As a private pilot-with-an-instrument-rating I often fly one of the Piper Warrior II of the Rotterdam Flying Club. The PH-SVF is one of those.
In order to practice at home I downloaded several Warriors from www.SurClaro but none was exactly as I wanted it.

More then a year ago I designed a panel for the Warrior that made the instruments look right and in the right place. The panel's background is based on a promotion poster issued by the Piper company. I shrunk the panel vertically, bottom more than top, to make it look like in the real aircraft where your eyes are in your head and not down on the seat surface. Most gauges are read on top, not the side, so reading them is not impaired. Better view on what is outside in front of the aircraft is an extra bonus.
On the panel I placed mainly FS2000 Mooney and C182 gauges, of which the dial bitmaps were changed to make them look like Warrior instruments. The subscale of the altimeter was changed to read hPa (=mB) instead of inches of mercury. I used digital photographs of the real instruments, applying Chuck Dome's very nice and useful Gaubmp.exe to exchange dial bitmaps and finishing the instruments with his makepink.exe for nice night flying. The engine controls, flaplever, primer, friction nut, and carburetor heat were in my gauges directory, downloaded in the past, too nice not to use, but I don't know whom to credit for them. I am not (yet?) able to make gauges myself.
The instruments were put into place using cfgedit.exe; the MS FS2000 panel editor is unusable for pre-FS2000 gauges.
The prefix rc (my initials) were only added to the gauges' filenames to mark the files for copying or deleting.

Next came flight dynamics. Available flight dynamics for the Warrior had one or more of the following inaccuracies:

1. Applying 10 degrees of flaps at 100kt would result in 15-20 kt loss of speed. That may be normal for a Cessna with its Fowler flaps, but in a Warrior it should be 5 kt. Directly after giving flaps the nose must go up, and not down as in many FS aircraft.
2. In almost all single engine aircraft the maximum rate of climb is way to high. In a Warrior it is 650 ft/min at 2440 lbs., 1013 hPa, +15 deg. centigrade.
3. Speed is generally too high at a given power setting.
4. Ailerons and elevator often are far too sensitive.

I started from C182S.air, changed it for fixed prop and tried to match the Warrior's flight characteristics as closely as possible. Speed with respect to powersetting was adjusted changing profile drag and induced drag. Flap drag and lift were far too high in the C182 and were reduced. Introducing the correct wing area resulted in a stall speed way too low, so I made the surface parameters smaller than the real ones.
Whatever I tried, power settings kept being difficult. A difference of 100 RPM should give 5 kt in/decrease in horizontal flight or 125 ft/min at constant airspeed, but would invariably result in more. Full power on the ground at sea level while hitting the brakes should give 2350-2450 RPM according to the aircraft manual, but gave no more then 2200 with correct engine entries in the flight dynamics.
Because of this I revised the tachometer dial, putting the 2400 RPM mark right where the pointer was at static full throttle and adjusting the distance between the 100 RPM marks in a way to make power settings match the ones stated in the aircraft manual.
The P-factor was simulated by placing the engine 10" to the right of the midline and adjusting the P-factor entry in the realism options of FS2000 to zero.

Finally I needed a model file, so I bought Abacus FS Design Studio Pro and Aircraft Animator. I guessed it would take months to achieve the first thing useful, but the manual proved very comprehensive and in two weeks I had something Warriorlike better then what I had seen before.
Of course after that the textures and the finishing touch took lots of time.
The windows are transparant and from outside as well as from inside one can see the panel, which once again is the poster issued by Piper, Inc.. Aircraft Animator gave the aircraft moving flaps, ailerons, rudder, nose gear and propeller. Landing, strobe, anti-collision and navigational lights are present. The latter shed their light over the correct angles: green is seen from front to 110 degrees right, red the same thing to the left and white from 110 to 180 degrees at both sides.
I intended to put an ape with four stripes on both shoulders into the left front seat, but artistic shortcomings proved to make this impossible.

I enjoy flying this Warrior and hope it will be useful to you too. I tried to make it look and fly like the real thing as much as possible, but even if this can fully be achieved it will probably not be by me.

In the mean time a commercial Warrior is being issued for FS2000. Mine is free, the source for the .mdl file (WarriorII.fsc) is included. My work is in the public domain: one can do with my work whatever pleases him or her, including changing, selling, or even deleting(!) files. Keep in mind that I bought FSDS Pro in the non-commercial version, which means that you can't sell my .mdl file, but you could buy FSDS in the commercial version and assemble my source file yourself. Should you become a millionaire that way, an invitation for a cruise on your yacht will be appreciated, as will be one to fly your 747 from your private airfield.


Installation: unzip PH-SVF.zip into your FS2000 directory. In the aircraft menu it will appear as WarriorII.
If you have pedals, disable auto-rudder. Set P-factor, torque and gyro to zero. Set control sensitivities in the middle, except for throttle, which must have maximum. Set null zones all to zero. The aircraft.cfg had been set for 2 front seat occupants weighing 350 lbs. in total, but you can change that using a simple text editor like notepad.exe.

FS2000 only. Comment welcome. Resolution preferably >1024*768. All your fun are belong to us, and may the source be with you, always.


Rien Cornelissen
Badhoevedorp, the Netherlands
mw.cornelissen@quicknet.nl