Did I really need this? Yes! (Dash 7 by Milton Shupe)

You know, I'm really trying to buckle down and focus my flightsimming activities, but along comes another freeware Must Have. I've hardly had time to absorb the great Cessna 150, Glacier Bay v.2, or the new-to-me freeware Maule for FS2004. This is getting to be a problem, I have too much flightsim stuff to do, and not enough time. I guess this is a good problem to have (from a real-world perspective, having any flightsim problem is a good problem, because the prerequisite for having such a problem is a certain amount of free time and material resources.)





Anyway, the real subject of this post is the Dash 7 upgrade from Milton Shupe and his team.
This release came as a complete suprise to me. I flew the first updated version of this plane quite a bit, and really enjoyed it even though I missed having a virtual cockpit. Then, I heard that they were working on an update with a VC, and was watching progress reports on this project with great interest. But about a year ago Milton announced that he was retiring from modelling, and would have to leave this project unfinished.

I won't attempt a review of this plane other than to say it is a fantastic model of a really fun plane. Andrew Herd wrote a very informative review of this plane when it was released for FS2002, and it is still worth reading.

This update includes a very well done VC as well as a fully-appointed cabin. The latter is nice if you want to replay a flight, and go back and sit with the passengers. That's what I did for my last picture here, on final into Skagway.

As if this wasn't enough, Milton says on one of the forums that this is not the final version, and a much-improved version will be available in 6 to 8 weeks!


Tonight is Flying Night, so I plan to devote the better part of it to mastering this plane. I can usually land it where I want, but often with a rollercoaster approach path. I haven't flown turboprops very much at all, so I need to get used to the delay between throttle changes and the effect on the descent rate.