now ready! If you dont see it under Fairchild, go to the Unspecified section and scan down to find Fairchild 24R.
*Remember to check the oil before take off!
This aircraft was designed with Flight Sim Design Studio 2 (FSDS-V2), which I highly recommend. It is obtained through www.abacuspub.com and can be purchased and downloaded emmediately from the web.
I wish to thank Adam Howe at Abacus Publishing for his patience and help, Bill Lyons at the Golden Eagle website for his input and inspirational wisdom, and Douglas Kallan who is a brilliant engineer at adjusting the MOI's of prototype simulator aircraft.
This design is copyright material and property of William Ortis, Lionheart Creations Ltd. This is intended for public use and not to be modified and distributed in any way except through explicit permission of William Ortis or Lionheart Creations. Enjoy!
Should you have any constructive input, I would be very thankful.
