I guess the Aeronca C-3 will always be one of my 2 or 3 favorite put-put's. It is the first airplane I ever remember seeing as a child. I had designed a FS98 version a couple of years ago and I decided to redo it with FSDS to do a more accurate job on the engine and exhaust pipe. I imported the .afx file, dutifully flipped every other polygon, ran "snap-to-scale" on all the parts to remove the extraneous points and redid the engine. Then I said ,well, I can do this and that a little better and pretty soon I gave up and redid the entire plane. I originally compiled the project into FS2000 as I didn't own FS2002 at the time. It flew great in that simulator using the FS98 .air file. I later acquired FS2002 (Thanks Santa) and copied the airplane folder into the new sim. Well, it didn't fly right at all; it took off in about 10 feet and pointed its nose straight up . I spent a lot of time trying to tame the flight dynamics with very little success. Finally I started from scratch with a FS2002 air file and got things tamed down to where they belong. This project is for FS2002 and has not been tested in any other sim.
SOUND: I am deeply indepted to Michael Clarke of the UK for sending me this sound file several months ago; it is a recording of an actual 2 cylinder engine. He stated it is a recording of his fathers Cooper motorcycle powered with a 2 cylinder J.A.P. engine. BTW crack open the throttle about 25% before hitting Control+E or the engine will die.
PANEL: I lamented the fact I had found no documentation for the C-3 panel when I uploaded the FS98 version. Well, Brian "Bulldog" Higginbotham came up with a picture of a C-2 panel from a French website. The data with it indicated the C-3 panel was the same except it had a push throttle in the middle rather than a left - handed job. The orange thing above the panel is a pillow attached right to the end of the fuel tank; talk about having things in your lap! My wife says it looks like the precursor of the air bag. The white face gauges and throttle are courtesy of J. L. Stubbs. I have lost the name of the original designer of the other 2 gauges. Before anyone asks, this plane had only 4 gauges, not even an airspeed indicator.
INSTALLATION: Unzip C3V2.ZIP into a temporary folder. Copy and paste the folder C-3v2 into the Aircraft folder in FS2002. Open the gauges folder and copy and paste the 5 gauges into the Gauges folder in FS2002. Close everything and fire up FS2002. The "Put-Put" should under Aeronca as the Aeronca C-3.
LEGAL: This project is released as freeware. You may modify it, repaint it, etc., upload to another website as long as it is not for profit. You need my written permission to use any of these files for commercial purposes; otherwise a simple credit would be nice. This airplane should not hurt your computer but I am not responsible if it causes problems.
