MS Flight Sim 2004 Add-On: Mid-Atlantic Air Museum's B-25J Mitchell "Briefing Time"

Introduction:

Front view of MAAM's B-25J "Briefing Time" in FS 2004

On March 11, 1939, the U.S. Army Air Corps issued a request for a twin engine bomber capable of carrying a 3000 pound payload and a top speed in excess of 300 MPH. North American Aviation answered the call with their design, the B-25. The USAAC found the Mitchell acceptable to their requirements and 25 were built. These were tested and modified to iron out flaws in the design. The B-25 would go through more factory and field modifications than any other U.S. bomber, but it would also be built in greater numbers and used for more purposes than any other U.S. bomber. Even the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps found the B-25 (PBJ-1 in USN/USMC designations) could fill some of their needs in the Pacific theater of operations. The B-25 proved itself to be highly versatile, reliable, and durable in combat. So much has been written about the B-25 that I feel it is unnecessary for me to repeat the entire history of the Mitchell, just perform a web search and you will find enough information to keep you busy for months.

Mid-Atlantic Air Museum (MAAM), located near Reading, Pennsylvania, owns and operates one of the finest restored B-25J's in the world. Their Mitchell does have some modern avionics and their associated antennas as this Mitchell was restored with air show flying in mind, but it is unique in that the exhaust system is the original design that was introduced on the B-25C and D models and continued through to the end of production of the B-25J. This system gave each cylinder its own, very short, exhaust stack, making these Mitchells incredibly loud, both on the inside and on the outside. Most Mitchells today use a system that was developed after World War II, where the cylinders along the top of the engine are exhausted through a collector ring with the exit being on the outboard side of the engine cowling. This modification made the Mitchell a little less noisy and also prevented rain water from entering the upper cylinders.

You will need a computer with MicroSoft Flight Sim 2002 or 2004 installed and operating. To get the most out of Briefing Time, you will need a powerful computer. My experience lies in FS 2004 and I have found it to be a resource hog. My system sports an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor, 2GB of PC-3200 RAM, a Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS sound card and an eVGA NV6800 Ultra PCI Express video card, rather state of the art by 2005 standards. Even with this system FS2004 will slow down in areas of heavy AI traffic or big cities. I don't even have all the graphics features on, I would say I run the graphics suite at 85 to 90% of the maximum settings. The users guide that comes with the Briefing Time CD gives excellent suggestions on tuning FS2002 and 2004 for best performance.

On the Briefing Time disc you get the B-25J Mitchell, "Briefing Time" in two paint schemes. The first one is the green and gray camouflage scheme she wears today. This is also the scheme that was applied to the WW II Mitchell, "Briefing Time" during her combat operations. The other scheme is a natural metal finish that the real Briefing Time wore when she first entered the combat theater. You also get a solid nosed B-25J (factory twelve machine gun solid nose) painted in the markings of a B-25 that served in the 498th Bomb Squadron (the Falcons), 345th Bomb Group, 5th Air Force, Southwest Pacific theater. If you are not satisfied with these skins, you can go to MAAM's website and download a number of different skins, including a PBJ-1J skin.

You also get the user's guide, a scanned copy of the April, 1945 version of the B-25 pilot's training manual, several videos of the restored Briefing Time, and a 21 minute WW II training film . All in all, this is an excellent package.

Flight at dusk in FS 2004

The MAAM team has done an excellent job of creating a great FS version of their B-25. By using digital photographs, they created an outstanding model of the real aircraft. The exterior appears to be of proper dimensions and overall correctness. The control surfaces, flaps, bomb bay doors, front entry hatch, cowl flaps, and landing gear are animated. The interior model is also well done, with photo real 2-D and nicely rendered 3-D virtual views. The 2-D panels are fully clickable, but you can click only a few things in the 3-D virtual cockpit. This is not a tremendous problem, but a fully clickable virtual cockpit would have been nice. Cockpit animations include the pilot's window, engine controls, landing gear and flap levers, and control columns.

The B-25J "Panchito" at Chesterfield in 2005. Note the post-WW II exhaust system and carburetor air intake. (Michael A. Stansfield collection)

Briefing Time in FS 2004 at Chesterfield.

