Dash 8-300 Professional

The Good
I have no real liking for this aircraft and no burning desire to have it on my pc. I got this package because it was available, it was cheap, and I wanted to try something new. It has turned out to be a little gem.

The install process is very straightforward. The aircraft and the airports drop into Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2002 and the two work together seamlessly. I did have a problem with Lago's Schiphol airport, see below, but that did not affect gameplay.

So how good is this simulation? Well I think it is excellent. I've looked at some web sites such as http://www.airliners.net and pictures of the cockpit instrumentation layout in the flight sim matches the real world photo's almost exactly. (I did spot that there was one extra dial in the flight sim's instrumentation but that could be because the sim is several years old now and the real world plane has moved on or it could be the difference between the 8-300 and the 8-Q300. I didn't care enough to follow this up)

The exterior screen shots showing the shape of the plane and the different liveries seem to be an almost perfect match to real world photographs too, so all in all this seems like a jolly good simulation of the real thing.

I cannot comment on the flight characteristics because I have never flown a real aircraft and don't expect I ever will, however the reviews of this product say that it's very good and they do seem to be written by people who know about flying in the real world.

I liked the active instrumentation. With other flight sims I've sometimes, well nearly always, struggled to work out each what dial means and what it is reading. being able to hover the mouse cursor over an instrument and have a label come up and give me that information is a real bonus.

I don't know why there are two models of this aircraft but each comes with it's own set of aircraft livery, I think 5 schemes come with the 8-300 and 12 come with the 8-Q300. It's a nice touch and shows an attention to detail. It'snot something that greatly bothers me but when researching this and other planes I've noted that there are people who seem to collect aircraft liveries, so getting 17 in this package may well be important to other players.

I was very impressed that the package included three enhanced airports. Having the plane is one thing but having somewhere to fly to is just as important. Frankfurt and Amsterdam are two major European commuter airports and being able to fly between them and London is excellent. The quality of the enhanced airports is very good too. I've not checked to see whether the airports supplied actually match the real world airports, because I expect that there will have been some development work at each of them since this product was released, but I do think they do look much better than the default airports that come with the flight simulator.

The documentation is also very comprehensive. Sure I was able to start with the plane on the runway and just take off but here I have flight check-lists that will enable me to fly between the three European airports in either direction, the Bahamas and the USA, and an internal Canadian route. I haven't done this yet because each flight is estimated at around 2 hours, but it's the sort of guidance that a novice like me needs if I'm to start flying 'properly'.

I've played around with this product, on & off, for a week now and I haven't had any problems. This is more than 'just another plane' that's flown between the same old places, there's scope in this product that will help the novice (aka me) develop their flying abilities.

I've also used this aircraft and the UK airport with and without VFR Photographic UK scenery. They also work together seamlessly.

I haven't tried them yet but the additional software that allows the plane's loading to be altered sounds like something that I'd probably try after I've started flying commercial routes.

The Bad
When the game installs it puts three entries into the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002's scenery library, one for each airport supplied. This way the player can choose whether to enable / disable them depending on the flight they're about to undertake and the capacity of their machine. There's no point in having the Frankfurt scenery loaded if the flight is between London and Amsterdam.
The install went well but the scenery library for the Amsterdam Schiphol airport was empty. I later learned that the enhanced airport could be accessed as the flight simulators default Amsterdam Schiphol airport which it seems to replace.
This is not a major problem as the new airport can be easily un-installed but I'd have preferred to retain control and for the airport scenery to have been handled consistently.

The Bottom Line
I don't think this is an aircraft that I will ever fall in love with the way I fell for, say, Concorde but as a package I think this one will be difficult to beat.
If you want a new plane that's easy to fly - get this.
If you just want something that looks pretty - get this
If you want to venture beyond flying a couple of circuits of the airfield and try something that's nearer to real life - get this.