Review of Flying Club X from JustFlight

One of my biggest complaints with our hobby is the cost of add-ons. Flight Simulator itself may seem expensive at £59.95 (for the UK Deluxe version of Flight Simulator X), but in comparison to the average of around £29.95 for a single aircraft add-on, FSX suddenly seems ridiculously cheap for what you’re getting. However, I certainly can’t accuse JustFlight of over-charging for Flying Club X. For your £29.95, you get not one, but five, beautifully detailed aircraft (4 fixed wing and a shiny new Schweizer 300CBi helicopter). For this reason alone, I can recommend its purchase, but read on for even more reasons.

As the JustFlight manual states, general aviation accounts for 75% of all hours flown by civil machines. With the advent of FSX, I find myself flying more and more general aviation aircraft, rather than my previous favourite heavy metal fleet in FS9/FS2004. There are 2 reasons for this: 1) I don’t have as much time as I’d like for my virtual simming, so spending half an hour setting up an FMC for a flight is becoming less of an option for me and 2) general aviation flight in FSX is simply superb. So, it was with great anticipation that I installed the self-contained GA fleet supplied with Flying Club X.

As I’ve already mentioned, you get 5 aircraft in total:

The ubiquitous Cessna 152

The 2-seat PA38-112 Tomahawk trainer

The PA28-161 Warrior

The twin-engined PA34-200T Seneca II

And the marvelous Schweizer 300CBi helicopter

You’d be forgiven at this price for not expecting the models themselves to be of tremendous quality and perhaps for there to be some shortcomings in the flight models and sound sets. If so, like me, you’re in for a nice surprise. Each and every one of these models is of the very highest standard, in all aspects, from the external model, to the virtual cockpits, the animations and the sound sets. With the aircraft models created by Marc Siegel and flight modeling by Rob Young, you know you’re in for a treat.

Not content with supplying a complete set of outstanding aircraft, JustFlight has included a set of utilities including a load editor (AeroSelectX) and a fun utility (AeroFace) which allows you to have your face (or any other) applied to the pilots of the aircraft. For the fixed-wing aircraft, AeroSelectX allows the user to specify fuel load, number of passengers (and whether or not to show them in the virtual cockpit) and baggage weight. For the Schweizer, you can alter all of the previous items mentioned, in addition to the nationality/registration of the aircraft and whether it should be equipped with 1 or 2 fuel tanks. JustFlight made the decision to allow the user to alter all of these parameters with this external utility (you should make your changes and then launch Flight Simulator X so it can detect the changes made) to avoid a huge number (hundreds) of aircraft being shown in the FSX aircraft selection screen. This was a wise choice, in my opinion, as it makes the collection much more manageable.

JustFlight also include AeroPaint, which allows you to manage your aircraft repaints.

So, what are these aircraft like to fly? They feel very much like you’d expect the individual aircraft to handle. The 152 is a relatively slow, but very solid aircraft. It’s ideal for VFR flight, allowing you to to take your time and enjoy the scenery once you’ve got airborne and trimmed the aircraft. The virtual cockpit is, as with the real aircraft, sparse in equipment, but functional. The minimalist look and feel of the real aircraft is captured beautifully in this rendition.

The Tomahawk is a small 2-seater trainer. It’s a low-wing aircraft, so not as suited to VFR sight-seeing as the Cessna 152, but with similar performance and specifications. Again with a fairly sparse cockpit, reflecting most actual aircraft in real-life use. The Tomahawk is a great aircraft for practicing circuits in.

When you’re ready to move to something a little larger, it’s time to climb aboard the Warrior, a fixed undercarriage, low-wing aircraft capable of holding 4 people. The virtual cockpit is a little better equipped than the 2 previous aircraft in our fleet, and the whole aircraft feels a little more sumptuous. The main improvements over the earlier aircraft are a better avionics suite.

On to the last of the fixed wing aircraft, the twin-engined Seneca II. This sprightly and well equipped aircraft is the ideal first step up to twin-engined operations after having practiced your skills in the single-engined fleet. This aircraft has a simplified model of the autopilot system fitted to actual aircraft.

And now to what I consider to be the very best of the fleet, the fantastic Schweizer 300 CBi helicopter. This really is a beauty. I’ve sometimes dabbled with, but never really mastered, helicopter flight in Flight Simulator. The Schweizer has made me determined to master it, as this is so much fun to fly. What you have here is a highly detailed external and internal model with a great set of animations and sounds. The external animations are marvelous, down to the pulleys and gears for the main/tail rotor and the high detailed pilot and passenger. The view from the cockpit is possibly the best you’ll ever get for VFR flying. Tilting the view down slightly in the virtual cockpit allows for an almost full screen-height view of the surrounding countryside. I spent a lot of time with this aircraft, simply having great fun which is, after all, what our hobby is supposed to be all about.

Installation

Installation was the usual easy affair for JustFlight products. During installation, you have the option of allowing the Flight Simulator X missions to be modified to use the aircraft from the fleet.
System Requirements

JustFlight quote the following as the system requirements for Flying Club X:

• Flight Simulator X or FS2004
• Pentium III 1.7GHz PC (2.5GHz for FSX)
• 512Mb RAM (1 GHZ for FSX)
• 64Mb 3D graphics card (128Mb for FSX)
• Windows XP
• 1.0Gb hard drive space
• DVD-ROM drive

I tested the Flight Simulator X version of the application using a machine with a 2Ghz Centrino processor with 1Gb RAM, a 256Mb nVidia 7800 graphics card and around 200Gb free space on my FSX install directory. Frame rates were a little lower than for the default aircraft supplied with FSX (perhaps 5% lower) and therefore did not noticeably affect the performance of the simulator.

Conclusion

It’s difficult to look at every aircraft in detail for a product like this, as the review would probably run to a dozen pages or more, but I hope I’ve given you a flavour of what you can expect. I’d have to say (if you haven’t already guessed!) that the Schweizer is the cream of the crop in this package (you could argue that the cost of this package is worth it for the Schweizer alone), but all 5 included aircraft stand out from the crowd in their own right. All the aircraft have beautifully rendered external models and virtual cockpits, in addition to highly detailed 2D cockpits and pop-ups windows for the main aircraft systems.

The package comes with an excellent 68 page manual, providing an overview of all of the cockpit layouts, complete with descriptions of all the pop-up windows and sub-systems. In addition, it provides a useful tutorial flight for the Schweizer helicopter which is a great introduction for simulator pilots venturing away from fixed-wing aircraft for the first time. It also details the additional utilities provided with the package as mentioned above.

I’ve paid as much for a single aircraft that has been of a lesser quality than any of those included in this package (I won’t mention any names!), so I have to award Flying Club X 10/10 for value for money. This package makes an ideal first add-on for people who’ve just purchased Flight Simulator X and want to move on from the default aircraft. Having said that, experienced users will also have great fun with all of these aircraft.

If you’d rather not purchase the entire collection of aircraft, you can download individual aircraft from the JustFlight web site. However, by purchasing all of them in this single package, you effectively get 2 of the aircraft for free.

• Just Flight Flying Club now fully FSX compliant
• JustFlight Flying Club aircraft now FSX compatible
• Just Flight Flying Club patch
• Just Flight Flying Club aircraft downloads updated
• Flying Club X available now