Supronov Design Yakovlev 40
SD (formerly SCDS) have been around a while plugging away with their product the Yak 40 – the real aircraft coincidentally having its 40th birthday today (21/10/06). Previous to this, founders Igor Supronov and Elena Mezina were responsible for the fs2002 Lago Twin Otter. I have experience with the company is with their demos released back in 2004 via several download sites and I have not thought too much about it since. In trying to find something interesting without computers I eventually found their website detailing the new V2 release, ‘Lite’ release and lots of amazing interior screenshots.
The Yak 40 was introduced in the mid-sixties as the primary aircraft for Aeroflot. Production ended in 1978 but still over 400 are left flying and registered in 18 countries. It is important to note the Soviets got into the regional jet nearly 30 years before anyone else.
The main design philosophy behind the Yak-40 was the idea of a short-range short take off jet aircraft to fill in all the gaps of the airline timetable. Straight wings provide lift, chunky wheels deal with rough airstrips and 3 powerful engines blast it out in the shortest space possible. The Yak doesn’t even need ground crew, the pilots can simply lower the air stair, turn around and take off again ensuring access to all but the most remote or small airfields was granted. I wouldn’t worry either about a failure – this plane is built like a tank with a very simple cockpit for the time.
Supronov decided to create one of the most successful Russian airliners in copious detail – going head to head in theory with the likes of the outstanding freeware Project Tupolev or detailed payware offerings such as Flight One/Coolsky’s MD-80 and perhaps to a much lesser extent the full simulation offerings from PMDG. Systems simulated include electrics, fuel, APU, GMK course system, avionics (including initial line up), full navigation and as this is an ongoing project - pressurisation will be along soon. You can’t even be afraid of the Russian with English callouts, tool tips, manual, panel labels and imperial measures available.
Installation
The aircraft is a hefty 123mb download and the Lite version is another 50mb. When downloaded you must install before going back to the web site. Upon licence purchase you will receive a product key that will then allow you access to the plane in game and the registration option is available in the start menu. All set to go the plane installs with a whopping one livery…185mb of download? Well the sounds don’t add much and the textures are only 20mb (or 5mb in DXT3) – oddly it is the panel folders that carry the weight with 277mb and 144mb of gauges! Crikey! Note this does not include any documentation – this is separate. The plane appears in the aircraft menu under ‘Supronov’ and there are two to select from – either the full or Lite package.
Documentation/Support
The manual is a 85mb download which provides you with 105 almost complete PDF pages missing a few sound notes and example full flight. The manual is set in two columns with English on the left and Russian on the right with many, many labelled pictures. As I said earlier I had no problems going from ground-off to take-off. It’s pretty important to print about 30pages of it as switching from FS to PDF is very memory crunching and irritating.
Support wise: every email was responded to in under an hour and forum response within 24. After about 10 emails I think my longest wait was around 2hrs with messages from several of the team. Thorough!
Exterior
loading up the aircraft firstly in the exterior view you can see great time has gone into the texture and model work. On the ground the Yak is quite an ugly fella, with it’s sleek nose and T wings ruined by giant tyres. I let that go because such a giant gear means lots of big detail including cables and suspension plus nice photo texturing. The fuselage and tail show lots of wear as strong dirt effects contrast against the sleek blue/black private livery. The textures are not at a wonderfully high resolution but they are pleasing enough close up and contain plenty of detail.
The fuselage itself has 3D windows over some flat graphics – a nice touch and I can’t say I noticed there being no interior for a while into play. I don’t see this as a bad point – but for those who do, it means no FPS issues for the people on small computers. Missing from the interior also in V2 are the pilots but this will be resolved shortly I am told – it may currently be due to a missing texture.
I like animations, but I’m a bit let down here. All the normal controls are there as you’d expect; control surfaces, wheel roll, nose gear turning, suspension, flaps, trim etc and 2 doors are available – front and rear air stair but no cones, maintenance modes or ‘remove before flight’ tags to be seen. It’s not exactly a great loss: I just like the said small touches.