Briefing Time allows you to select three complexity models, regular, which has all of the available graphical features; medium, which limits the virtual view to the cockpit; and light, which features no 3-D virtual views. The regular version will require the most of your computer, while the light version requires the least resources. You also get tips and suggestions that will allow you to adjust the settings in FS so that you can enjoy the highest frames per second, the best graphics or find a compromise point somewhere in between the two extremes.

If you, like me, have Track IR and fly using the virtual cockpit, you'll quickly learn how to pull up the 2-D pop-up controls for things such as the radio stack, electrical panel, throttle quadrant and GPS (yes, Briefing Time has GPS courtesy of the portable units that a great number of civilian pilots now own) as the virtual cockpit does not have a fully clickable cockpit. The 2-D panels are clickable and the pilot's 2-D panel also has the icons for communication, flight plan, and check lists that are absent on the 3-D model. Track IR 3 or 4 with the Vector Expansion works really well in FS as it allows you to lean around to see all aspects of your virtual world. You can even lean out of a window, but when you do, don't be surprised when you don't see your landing gear. Yeah, that's one big graphical flaw I've found. From the cockpit, you cannot see your main landing gear, but you can in the real Mitchell. Oops!

Another graphical annoyance is the plexiglass roof in the nose. Evidently the MAAM team modeled the nose section with a sunscreen over the inside of the roof of the nose. I don't spend much time there, as the duties of plane commander keep me firmly planted in the pilot's seat, so it's not that big of a deal. Oh, I almost forgot, you can take a virtual tour of "Briefing Time", meaning you can crawl through the tunnel under the pilot to enter the nose or you can crawl up into the upper turret. Virtual touring will require something like Active Camera, although using Track IR and F1 View worked pretty well for me. The rear section of the plane just doesn't seem to have received as much attention from the model builders as the front section. Again, not a big problem for me since I bought this to fly and flying generally takes place from the pilot's seat.

Briefing Time's avionics are pretty good, radios are there for air traffic control communication, weather, ADF, ILS and OMI systems, but they have a WW II era look, no modern radio stacks here. And there is no weather or ground mapping radar, so foul weather flying is not exactly pleasant. Night flying is fine as Briefing Time does have a radar altimeter and as long as visibility is excellent, night flights are fairly easy and can be visually enjoyable. I have not delved into the world of IFR (instrument flying rules), so I won't be the judge of Briefing Time's IFR fidelity, but the instruments are present.

Pilot's 2-D panel

Co-Pilot's 2-D panel

The 3-D virtual cockpit

Also included are some pre-programmed flights, including one off of a modern aircraft carrier to commemorate the Doolittle raid on Japan. For this mission, you will need to download Javier Fernandez's U.S.S. John C. Stennis (cvz74jf.zip). I have not tried the pre-packaged flights as I prefer to fly out of my home airport.

Smoke during engine start up.

Real B-25's smoke too. (Michael A. Stansfield collection)

It's kind of hard for me to comment on the accuracy of the flight model since I have never piloted a real B-25 and not likely to ever have such an honor, but this is supposed to be as accurate as possible given the limitations of FS 2002 and 2004. I can say that I have seen several B-25's perform and I have flown in one and MAAM's B-25 flight model feels and looks like what I have seen of the real B-25s. Ground handling is not as good as the real B-25, but that is a flaw of the FS series. The start up sequence, taking off, flying and landing is fairly easy as long as you go by the pilot's training manual. The start up procedures as performed in the videos of the restored Briefing Time are different from that of the training manual and are also more difficult than the technique in the training manual. I recommend following the procedure in the manual. Oh, and don't take too much time trying to get the engines fired up or you may just drain the batteries.

Take off is exhilarating. Put the flaps down one-quarter or one-half, hold the toe brakes, rev up the engines to full power, release the brakes, apply a little back pressure on the control column and at around 90 to 100 mph indicated, and that comes pretty quickly, you lift off. Climb out, retract the landing gear, slowly raise the flaps and close the cowl flaps (but watch the cylinder head temperatures, you don't want to cook those engines, they cost a lot of money to repair or replace). Level flight is easily maintained and the B-25 is a very docile aircraft. Landing is about as simple as any aircraft around. Make sure you are below 180 mph indicated before extending the landing gear and deploying the flaps. The view over the nose is good, so a long and gentle approach is possible. Be sure you flare just before touch down as the nose gear is not designed to bear landing forces and may collapse should it be the first wheel to make contact with the runway.

