I’ve wanted to pick this one up for a long time. Local Legend 9: Latécoère 631 for Microsoft Flight Simulator is a simulation of one of the largest operational flying boats in history and an airplane that no longer exists anymore except digitally in Microsoft Flight Simulator. I took it out for an inaugural flight in the sim.

Le Havre to La Rochelle route and power up

I’ll write up a review of the Latécoère 631 soon but one of the criticisms around this and other seaplanes is that there just aren’t enough water bases around to enjoy these aircraft. Enter Water Airports Global 1 from Flightsim.to which adds 100 seaplane bases. A follow-up pack adds even more. This add-on helped facilitate today’s flight.

This aircraft was capable of some extremely long haul flights. Another download on Flightsim.to includes some of the commercial routes for the aircraft and it includes Dakar Senegal on the coast of Africa down to Rio de Janeiro or 2716 nautical miles. By modern jetliner standards its not too unusual, however, for an aircraft of the 1930s its quite a lengthy cruise.

Today’s flight was not on the standard route list but a simple harbour to harbour hop in the airplane from Le Havre on the Normandy coast down to La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay.

Starting up in the middle of a rainstorm was a bit of an interesting start to flying this airplane but this is Stormbirds and I like flying in some interesting weather. Making use of the tugboat feature on the aircraft’s tablet, I pulled the airplane into a position for takeoff and then started up the engines. I’ll be doing a full run through of the engine start process at some point but for now the autostart system was great to get flying. The shotgun starter cartridge for each engine plus flames and smoke are a great touch!

Once powered up, I confronted another challenge. The game binds for 4 axis and this aircraft has 6. I may end up having to do a custom configuration with a single axis bound but for now I’m just using the mouse to adjust the last two axis. It’s awkward.

Take off and cruise

After getting things sorted out, it was time to fully throttle up and lift off. This is a lumbering aircraft and slow and gentle responses are needed to get it up into the air but once there it’s a relatively gentle giant.

Latécoère 631 has an autopilot system as well. It’s not all that capable but it is good for doing simple altitude and heading holds and so once I was established on my course it was time to sit back and relax. Or…. check out the rest of the plane! Both behind the pilot and under the pilot, there’s quite a lot to explore. More than the usual.

The flight deck has room for 7 crew including a navigator, radio operator, and a couple of engineers. There isn’t as much to do in these positions in MSFS, its not that deep of a simulation, but there are beautifully rendered and you can get a good feel for the airplane.

Then you can go below the flight deck into the passenger compartment where you’ve got beds, seats, windows, a toilet and sink, and there’s even a galley. Just look at all of this!

It took a while but we eventually saw the coast coming up and our destination.

Landing and thoughts

Finally, it was time to land and with the Latécoère 631 you need to do a bit of planning ahead. Bringing it into a landing takes a gentle approach but eventually you’ll find yourself in a good position to slowly, gingerly, bring the airplane down onto the water. It takes a bit but it will slow down with the throttles at idle.

Eventually I was able to get it into a good enough spot to cut the engines and bring in the tug boat. The tug positioned the aircraft the way I wanted it to be positioned and then they “bring out the dock.” That parks the plane and makes any harbour or substantial water body ready to accept this giant. Where were going, we don’t need terminals and jet ways!

Though it was calm and uneventful for the most part, this flight across France was quite a bit of fun in an airplane that I’ve wanted to check out for a while now. The thing that sticks in my head from when it was introduced was the news that Microsoft, Blue Mesh the developer of the Latécoère 631 for the sim, and the Pierre-Georges Latécoère Foundation, which is set up to celebrate the designer of the airplane, were able to come together to make this digital recreation come to our hard disks.

Personal notes and effects were leveraged in the creation of the airplane creating a digital model of an aircraft that no longer exists anywhere else. So we have something here that only really exists because Microsoft Flight Simulator is here as a sim. The sentimentalist in me plus the historian just loves that this happened at all. We’re lucky to experience it!