VFR Reviews
Aerosoft’s – DHC-6 Twin Otter X
By Ashton Lawson

Here’s another review brought to you by the VFR Reviews team with thanks to Aerosoft for providing the aircraft in which I now fly fairly often.

As with most addons the process begins with a download, and in this case the download comes in at around 125 megabytes and after installation, which is very simple as are most payware installations, the manual says that you would’ve lost a total of around 600MB of hard drive space.  I’m not completely sure about this, since it’s never occurred to me to actually monitor disk space to find out, but I suppose I better start doing that in the future.

The download itself comes down relatively quickly, and I’m in Thailand, so I imagine the majority of you who live in the more internet-friendly regions of our slowly toasting planet will have no trouble in acquiring this fine addon.

Now, it’s slowly become apparent to me that in reviewing items of the payware variety, it’s imperative that you read the manual.  I still, however, don’t do this much.  Instead I just jump right in, fool about, and once I’ve got first impressions done and over-with, I’ll then read the manual.

The first thing I noticed in this aircraft, and indeed the first thing I notice with most aircraft is the sound, typically because Flight Simulator, after having loaded to 100%, tends to play sounds, briefly pause, and then begin rendering the simulation.   So, I make this statement:  This aircraft is considerably loud.



It’s one of the greater things about this aircraft though, since the sound quality is very good, the way sounds blend in with each other is pretty awesome, and the overall feeling of the environment around the aircraft becomes quite immersive.  I suppose one can liken it to typical first-person shooters, in the sense that whilst the game can be very realistic, the sounds of the gunshots are actually quite quiet.  If you’ve heard a real gunshot, its intensity is quite remarkable, and thus most shooters don’t really capture that, and the same can be said for most of the default aircraft in Flight Simulator.

This is why I find the sound to be one of the finer points of this aircraft.  You can imagine the start up sounds of classic aircraft like spitfires or mustangs as those sounds have as much to do with what the aircraft is and what it represents as its airframe or paint scheme.  A quick search on YouTube for the ‘Twotter’, as it’s affectionately known, and you’ll see that the sounds are indeed quite accurate, and I don’t really find much fault in that area.

Moving on though, the things that most people want to read about are visuals.  So, how does it look?

It looks spectacular, from the outside.  Inside isn’t as impressive, but we’ll get to that later.  Outside the aircraft is of seriously good quality, and has all of the features that Flight Simulator’s graphics engine allows for, including self-shadowing, bump-mapping,  light-bloom, everything. Even the texture detail is very nice, but we do have a few issues with those, since there are a few noticeable areas where the textures don’t appear to line up correctly.  They’re not blatantly obvious, and most people wouldn’t notice them, but if you do look closely they’re there.  Another thing which I found quite funny is the fact that the tyres reflect the world like the rest of the aircraft.  Perhaps that’s to simulate very shiny tyres which are very polished, I don’t know, but these are just silly things I’m picking on now.  Finally, the textures, in certain areas can get a little blurry, but overall still good quality for payware.



Moving on, we also have five variants of the aircraft including a wheeled version, the same wheeled version only with more modern equipment like GPS, a wheeled version with retractable skids, a skidded version, and finally one with floats.  Not only that, but we have a total of fifteen paint jobs, one scheme for the skid version, one scheme for the wheel and skid version, two for the floats version, seven for the regular, and a final four for the ones with more modern-day systems.



What kinds of details do we expect from this aircraft though?  Most of you probably wouldn’t be into examining every single detail, but I am, and I’m quite pleased with the results.  In fact, there’s something I’d like to point out.

In the manual, the front page shows the title of the aircraft obviously, and then shows a picture, a picture of the DHC-6-100 Kenn Borek Air Ltd. version.  The notable thing about this is the fact that it has landing skids, not gear, nor skids with gear.  And the image itself is of the leading skid.  Nothing else.  A rather odd choice, but it becomes apparent that they want to let people know how detailed the thing is, because looking at it we see each individual metal strip that make up the suspension’s construction.



The thought that comes to mind when seeing this (for me anyway) is ‘pre-rendered’.   So, I started up FS for the twenty-eighth time for this review, loaded a flight with the subject of the screenie, and examined all three legs.

Sure enough, there they are, the metal suspension strips, each one modelled quite nicely, very visible, and of course, very impressive.



One has to ask though, if they’ve put this kind of detail into the thing, surely the frame hit must be considerable.  Well nope, it isn’t.  When compared to similar aircraft in size or function, such as the Grand Caravan or Maule, the Twotter gets roughly the same frame rate, so we’re getting great quality, plenty of detail, and at little cost, performance-wise.



We’ve addressed the basic things that most people look for in an addon, but now we enter the realism stage, where we forget about the actress’s looks, and start getting concerned about her abilities.

A handy thing about this day and age is that the internet provides us with many resources, and I can safely say that taking off is quite realistic, or so a video would have me believe.  Can’t say much about anything else, because YouTube videos and performance data will only get you so far, and I’d honestly have to track down a real Twin Otter pilot to get his certified opinion of the plane, but since I don’t really have the time, nor the resources, I will describe for you the experience instead.

Overall, flying the aircraft is a pleasant experience, with movements being nice and smooth, and that’s one of the funny things, actually.  The ailerons appear to be quite large in surface area, and not subtle in range of motion, so I find it a bit strange that rolling the aircraft is as slow as it is.  The same can’t be said for pitch and yaw control, since their actions appear to be quite realistic, but really, rolling seems quite sluggish.



Moving the flaps up and down doesn’t produce abnormal results.  I notice with the default Beaver or Goose, the flaps tend to levitate the aircraft upwards fairly rapidly, and a bit unnaturally, yet don’t appear to slow down the aircraft as much as one might suppose considering their affect on altitude.

If I only had the money...