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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. |