2D Panel
I have a gripe with the 2D panel. It is not bad, it is in fact almost a work of art both visually and in coding ability but the time it takes to load – if it loads – is sometimes painful. The full package may sometimes just freeze on my system if I’ve been working beforehand and when it does load after a few minutes it will cause hang ups for a further 5 minutes before settling down into a playable state. The Lite version on the other hand takes around one mintute to fully load and shows no signs of lag in use – it makes me think why the full is still included since they offer the same features and any differences I found un-noticeable.
Why does it take so long? Well instead of the pedestal, side panels and overhead being separate windows and bitmaps with gauges added on top they are in fact just big gauges. Yep, the full lot - including full night lighting - is coded into a gauge (background and all) – 144mb of gauge in fact (more later) The views are all full window 3D renders that act almost like a virtual cockpit for those without a camera module or joystick view capability: it is not for those with lower end systems, it still takes some serious force to load. Every switch, lever and button looks very tidy with almost no rough edges in site. LCD displays glow, numbers and knobs rotate – this is like the smoothest most amazing VC until you notice it’s flat.
It takes longer to load if you have voice call outs turned on. By default these are in Russian, but English ‘crew environment’ packs have been made by Jeffrey Moss in both imperial units and the metric system. I actually don’t want to turn these off and would rather wait as having a co-pilot call out speeds, flap settings (more later) engine and fuel notes (‘Pressure normal, generator on’ etc.) and many other things adds both to immersion into the product and acts as a useful aid…’safe height for landing gear retraction…gear retracting…three red’.
Most handily SD have made a clever ‘deck navigator’ on shift + 5, so instead of click spots or icons you get a diagram that can move you area to area in full screen or open individual items. If you don’t feel like using that then you can mouse around the edges to find arrows that will pop-up and re-direct you.
As mentioned before, many systems are simulated meaning lots of switch throwing and getting round the 2D panel with the navigator gives a good start for using the VC in both direction and usability. Left and right clicks can be used for small or large adjustments on radios, dragging and click spots are all the same.
The deck navigator not only let’s you move around the main areas but open up individual gauges or systems such as lights or the altitude indicator.
Before start up the manual will tell you to press shift + 0 which after a few goes (seems a bit hit and miss, but works best if you load into the VC first) will load a comprehensive load manager for fuel, passenger seating and optional ground power. It isn’t necessary to use this but it adds detail.
Virtual Cockpit
If you don’t want to load the 2D panel, not to worry you can start straight away in the VC and call up any necessary 2D panels via the ALT flight sim menu at the top or navigator. As well as being somewhat faster to load it saves RAM for your scenery. By default you cannot use the CTRLt + E start up procedure as in the 2D panel, but a quick fiddle in the panel.cfg and you can. I must now mention some tech points; The Yak’s VC uses 41 virtual cockpit planes/panels/areas. Normally 15 of these might hurt your system badly unless they were simple, and the more windows included means the lower refresh rate of your gauges. ‘How do you fly with this thing?!’ you may cry but don’t click off this review and give up all hope. SD have used those wonderful built-into-the-model-smooth-gauges for most of the main instrumentation, all switches and knobs are 3D so the only lag you’ll get on gauge refresh is when fiddling with the radios so the numbers can take a second to load. The 41 windows are in fact used for many of the VC textures. Why? So that you can flick between languages, units and also have some nice night lighting. It seems a very heavy way to do this, so although clever and well executed I don’t see the purpose over having separate English textures. If you pan around you’ll find all controls are animated, clickable (including autopilot on/off on the yoke, toe brakes and parking brake) and has everything you could want from a top cockpit.
Texturally this VC changes from the demos seen around in that the flat 3D images of headphones have gone, the blurry floor has gone and now everything is crystal clear and very nice. Shadows, dirt and bumps all look very good and I can’t point out one bit that is flatter than the real thing. Look at the pictures. You’ll even notice the visibility is good and the text is readable.
