Finally we’ve got the Assembly Line moving and I’ve sent the first aircraft to Bear to QA. The 4.0.164, or “164” as we call it is such a massive step up from all of our previous efforts.

New is using the all the physics to predict performance. This brings us much closer to our intended goal, accurate flight performance of the aircraft.

Our process is different from others who rely on anecdotal data and fudges to make the aircraft fly like whoever yells loudest. If you go to their message boards you see a lot on arguments of my daddy says or my 3rd cousins says. These arguments really contribute little to understanding the aircraft, let alone being able to produce a flight model for the aircraft.

When you look at the product content out there, the flight model (FM) is one area that is skimped on. Part of the problem is production houses with tight schedules are running late. Since the user can’t see the FM, it becomes the first area to cut back at. If a user later does complain, the developer can always respond with “And how many hours have you flown plane XXX to know it’s not right?”.

What we are hoping is to get flight sims away from the arcade format and execution used by commercial releases and back to Scientific and Historical investigation. The desktop computers we now have at home are very powerful, and allow us to use very high fidelity 6 DOF flight equations.

So the aircraft AvHistory will soon be releasing will use the predicted performance instead of what is listed in the books. Remember, our performance comes from respected aerospace methods like DATCOM, Dr Roskam, Dr Phillips and Lifting Line theory.

The intent here is to move the discussion away from “my pop is bigger than your pop” to trying to answer why is it different. If we learn why, it allows us to more accurately predict performance or recognize certain book data or sources are wrong. It should be a lot more fun and rewarding.