This next journal was driven by a couple of different ideas that came together. First, I wanted to do some more content with Emerald Scenery’s excellent Myakka Head Bald Eagle airport located in Florida. It’s a fun grass strip with a ton of potential and one of them is flying warbirds into the site as the lengthy grass runway is reasonably ideal for one of these aircraft to tackle. That dovetailed nicely with a freeware scenery, also from Emerald Scenery, that brings the Fantasy of Flight museum (better known by some for its founder, Kermit Weeks) to Microsoft Flight Simulator. Bring those two scenery packages, located not that far from each other, plus Flying Iron Simulations Fw190A-8 and you have yourself a meal. Or a flight anyways! Lets fly!

Power up and head out from the Fantasy of Flight

Located in Polk City, Florida, the Fantasy of Flight museum has a seriously impressive collection of warbirds from an Airco DH.4, Boeing PT-17 Stearman and Bell 47G to a Boeing P2B-1S Superfortress (a B-29 variant), PBY Catalina, and Lockheed Vega. Emerald Scenery Design’s offers the scenery as a freeware package.

The package itself is originally an FSX scenery setup by Vassilis “Dimus” Dimoulas. However, despite originating in the older sim, the assets are of a reasonably high quality and the vegetation work is very typically Emerald Scenery Designs. In other words, it looks really good!

Starting out cold and dark on the apron, it takes a couple of minutes but its not that difficult to get the Fw190A-8 ready for flight. I do like the inertial starter button control which has a tooltip that shows you what the RPM is at and indicates when ready. Once you’re ready, the control goes from push to pull and you hold it until the engine roars to life. And roar it does!

After that, I used the GPS (a modern concession) to plug in a route to fly that would take us directly to our destination at 67FL.

I taxied the Fw190 out, this one painted in US markings with a red overall high visibility scheme, and backtracked down the longer grass runway. Lined up at the end, held the stick back (to engage the tailwheel lock) and powered up. At 100km/h I released the stick and let the nose start to fall before pulling back again as the aircraft rotated up and off the ground. Flying Iron Simulation’s tailwheel modeling is a cut above the standard MSFS aircraft and pretty enjoyable to work with.

Climbing out into some heavy clouds, I cut my way through the breaks in the clouds up to 8,000 feet. Here I engaged the tablet based autopilot to test out the system. Flying Iron Simulations know that some warbird flyers in MSFS like to do long cross country flights and this system ensures that they can leave the aircraft straight and level, do something else in the house, and then come back and resume flying without hitting pause. The AP system works generally flawlessly in operation though it does seem to protest if you use a hotkey for AP disconnect.

After cutting through the clouds, the skies parted and just in time because I was about to arrive at Myakka Head Bald Eagle airport! Some of you may remember this from a past flight journal but this time I was keen to try landing a warbird at it. It’s a lengthy runway and in a YouTube video made by the airfields new YouTube star owner, they convinced a local P-51 pilot to land there with quite a lot of success. I was intending to do the same.

Bringing the aircraft into the pattern and then landing on the grass went well. Mostly. I got myself stabilized on the approach, landed in a nearly perfect three point landing, and rolled out to the end of the field. I must have reduced the throttle too much because the BMW radial engine started to sputter and then died… woops. A couple of minutes later I was powered back up and taxied over to the hangars.

Return flight

After a little delay, it was time to return course and head back to Fantasy of Flight. Powered up the Fw190A-8 again and taxied out. This aircraft can really get going if you let it get ahead of you and while this version is easier than the DCS and IL-2 versions to taxi, it still requires some dancing on the pedals to get it right.

Powered up, throttled up, away we went back into the skies!

I did the return leg at lower altitudes getting in under the cloud deck. There’s a rather large building near the Fantasy of Flight museum that makes for a great visual landmark and once that was located, conventionally in the sun with dark clouds all around, I headed in and landed the Focke Wulf.

Another careful taxi and power down. A great little adventure that took maybe 30-40 minutes to accomplish and a great way to showcase a warbird.

I’ve been asked a few times what you can do with a warbird in a non-combat flight sim and the answer I think is that you’ve got several kinds of missions you can do. Visiting a local airfield and flying back home is something you can do in any kind of aircraft but when you do it with one of these you up the challenge and the performance. Here you’ve got an aircraft that’s got more temperamental handling qualities landing at some interesting locations and being able to do 270 knots at low altitude without too much of a struggle. It’s fun, its interesting, and you don’t even need to pull the trigger.

Of course, I’ve flown the Fw190A-8 in tons of flight sim combat situations across multiple sims so doing something different with it is just as interesting.

Emerald Scenery Design’s Fantasy of Flight is a freeware offering while Bald Eagle Airfield / Myakka Head is available for just $6.99 USD. FlyingIron Simulation’s Fw190A-8 is a newly released warbird for MSFS 2020 and is available for $45.00 AUD on their store.