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Cessna Citation Mustang Review
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Biz jet, private jet, business jet, or whatever you call these aircraft there’s no denying their popularity or their usefulness. But, simmers with a taste for the high life, have been downright ignored by the commercial addon world. Airliners and military jets draw the most business for the high fidelity addons. However, Flight One have answered the call to arms with its Cessna Citation Mustang …
click on the banner or the Read More link for our review
Installing the Mustang wasn’t quite hassle free… Turns out to get the nav data to work properly I needed to run FS X as administrator – but this was resolved by using the dedicated Mustang support forum. I asked the developers about the issue and Jim Rhoads said that this problem “has a lot more to do with Vista than it does us”.
The nice thing that Flight One did with the support forum is to only allow you access once you’ve submitted your “Owner’s Certificate” ! A little gimmicky? Perhaps, but nonetheless at least it protects its software in so far as you can only assign your Owner’s Certificate number to one forum user name. A little frustrating initially because all you want to do is fly it, but it was automated and seamless enough that even a monkey can do it.
The Citation Mustang has been designed for the owner pilot, and arguably is the first of the VLJs that came to market. What Flight One has done is taken the idea of an FS addon one step further.
Through its partnership with Cessna, which it says is the first time Cessna has partnered with anyone outside of Microsoft for the FS series, the work is breathtaking and manufacturer involvement is clearly evident. Take one look at the model and compare it to the real thing you can see every single aerial is replicated in intricate detail.
Naturally the developer Jim Rhoads remains tight lipped about Cessna’s exact involvement, but it’s a safe guess to say that Cessna must have provided a lot of information for a third party developer to provide such an extensively modeled, and accurate, representation of a biz jet.
Climbing on board your virtual Mustang you can see an exact replication of the Mustang’s real four-seat club interior. Everything has been included, even down to the seat belts, which are an exact replica of the real thing. Oh and even the cup holders have been modeled! (first two images links are Wallpapers)
But what we really need to do is to see how she flies…
For this flight I decided to do a short hop ‘down under’ from ORBX YPMQ Port Macquarie to Adelaide in Australia, around 1,500km a typical mission length that you would expect the aircraft to fly.
Truly this aircraft depicts what modern aviation is about – systems management. And while thanks to the G1000 this is simplified, the level of realism is certainly high. Everything from the functionality of the G1000 to the aircraft’s handling.
The Mustang is a joy to fly by hand, it feels right and certainly rewards a bit of homework. Without doing some basic reading you are going to struggle to tap into its potential.
At max weight the aircraft still lifts off easily, and because of the G1000 you can get V speeds displayed on the PFD with ease.
To really appreciate this aircraft you need to have read the manual, and this addon does come with a 94-page PDF manual that tells you absolutely everything, including performance charts from the real Pilot’s Operating Handbook.
Without reading through that you will spend countless hours of frustration trying to get the autopilot into Nav mode.
Perhaps the nicest thing about flying the Mustang is taking a look around the cabin from the cockpit, and noticing that the seat belts are modeled, but also the seat runners and the polygon count on this aircraft must be phenomenal.
The hard work and attention to detail practically jumps up and hits you in the face whenever you look at anything in the cockpit, cabin, external model or even peering into the baggage compartments.
When comparing the Flight One $55 Mustang to Cessna’s $3m Mustang it’s hard to find any differences, aside from the direct operating costs... From the noises and clicks of the switches to the cabin layout.
Moreover if you fly through icing conditions in the Virtual Cockpit and External views you can see the ice accumulating on the windshield, wings and engines. Perhaps the only thing missing is the actual wing boots inflating to break the ice, but then again that’s more likely to be a limitation of FS X than a developer oversight. Instead ice begins to accumulate and then disappears, thanks to the automation of the wing boots.
The navigation data that comes with the current v1.02 is good. You can also update the Navigraph database, although the database may cause installation issues for Vista users – to solve the Navigraph setup errors run FS X ‘as an administrator’. Again I asked Rhoads about the issue and he said that the developers had seen very few of these issues and “that this may be more of a localized issue for whatever reason”.
Certainly with an addon of this nature, this is not an exercise in flying; this truly is risk and systems management. An exact replica of what flying a machine like this really is all about.
Of course, being an FS addon there’s nothing to stop you from just jumping in and lighting up the engines and going. But to appreciate it and understand more about the real Mustang you need to operate it the way it was designed to.
For dedicated FS fans this addon also offers an easy step up into jet operations. The fact that it has a landing speed of around 96knots means you are not that far from the days of coming down the ILS in a 182 or 172.
In the low speed handling it is a benign aircraft and the real challenge for making the jump to jets is to anticipate everything that little bit quicker.
Overall, it’s an impressive addon, and perhaps the best piece of payware I’ve seen so far. If you are into your biz jets and fancy trying something on the smaller end of the scale there just isn’t anything to contend with it.
I’ve tried the Roger Wilco biz jet series and although on their own they are a decent addon, nothing seems to come close to what this Mustang can offer.
My only gripe I’ve had with flying the virtual Mustang is manipulating the G1000’s MFD, but this isn’t a design fault or flaw, it’s just a lot easier to use rotary knobs with fingers than it is with a mouse.
What this addon does is give you that sense of being in the cockpit. Flying it in the virtual cockpit is a must; in there you can see the detailing on the yokes. You can even see the modeling of the seat runners…
Flying it is truly a joy, but be warned if you have a low-end PC you might struggle with the virtual cockpit, but the 2D panels that are included are also to an impeccable standard.
Personally, this is how all payware add ons should be. Whether it warrants a purchase price of more than FS itself, well only the customers can decide but it’s fair to say that this is actually a simulator in its own right. It just piggy backs FS for the pretty visuals.
FSX-A, ASA, FEX, REX, Samoshin Natural World Trees 2, ORBX PORT MACQUARIE, ORBX Australia were used.
Screenshots were taken by ThomasDWeiss on a DX48BT2 Core2Duo 3.16Mhz, 4 GB 1333 RAM, 2x500MB RAID, WinXP Pro, Nvidia 8800GTX - and were not edited in any way other than resizing.
As always, we do not profit from any sales of anything we review.
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Posted on Tuesday, July 14 @ 05:00:00 PDT by Zorrin
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Average Score: 4.87
Votes: 8
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