FlightSim Manager - Ranainside

If you don’t know how to tweak your fs9.cfg or optimise your system (or even if you do) FlightSim Manager is for you. Rana Hossain has made a very tidy bit of software that lets you manage your aircraft, scenery and provide powerful tweaks, however the most impressive feature is the ‘launch FS’ button that optimises your system before loading FS9 up. Need an extra 10FPS? Here’s your solution, available free. You’ll need the patch (fsmgr.zip) from Flightsim.com to make it run.

GA Traffic

Ever wanted lots of traffic around your local airfield but have no idea how to set up a flight plan and no money to purchase software that might not even cover your area? No problem with GA traffic! Choose planes from your hangar and generate those flight plans. There are many options to tweak but the instant satisfaction of lots of general aviation buzzing around pleased me a lot.

The program is available at avsim.

Learjet 25D

Small business jets have been fairly few on the ground but now many come at once. Pick of these is Lars Roennig’s fantastic first package. It’s very smoothly modeled with plenty of details and it’s covered in high resolution textures. There is also a small panel included. It’s a lovely piece of work available from the Avsim library.

ISDT ATR 42-300

This new Israeli design team has produced a cracking first project. The ATR isn’t well represented these days in freeware but ISDT look set to solve this with a -500 in the pipeline and small improvements to this download. The package contains a single blank livery but more are available in the forums and for now it doesn’t matter too much as you can just look at the modeling quality which is excellent. Visit ISDT.

Antonov AN-26

Vladimir Zhyhulskiy has produced some fine soviet add-ons and his model of the sturdy turbo prop Antonov AN-26 was a really welcome surprise. It features a smooth frame rate friendly model, a tidy 2D panel and very neat VC. It’s really nice to fly and on top of that repainters have been busy. Get the AN-26 from Avsim.

Bucker 131 Jungmann

Oliver Fischer is a talented man as we’ve seen in my review of his Junkers 52 but his rendition of the German answer to the Tiger Moth is in my opinion is even better, it’s just so much fun! A gorgeous VC and gauge set combined with the graceful looks make a fun days simming around your favourite GA airfield. Visit Junkers-52.de to download the self installing package.