One of the best features for those new to Russian aviation, lazy, too old to care or whatever your reason to not bother with Cyrillic alphabet and metric system SD have made it a click away from all change. Avionics change colours, units (kilometers > knots) and indeed language to make everything a very familiar environment. Notes above switches and all labelling becomes English – so unlike other soviet simulations you actually know where the APU switch is without just blindly clicking it by number. It certainly makes me feel more involved and useful.
As with any VC sometimes reading a piece of equipment accurately can be a problem on the small screen so instead of having to adjust headings or courses ‘roughly’ many gauges pop up with a click and can be changed accurately. It’s not a feature I’m used to but I liked it even if it isn’t so realistic.
The very nice night lighting of the 2D cockpit also makes it into the virtual one.
Sound
Good…I don’t know what more to say. The switches click – but not too loudly, and the engine sounds are mighty and no loops or poor quality sounds are apparent.
Flight
I’ll be honest and say for the first few flights I couldn’t be bothered to start up manually, so Ctrl + E it was and off I went. Having read the manual first* I knew the flaps have a full 65degrees of adjustment and getting the needed 20 degrees for take-off meant holding F7 down until the call from my co-pilot. I also knew that you must switch the radio and antennae to ILS before switching them both to VOR/ADF/NDB…
You can’t quite jump in and fly without reading some documentation. Apart from the above you probably won’t know how to use the autopilot and if you haven’t been in a Soviet plane before: navigate. So let’s start from the beginning.
After reading through some of the manual I felt clued up to finally take a full flight so I set up a short flight plan from Munich to Stuttgart, printed of my waypoints and found my old diagram of EDDS – I wasn’t going to use the map for reference and there is no GPS.
The manual states a full system start should take around half an hour, but I can safely say it took me significantly less due to my time already in the seat. Looking around I fully noticed how different again everything was laid out with separate radio and switch responsibilities for pilot and first officer, there is no mass in the middle as seen in western planes and fortunately in my opinion no more flight engineer’s station. After setting the initial switches either in the 2D panel the 2D or VC have no advantage over one another; you either take the time trying to mouse over each 2D button for the English tip or take the time moving around the VC with the help of English labels. Actually starting up is similar to that of a western plane with APU, generators, fuel pumps and ignitions to click about but different in that everything is…all over: The APU is to the captains left while the generators are in front of the co-pilot. It’s interesting.
Also interesting was setting the radios. The electronic, shiny new DME and nav radios look very out of place when compared to the ADF frequency in the overhead or GMK course selector.
The co-pilot calls out fuel pressure and electronic values as being ‘stable’ and you are ready to move area to area fairly quickly with no 8 minute warm up times included, though these may be an option soon. Starting the engines is nothing new as such, but aligning the instruments can be tricky with nothing automatic much anywhere.
Calling for clearance I pushed back, shut the window and turned on the necessary lights. Just a little bit of power is needed to get under way and the plane taxis very smoothly. The visibility is good on the ground so staying on the guide lines is actually very easy, it seems my twist joystick and the Yak got along very well.
As mentioned before, holding down the flap button brings them out and setting a small amount of trim on my joystick and pitot heat I am ready to go.
Power smoothly to full and small adjustments on the brakes gives me a perfect take off, gear up, flaps to ten (though at your discretion – limits are written in the VC). Now the Yak 40 will never win awards for climb due to those little wings, but it might win an award for stability. If you wish you can switch the autopilot to active to hold the climb, but actually at 85% throttle it stuck dead on 1000FPM all the way up to around 8000feet before starting to drop off. I scroll the trim down a little, retract the flaps and set the autopilot. It’s just over 110NM to Stuttgart after performing a U-Turn from runway 8R so I hold the trigger (autopilot off while held in flight) to level off and align myself on the correct heading before switching on altitude lock. The autopilot is a simple affair really, when switched to active it can hold current pitch and heading or to altitude and heading. Adjustments can be made by holding the trigger or brake button (like a real planes yoke thumb button) or by using the turn knob as seen in many planes of the day. Setting the throttle to around 70% gives a steady 250knots and rather scary fuel consumption. No wonder some subtle smoke has been modelled in to those engines.
