A long time ago, back in the X-Plane 11 days, I picked up CowanSim’s 222B. I’ve taken it out on a few adventures over the years and now that it’s flying in X-Plane 12 I thought I’d check in and see how both the helicopter and the sim were running. This all happening to the backdrop of the 40th Anniversary of Airwolf series premiering on TV with the series’ slightly outlandish helicopter being a cosmetically modified Bell 222. And lets throw in some terrible live winter weather for the sake of it too. Need I say more? On with the Journal!

KBOS to KPWM

For this flight I did an approximately 45 minute flight direct from Boston’s Logan International up to Portland, Maine and the Portland International Jetport (KPWM) airport. A short to mid-sized hop for a helicopter but no problem for a cruiser like the 222B.

It’s been a long time since I had flown X-Plane 12 and even longer since I few a helicopter so it took me a while to sort out my controls and get myself back up and running. That together with some sort of weird spawn bug (where the helicopter would be launched, engine off, up about 500 feet and then come crashing down) nearly caused me to abandon the whole thing. But the issue went away and I was back on the ground and ready to get going.

After fumbling my way through the startup it was time to depart and I awkwardly flew the 222B out to the runway and away from the airport. Note to self: Learn more about helicopter ops at major airports for future journals.

After establishing the 222B in the gloomy and stormy conditions I set course north up the coast. The 222B’s autopilot handled part of the flight though I manually intervened a few times. I made sure to hug the coast as well as check out some areas inland to see how the sim was looking.

Throughout the flight the 222B was hit by strong winds that caused the autopilot to fly us off to one side. It made for uncomfortable viewing (who doesn’t like to have the horizon level) but the helicopter kept course comfortably.

The passengers in the back seemed amused and unprepared for the harsh weather so I can only assume the HVAC systems back there were doing their thing keeping everyone warm.

The rest of the flight was uneventful and I was quite suddenly almost on top of Portland International Jetport. My cruise came to an end and I approached KPWM for a quick and orderly landing.

How’s X-Plane feeling these days?

I continue to have mixed feelings about X-Plane 12 right now. I had a lot of fun with X-Plane 11 in its heyday but my recent flight simming in the civilian aviation side of things has been Microsoft Flight Simulator focused. There are definitely some great things about X-Plane 12 and some stuff that needs to improve still.

The CowanSim 222B performed well. Its a solid aircraft release by a well known helicopter developer and I’ve always enjoyed my time with the helicopter. It does these kinds of hops well too thanks to its autopilot system, slick aerodynamics, and high cruise speeds. You can see why they picked this helicopter for the Airwolf series.

X-Plane 12 also performed well throughout the flight. The work done in the later days of X-Plane 11 to bring Vulcan API to the sim together with the refinements in the sim for X-Plane 12 have paid off. Frame rates were anywhere between 30-40fps but more importantly they were fluid and steady throughout without any skipping or frame drops of any kind. A far cry from the days of X-Plane 11 where even 20 fps seemed to be considered high and stuttery FPS was a common occurrence.

The live weather roughly matched with what I could pull up from local METARs. That was good. The clouds, however, were a mixed bag. Some of the clouds looked really good. The best that X-Plane has ever looked. Others looked like inverted pyramids (seen in some of the images). I have no idea what was going on there but more work needs to be done there clearly.

Temperatures throughout the flight were below freezing, however, X-Plane 12 doesn’t yet have snowflakes so it all appears as rain. Local we cameras showed a fair bit of snow on the ground in Boston before the flight but the sim has only partially picked up on that with what I might call a “dusting of snow.”

Trees look incredible, even in the winter, as do the runways, taxiways and airport autogen. Everything you saw was stock X-Plane 12 which has nice high resolution assets that hold up well. On the downside, X-Plane’s scenery system is still largely rooted in the past with jagged edges and repeating patterned textures. I hope one day they can do something about it. They don’t have to do MSFS satellite scenery to improve the visuals here. Smoothing out the edges of lakes, ponds, oceans, and making the roadways follow curves instead of hard angles would be an improvement.

The world also felt a little stale. Running X-Plane 12 mostly stock these days I don’t have any traffic injection and nothing is baked in. So I was just a lone helicopter flying in a lonely world. I hope they can do something about that too… as great as third party add-ons can be its still nice to just boot up a “clean” sim and have things going on.

Definitely not a bad experience and actually quite a good one. But still work to do or things I need to do to get my X-Plane 12 up to where I had X-Plane 11 back in the day.