Watersprite...oh Waaatersprite??? I got a question for u

Fire_Emblem_Master wrote:

Hey, you're the bush pilot around here, I'm gonna be trying a flight across the US to see the simulated sights, I tried with the piper cub, but i cant land or taxi it cause tis a taildragger...do you have any good planes you could recommend, and tell me where to get them? I dont wanna use the cessna, cause its too fast or somethin, i dunno, but i want a good one, a tricycle gear one!

Thanks a bunch

Hmmm. One of my favorite slow tricycle gear planes just happens to be a Cessna...the 152 from Flight One (payware). Another really nice plane is the Piper Archer II from Flight One/DreamFleet (also payware). The Archer is more "stable" than the C152 I mentioned, and it truly is a joy to fly.

http://www.flight1.com/

A nice freeware plane with several landing gear options is the Maule M-7-260. You can find this one here:

http://www.fsnordic.net/

Go to the file library, and search on this to find all the files for this plane:

Maule M-7-260

The Maule is actually a pretty powerful single engine plane, but pretty easy to handle as well. Because of its many landing gear configurations, it's a nice plane to have around for bush flying.

Now, I know that you're reluctant to fly a taildragger, but I can't let you off that easy. 😉 So...I'll have to mention a very lovely taildragger (fun to fly, land, and taxi once you get used to it): The Super Decathlon from RealAir Simulations. This is another payware plane, but it has very quickly become one of my favorites.

http://www.realairsimulations.com/

There is a nice freeware version of the Super Decathlon from "Airhead" (a little less realistic flight model than the RealAir plane has, and because of this, it's also more forgiving...especially with regards to landing and ground handling). There's one thing that kind of annoys me about the Airhead Super Decathlon...and that's the "windscreen divider" that's right in the middle of the forward view (of course, this can also be used as a "crosshair" to line up approaches and landings). You can find this freeware Super Decathlon here:

These few planes I've mentioned are my favorites for "low and slow" VFR flying. 🙂

If you want to fly low over mountains, and want a little extra power for climbing quickly over ridges and such, of the planes I mentioned above, you'd have to be a bit more careful with the C152 and Piper Archer II. However, if you have the Piper Archer II, you can use Peter McLeland's freeware "Bandit Kit" to create a second Archer II with a more powerful engine. You can get the "Bandit Kit" here:

Click on the "Links" button to find the Bandit download

Also, if you get the RealAir Super Decathlon, be sure to tweak the "power_scalar" setting in aircraft.cfg to: 1.15 (default is 0.89). This tweak will give the SD a bit more realistic power. When you go into that .cfg file, you'll see that the developers did consider the more powerful setting).

Hey, thanks a million! I cant believe how horrible i am at flying the piper cub, i went to land it after about an hour of my cross-country flight, it never dawned on me that that little stick thingy was my fuel indicator, and i would've crashed had i not checked my framerate and saw i had about 4% fuel left.

So, I decided to descend and land at a nearby airport. I got the thing down all right...(thats gotta be cause of watching the autopilot in the big planes i usually fly). But there was just a tad bit of a crosswind, I didn't take any care to correct for it, cause i'm used to plowing through 8kts of crosswind with a 100,000+lb aircraft.

To make a long story shorter, i landed sideways, rolled the cub 3 times, and finally came to rest inverted in the ground near the runway threshold...