Reviews (by Charles)

The textures are quite beautiful. The sounds are spot-on and the handling is very accurate and the flight model is challenging to fly. Now the gripes: The pilots move in sync and this looks quite strange. They also seem to be a bit below scale. The main wheels will not rotate unless the nosewheel is in contact with the ground. The "8-ball" attitude indicator seems to be non-functional. At full flaps the plane can fly as slow as 100 knots which is very unrealistic. for this reason, I only use the first notch of flaps which makes for a more realistic 180-190 knot approach speed. I really hope SimSkunk continues development of the product and can provide upgrades a remedies for these drawbacks. In spite of these shortfalls the plane is a joy to look at and fly and is worth the purchase cost.

The flight model requires armloads of trim. You are constantly trimming. So it isn't hard to fly. It's just large, heavy and lets you know right away that if you don't fly her, she'll fly you. The engines seem to spool up much too quickly and unrealistically for a first generation afterburning turbofan. Also the buffet seems to come on too early. The pitch rate should be higher. Especially with the wings fully extended. The thrust for the engines seems too close together. Realistically, with one engine out, the thrust from one can easily exceed the yaw and roll authority. Also I almost wish the A model's engines were less forgiving like the real thing. It took forever to even get one to fail and it was fairly mundane and easy to control. The pilot and RIO figures look a bit cartoonish. The put-your-face-on-the-pilot thing is somewhat adolescent. Otherwise the visual model looks good. It's worth it but I wish it made you work harder.

The G91 looks great on the outside, has the typical 50's era fast-jet handling qualities like wide turn radius, skittish controls and high takeoff and landing speeds and having to use a great deal of trim throughout the speed regime. The sounds could use improvement in that the fan-blade noise is much louder than the actual exhaust noise and the shutdown sounds like a dyson vacuum cleaner being turned off. a strange quirk happens when the HSI passes the 360 degree position and the instrument freezes momentarily before returning to normal. The landing gear footprint suggests that the mainwheels actually sit about a foot further aft than they appear visually, causing them to appear to sink into the runway on takeoff and landing. There is a great amount of ugly pixelization on the right side of the cockpit. The removal of the gunsight was a disappointment as it would have made a good method for visual-alignment for maneuvering and landing as MSFS did away with the waterline markings. It's a realistic and beautiful model that's worth the money but I hope SSW can rectify these issues and provide updates.