File Notes
Sorry, but the DHC-2 file is over 7 MB but it contains three aircraft (wheeled, skis & wheels, and floats), a Beaver sound package, and realistic panel. The aircraft was designed by Fred Banting and Yannick Lavigne and repainted by Willy Wilcox in Cardinal livery. The aircraft and livery are freeware and copyrighted. Heartfelt thanks to Fred and Yannick for permission to repaint the Beavers for our VA.
The Beaver is rarely equipped with autopilot so it will not be found in the panel's radio stack but it is available through the Aircraft menu and it can also be activated by the GPS. The small green LED on the right electrical panel will light when the autopilot is active and it also serves as a mouseable ON/OFF switch.
The GEAR control switch is present on the panels of all the aircraft in this series. On the float model it operates the water rudders, on the wheel-ski model it raises and lowers the skis, and on the wheel model the circuit breaker has been removed and it is not operational. The switch shows 4 flags. UP, DOWN, YELLOW (gear in transit), RED (no power present). Keyboard gear control is the "/" key.
More details and performance data may be found in the DHC-2F folder in the file named bvr7.txt.
Installation Notes
The three aircraft may be installed by unzipping the cadh2_2k.zip file into the MAIN FS2000 FOLDER. Ensure "use folder names" is checked. That's it! Call up FS2000 and your new aircraft should be listed. The panel includes the FS2000 GPS and is also set up for Alain Capt's ACS-GPS98 ( http://www.acsoft.ch ). If you do not have this GPS installed on your system there will be a non-functional GPS graphic on the panel. To substitute a different gauge edit the "gauge53=" line in the panel.cfg file as shown here and insert the name of your gauge.
gauge53=ACS.GPS98-KLN90B_CRT, 834,421,185
change to
gauge53=YOUR_GAUGE_NAME_HERE, 834,421,185
General Information
From Fred Banting's data: The de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver is one of the most successful and long-lived designs in aviation history. The first production Beaver (CF-OBS) was delivered to the Ontario Provincial Air Service on April 26, 1948 and is now in retirement at the Canadian Bushplane Heritage Centre in Sault Ste. Marie Ontario. When production ended in 1967, 1631 of these rugged STOL utility aircraft had been built. An all metal high wing monoplane, the Beaver was designed from the ground up to be the ultimate bush plane. Features like removable cargo doors on both sides large enough to admit a 45 gal. drum, doors for pilot and co-pilot, fuel tank fillers mounted low on the fuselage, engine oil filler inside the cockpit, engine oil dilution system for cold weather operation, simple rubber shock absorbers to withstand rough landings, and light counterbalanced controls for fatigue free operation. The fat high lift wing with it's slotted flap system and "drooped "ailerons provide outstanding STOL capabilities and low speed handling which enable it to carry more than half a ton of payload in and out of tight spots on land, water and snow where few other aircraft dare to venture. More than half of the Beavers produced were purchased by the US military because nothing else could match it's performance, the first foreign aircraft ever ordered by the US in peacetime. The DHC-2 has become an icon in the history of northern Canadian bush flying and has been named as one of the ten most outstanding Canadian engineering achievements of the past century. An aircraft which, in over 50 years of service, has yet to be replaced.