The B-25 is not exactly light on the controls, but it is a fairly heavy and large aircraft and there is no computer that translates control input into rudder, aileron and elevator movement. The B-25 used pulleys and cables and MAAM's Flight Sim version does feel right. The controls are responsive, but slow, as they should be. This is not the aircraft for performing any sort of aerobatics, although other sims would lead one to believe that the twin engine medium bombers are just oversized twin engine fighters. Roll this B-25 or try to perform a loop and you may quickly become intimately acquainted with terra firma! And yes, I tried. I did manage a roll, but lost a whole lot of altitude and almost crashed. My attempt at a loop resulted in my first crash of this plane.

Ready for takeoff in FS2004.

Huh? What? Speak up. Yeah, I did lose a little more of my hearing last year when I flew in a real B-25J (Panchito). I'm pretty sure I've lost a tiny bit more due to wearing my headset, cranking up the volume, and flying the MAAM B-25 sim. The B-25 is one of the noisiest aircraft to ever fly. Flying in a B-25 was likened to being inside a 55 gallon steel drum and having 28 men beat on the drum with sledge hammers. Yeah, I guess it does sound kind of like that. The sound suite is excellent and the sim designers also make suggestions on the sound sliders in FS for getting the most out of the sound package. So if you want to get a feel for what it sounds like inside the B-25, put on those headphones, crank up the volume, then fire up the engines. If your ears are not ringing after 20 minutes of that racket, then you either did not have the volume up high enough or you are already deaf.

What's all that racket? The engine just outside the cockpit.

Ok, so you're almost sold on this add-on, but what about all those machine guns and the bomb bay? Well, if you open the bomb bay doors you will see some bombs, but they are inert and you can't drop them. Nor can you fire the machine guns. The FS series is not a combat flight sim and there is no provision for firing these guns or dropping the bombs. If you want to fire guns and drop bombs, you will have to use a combat flight sim and unfortunately, the MAAM B-25 add-on is not compatible with the MS Combat Flight Sim series. But this plane is still a blast to fly and make low level passes over an airport and wow the crowds.

Just in case you don't think you have enough information about the B-25, you can also purchase the multi-media CD and if you are as big of a fan of the B-25 as I am, I suggest you pay the extra money and order this CD with the Briefing Time CD, you'll save yourself some postage. This CD contains a scanned copy of the B-25J flight manual (256 pages), B-25J flight handbook (128 pages), a flight instructor's manual for the B-25 and B-26, the 489th Bombardment Squadron yearbook, more videos of the restored Briefing Time, a great article titled A Brief History of the B-25 "Mitchell" Medium Bomber, written by Howard Sodja, and 500 digital photos of the restored Briefing Time. It also contains the pilot's training manual that is also found on the Briefing Time CD. For $10 I think it's a steal!

So there you have it, it's a wonderful add-on, full of features, it looks, sounds and acts like a real B-25 and it is a lot of fun to fly. Is it perfect? No, but it's the best B-25 simulator I have found and a handsome addition to my growing stable of FS add-on aircraft. I do wish that I had the CH Products Throttle Quadrant and not just the Fighterstick (technically, I also need the CH Products Flight Yoke for aircraft that do not use a stick). The ability to use a dedicated throttle quadrant to control throttles, mixture and propellers would be a huge benefit in this add-on. Ground handling can be improved by using the throttles to power up one engine to assist in making turns. All in all this is a great add-on and my only regret about purchasing this add-on is that I did not buy it sooner!

For superb graphics, sound, and attention to detail, MAAM's B-25J Mitchell add-on for FS 2002 and FS 2004 receives a COMBATSIM.COM Top Pick Award:

Pricing:

• Briefing Time Add-on for FS 2002 or FS 2004: $25
• Briefing Time + Multimedia CD: $34.95

Useful Links:

• Michael "Stans" Stansfield's in-cockpit movie showing "Briefing Time" startup, take-off, and landing.
• Briefing Time Order Page
• Mid-Atlantic Air Museum Simulations Homepage
• F1 view utility for FS 2004.