| Carenado's Mooney M20J Review! |
I have a review of Carenado’s Mooney M20J for Flight Simulator X.
For those of you who are familiar with Carenado, and a good portion of
the flight simulator community is, we know that Carenado makes
tremendously detailed aircraft for the General Aviation market in flight
simulator and are not going any where any time soon. Their roots can be
traced back to the FS2002 days with their terrific Tomahawk model that
they have made, and I’d have to say right off the bat that if a company
were to fall in amongst the best of the best than Carenado would have to
be one of them.
I have experience with several of Carenado’s aircraft, the C182RG for
example, and I must say that little plane is one of my favorites, with
numerous hours on the chronometer. Also, with being the huge aviation
buff that I am, subscribe to Plane and Pilot magazine with this month’s
issue having a pilot report on the Mooney Acclaim, which is the latest in
the Mooney line.
The performance index is different on the M20J than with the Acclaim. I’
m glad I did some research on this first because when I do reviews I
want to compare how the performance handling is with the aircraft in the
simulated world to the real world. When I was looking online, I have
noticed that first of all the M20J contains a Lycoming IO-360-A3B6D
flat-4 engine, 200 hp engine. The aircraft is capable of a maximum
service ceiling of 18000ft. I’m glad I researched this after reading the
Plane and Pilot article that featured an Acclaim, for I would have
assumed that the planes were to perform the same. Not true! The M20’s
sibling can go 25000ft in altitude! How ever, both planes can do a 1000
foot per minute climb rate. Is this true? I had to find out how close to the
real world this really was.
I wanted to redo the test flight of the Acclaim with the M20. Now that
would be a nice challenge to see how well the predecessor could handle
the new challenge. The flight was to be from KSAN to Jacksonville,
Florida. The cruise altitude for my aircraft’s purposes was to be 18000ft.
Here’s what I did. When I first loaded the Mooney, you can tell that it’s
a Carenado aircraft by the attention to detail that they put in with all their
planes. This package comes with several different liveries, and now one
thing I like is it comes with a paint kit as well for you would be aircraft
repainters, thank you for that Carenado!
Anyway, back to the test flight: After I received take off clearance
from San Diego, I banked to my easterly heading, and immediately pulled
back on the yoke to a steady 1000ft per minute climb. I wanted to try to
see just how this really was with it’s simulated counterpart.
I was kind of disappointed. When I started my climb, I pushed the
timer on my Saitek yoke to time how long it really would take the M20J
to reach 18000 feet. It was a little over 19 minutes because I did start to
loose air speed going straight up at a 1000ft per minute instead of being
able to “hold her steady” the whole way up like they were able to with
the Acclaim in plane and pilot. I had to make slight adjustments after a
while to about 500 and even 300 Feet per minute while I was able to get
her up there. It was however a good portion of the way that it was able
to. After that, I had to do some maneuvers to see how she responded,
and the controls felt more than realistic enough. I’m still going to be
testing this bird again to make sure I did everything right - and when I
fly, I fly by the book.
If you have your PPL and are looking for a new plane to try in Flight
Simulator, you want the most realistic. Then pick up the new Mooney
from Carenado as with all their other aircraft, you won't notice any
details missing. This plane is well crafted, nicely animated, and also
includes the extras as well too when you shut off the engine. I noticed
that a review in Flightsim.com stated it didn’t but that’s wrong. Just a
plane wrong fact on that part. Like I was saying, if you’re in the market
for a nicely simulated aircraft and don’t have 100’s of thousands of
dollars to spend on a real one, pick up Carenado’s M20J. You’ll be
pleased with this one and you probably won’t get in as much trouble
with your wife too for buying a simulator rather than the real. This is one
plane that will be in my FS X General Aviation hangar, that’s for sure.
For those of you who are familiar with Carenado, and a good portion of
the flight simulator community is, we know that Carenado makes
tremendously detailed aircraft for the General Aviation market in flight
simulator and are not going any where any time soon. Their roots can be
traced back to the FS2002 days with their terrific Tomahawk model that
they have made, and I’d have to say right off the bat that if a company
were to fall in amongst the best of the best than Carenado would have to
be one of them.
I have experience with several of Carenado’s aircraft, the C182RG for
example, and I must say that little plane is one of my favorites, with
numerous hours on the chronometer. Also, with being the huge aviation
buff that I am, subscribe to Plane and Pilot magazine with this month’s
issue having a pilot report on the Mooney Acclaim, which is the latest in
the Mooney line.
The performance index is different on the M20J than with the Acclaim. I’
m glad I did some research on this first because when I do reviews I
want to compare how the performance handling is with the aircraft in the
simulated world to the real world. When I was looking online, I have
noticed that first of all the M20J contains a Lycoming IO-360-A3B6D
flat-4 engine, 200 hp engine. The aircraft is capable of a maximum
service ceiling of 18000ft. I’m glad I researched this after reading the
Plane and Pilot article that featured an Acclaim, for I would have
assumed that the planes were to perform the same. Not true! The M20’s
sibling can go 25000ft in altitude! How ever, both planes can do a 1000
foot per minute climb rate. Is this true? I had to find out how close to the
real world this really was.
I wanted to redo the test flight of the Acclaim with the M20. Now that
would be a nice challenge to see how well the predecessor could handle
the new challenge. The flight was to be from KSAN to Jacksonville,
Florida. The cruise altitude for my aircraft’s purposes was to be 18000ft.
Here’s what I did. When I first loaded the Mooney, you can tell that it’s
a Carenado aircraft by the attention to detail that they put in with all their
planes. This package comes with several different liveries, and now one
thing I like is it comes with a paint kit as well for you would be aircraft
repainters, thank you for that Carenado!
Anyway, back to the test flight: After I received take off clearance
from San Diego, I banked to my easterly heading, and immediately pulled
back on the yoke to a steady 1000ft per minute climb. I wanted to try to
see just how this really was with it’s simulated counterpart.
I was kind of disappointed. When I started my climb, I pushed the
timer on my Saitek yoke to time how long it really would take the M20J
to reach 18000 feet. It was a little over 19 minutes because I did start to
loose air speed going straight up at a 1000ft per minute instead of being
able to “hold her steady” the whole way up like they were able to with
the Acclaim in plane and pilot. I had to make slight adjustments after a
while to about 500 and even 300 Feet per minute while I was able to get
her up there. It was however a good portion of the way that it was able
to. After that, I had to do some maneuvers to see how she responded,
and the controls felt more than realistic enough. I’m still going to be
testing this bird again to make sure I did everything right - and when I
fly, I fly by the book.
If you have your PPL and are looking for a new plane to try in Flight
Simulator, you want the most realistic. Then pick up the new Mooney
from Carenado as with all their other aircraft, you won't notice any
details missing. This plane is well crafted, nicely animated, and also
includes the extras as well too when you shut off the engine. I noticed
that a review in Flightsim.com stated it didn’t but that’s wrong. Just a
plane wrong fact on that part. Like I was saying, if you’re in the market
for a nicely simulated aircraft and don’t have 100’s of thousands of
dollars to spend on a real one, pick up Carenado’s M20J. You’ll be
pleased with this one and you probably won’t get in as much trouble
with your wife too for buying a simulator rather than the real. This is one
plane that will be in my FS X General Aviation hangar, that’s for sure.
| Screen shots coming soon! |
| All reviews written by: Captain John! |