The Queen of
Floatplanes - The Jumbo of her times
Night Over Water
The
age of great float planes is history. Maybe this is the
reason, why they have fascinated me ever since. I built the
first B314 using ASD for FS4.0. You may remember, that it
was possible back then, to have float planes in FS. I mean
real float planes, the ones you could land in the sea and
the plane would leave well visible marks on the water. Just
lines, but with lots of imagination one could see them being
waves and vortices. In FS5 we lost this feature and we had
to wait until 2002 was released to float again! But what a
difference! It was well worth waiting for it!
The
Flightmodel
You may have waited eagerly about what is going on here!
Well, despite the fact that there was no post, we DID
advance on the flight model! Eric is to blame! ;-) He is a
buff and brought our basic "prealpha" version
flight model from "non moving in the water at full
throttle" to "slow taxi in water with only two
engines running". He has adjusted speeds, ceiling and
fuel consumption according to the real thing with the help
of our mentors. He has managed to get a special behaviour of
The Clipper to work: gain speed until about 70-80 kts, pull
the yoke sharply to get her out of the water and reduce
drag, push back the yoke immediately to level off just above
the waves, gain more speed, then continue to climb.
And:
Yes, you can tilt the aircraft during taxi submerging the
wingtip. This was called the "passenger shower" as
at this occasion the water came down the wing splashing into
the salon where the passengers were sitting!
The
Panel
Andy faced the problem, that the B314 had a huge flight
deck. The crew walked around, had big sea charts, where they
plotted their course. It was possible (and done!) to open
the small look-out on top of the plane to navigate with a
sextant! So you will find some new instruments in this
cockpit ... Main focus was, to have perfect readability in
all resolutions.
The
Sounds
Conducting a historic project, one is faced with the
problem of "fading sources". In case of The
Clipper it is even worse. The last one ended its life in the
early 50s. Well, no one at that time imagined, that it might
be interesting for people coming, how the sound of the
engines would have been. We did a lot of research, checked
other engines for their usability and were a bit lost.
But
then I got this "relief mail" from Ed Dover:
The
B314 engines were very noisy. The flight deck would have
been the loudest place. Down below in the passenger area it
was somewhat more muffled as you moved to the rear of the
aircraft, but generally the noise level would have been
higher than what we experience today in the jet airliners.
The B29 engine would probably be a good approximation.
There are still some
B29s around. So the sound of the B314 in this package was
recorded on a B29. Both were the same type, the B314 had a
Wright GR-2600, the B29 a Wright R-3350. We did a little
rework on the recorded sounds and now we ask, who can tell
the difference?
The Scenery
The Clipper does not arrive at Port Washington in Kens
book. If she had, she would have arrived at La Guardia
instead as in these days The Clipper did not go to Port
Washington any more. La Guardia was much more convenient for
the passengers travelling to New York.
Additionally we will
have some more scenery.
In total we will have
the following Clipper bases:
Pacific Sector:
Auckland, Canton Island, Guam, Manila, Noumea, Oahu/Pearl
Harbor, Treasure Island (San Francisco Bay) and Wake Island
Atlantic Sector:
Bermuda, Botwood, Foynes, Horta (Azores), Shediac and
Southampton.
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