After the set up navigating is easy and as I already had all the ADF’s and settings programmed in bar ILS all I had to do was pop up the indicator and switch the arrows about. Calling to Stuttgart from 35NM I start my descent ready for another U turn onto runway 8. I slow to 160knots by 5000feet and pull the flaps to 10…then 20. They cause a lot of drag so a good eye on the ASI and hand on the throttle is needed. I level and turn using the autopilot at 150knots to come into the glideslope from below. Landing clearance is given just 4NM away so I set the landing lights to extend with the gear and flaps now to 50. I noticed throughout the descent the nose stayed glued to a rather disconcerting degree of down pitch not unlike a CRJ so I lower the throttle again before setting the flaps. How fast to land is quite easy – just keep an eye on the pitch. If the nose is too far down at that level of flap, then slow down some more! I came across the threshold with just 6% of fuel and make a rather perfect landing just past the second set of markers.
Taxiing again was like the actual flight – smooth and simple. The plane is not too hard to control with trim and turns as if being on rails, but getting the correct speeds and fuel rate is tricky.
After a good few hours in the plane you notice it is very dependable, autopilot actually isn’t needed often as the trim does so well in fine weather. Landings and take-offs will be performed smoothly. The handling reminded me of Project Fokker, in that the majority of landings will be spot on.
My Performance Tips
- load up plane in virtual cockpit to save precious RAM
- include logic gauge in the VC to allow full functionality without first loading 2D
- use shft + S to backtrack views and avoid 2D panel.
- Download English sound pack by Jeffrey Moss
- Upgrade to 2GB RAM (1Gb £20 –ebay)
Overall
I think unlike any other Soviet project I’ve used I’ve actually been able to get into it and feel involved, helped also by the fact this plane had a host of new technology and was much simpler to operate. Due to this I think it has a wide audience from vintage jet flyers, those with an inclination for the Russian, those stepping up to passenger aircraft or those perhaps scared off by the likes of PMDG and FeelThere or Project Tupolev or Samdim’s An-24 due to the overwhelming modern/soviet complexity. This simulation is like the real plane both for obvious reasons and in spirit. It’s not trying too hard and it does the job convincingly. Performing a full flight is rewarding while not having a serious learning curve.
No other plane of this size has smooth model gauges so I can’t see anything else having such an enjoyable and useful virtual cockpit. The only error is the back-up attitude gauge card can pop out below the panel. The regular version seems somewhat redundant now the Lite download is available and it is now gone from my hard drive. Most other projects don’t have such regular free updates – as said coming soon is a full pressurisation system and virtual cabin, but for those looking ahead in regards to software total FSX compatibility has been ensured – handy with the 2D/VC load time issues as FSX supports either one or the other. Version 2.02 will be out soon and standalone VC model is also on the way.
Despite some longer load times on the 2D panels the product performed well on my system with no hang ups I’m not used to. I run scenery almost top whack with real weather and clouds 50% 3D so I was surprised. In the worst weather and in heavier airport scenery I found VC frame rates did drop to around 10FPS so though just flyable: not ideal. Running the sim straight from system start up or closing down a few programs first helped in terms of load times and switching views.
The help is very fast and friendly and there is a passionate community both speaking Russian and English. Despite the quite high price tag for an almost un-known simulation I am quite happy to say it is well worth every penny and will provide a lot of enjoyment – I also don’t mind giving money to such a friendly and active team.
BUT
The package is very heavy on your computers resources. If you’re thinking ahead to FSX and/or Vista I’d imagine you have at least 2GB of RAM – ideal then for this add-on. The aircraft eats up nearly 300mb (Lite version) more RAM than any other simulation I own due to the way FS2004 keeps the 2D panel in the memory. This could certainly be solved using other techniques I’m sure – perhaps even going back to the old fashioned 2D bitmaps being in the folder, not within the gauge 
I say this because an equally or more complex Project Tupolev is in fact very system light in comparison and it is a shame such complexity here can’t be optimised in the same way. I could even go so far as to remove the 2D main panel right now and leave only the pop-ups for the virtual cockpit.
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