This Flight Sim Goes WAY Deeper Than I Expected

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]So, this game has been in development forever. I've been super super excited about this one, ever since it was announced. I have played it before at uh a Flight Sim Expo. But here we are in the play test, meaning that we're so close to demo. And then what comes after demo? The full game. And I'm very excited for that. And welcome to Dead Stick Bush Pilot Simulator. New message received. Fantastic. We have to open our phone. Okay, we'll use the wheel here.

[00:00:29]Open our phone. There's our phone book.

[00:00:30]There we have a message down here. Looks like what do we got? Uh, welcome to the family, I guess. Okay. I'm Clint. I'll be handling your onboarding. Let's make this quick. I've got things to do.

[00:00:43]First things first, go ahead and grab your insurance paperwork. I'm faxing it over now. Ooh, a fax. You're covered for all the basics. Just don't push your luck. We're a business, not a charity.

[00:00:54]All right, let's read the facts here.

[00:00:56]Let's collect our insurance papers.

[00:00:58]Whilst employed by WWLF, you will have to fully cover for any damages or contents to the airplane. Great. All right, let's go. Obtain a weather report from the PC. Our PC's over here in the corner. Check this thing out. My god, is this a like pennium 2 in this thing? Um, obtain a weather report from the PC.

[00:01:17]Sweet.

[00:01:21]We're getting weather, getting notems.

[00:01:22]Notice the airmen. Uh, your location is shown only when on the ground. Okay, gotcha. This is the map. Look at this.

[00:01:30]When airborne, you'll rely on analog navigation. Sweet. Jones. Opened in 1933, making it the island's oldest airirstrip. You see, long since out competed by Morton to the north. It's still a favorite. Rest up among local pilots. All right, that's our local uh our current location. Yeah, we're there.

[00:01:47]Obtaining a weather briefing will give you the meter uh and TAFF data at all known airports. Yes, I said meter. I didn't say metar. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

[00:01:55]Let's look at the mear here. We got uh 0717 Zulu 180 variable at one knot. So out of the south there uh clear skies.

[00:02:03]Awesome. They're giving us a Q&H of 0947, but I do have it set to inches. So I don't know why it's doing that. All right, our TAF right here. This is the area forecast. We're looking at uh 180 variable at one knot as well. So the Taff is calling for looks like uh same thing, 180 variable at one, but we have some light drizzle. All right. Well, that was fun. Now, we need to exit the briefing hut itself. Well, let's do that. Let's go see what the world of Dead Stick is all about. We weren't born in a barn. We need to close that door.

[00:02:37]There we go. We need to open our phone up is what we actually need to do. All right. Go look for the WWLF hanger.

[00:02:43]There's a plane waiting for you. Oh, thank you, Clint. We never would have ever found that out ourselves. Here's our little cub. Check it out. I do like the livery on this. The green and the white. That looks really good. Oh, we can open the cowling, baby. You have to click and hold to remove that. Okay, we did that. We have to tow the airplane to the white box.

[00:03:03]Okay, let's do that. All right, let's tow the airplane. Got to come back here and tow the aircraft. Nice. Oh, check it out. We actually have a little bar here we have to use to pull it. Don't run it into anything. Okay, nice.

[00:03:18]Turn direction left and right. Gotcha.

[00:03:21]That's actually really nice. Where are we actually going here? That's the question. That's the white box over there. Okay, I see it now. Now it all makes sense. I don't need to check the rudder. I need to tow the airplane. Tow the airplane. All right, let's pull it over this way so we can get it into the white box and make sure we're good to go here.

[00:03:40]It's over that way. Okay. Yep. Over this way more. Here is the white box.

[00:03:44]Wonderful. It's a little further. Little further. It doesn't have to be perfect, right?

[00:03:51]Yeah, that's good. right there.

[00:03:54]Complete the safety inspection. It is optional, but of course we're going to do that because this is what it's all about, man. All right. Can we close these doors, please? And thank you.

[00:04:03]There we go. We don't want those things open right now. Um, so here's the deal.

[00:04:08]Your pre-flight begins when you first look at the airplane when you're coming out here. So, let's check out everything. We got the wing over here.

[00:04:15]100%. Very nice. Let's look at the aileron. Oh, you can move it around. Ah, it's so cool. Check the flaps are 100%.

[00:04:24]Let's check the empanage.

[00:04:26]The fuselage. Um, port stabilizer 100%.

[00:04:31]Elevator. I remember in flight school they're like, you can impress your friends by saying emponage instead of fuselage. Well, nobody nobody does that.

[00:04:40]Okay, there we go. That's good. All right, flaps are good. Ailerons are good.

[00:04:47]Oh man, this is really well detailed.

[00:04:50]Look at that.

[00:04:51]Okay.

[00:04:53]Tires are good. Starboard uh underc carriage. Oh, they're calling it starboard import and port. Interesting.

[00:04:58]Uh we have the drive belt. Oh, yeah. I see that. You can move the uh prop around. We can open the cowling up and check everything. Battery 100%.

[00:05:05]Cylinders. We can check those. The prop, of course. Spark plugs are a thing as well that are modeled. Magneto there that we can see in the spark plug there.

[00:05:14]This is super super cool stuff, man.

[00:05:18]Like this is what I've always wanted to have in a flight sim is that you you love and care for your airplanes. Okay, all that is looking great.

[00:05:27]Nice. And that one's fine, too. This is the port side. Check out that pedo. It's clear 100%. Beautiful. We can see our uh fuel amount right there. It looks like what are we at? About a half tank is what it looks like on that side.

[00:05:41]Probably on both wings. Let's see. Well, I could get into the airplane. Duh. We could actually see it. have to get in on this side. So, we'll open the door there. And this is where you can open and close the door. Nice. Or you can just enter the airplane. Look at this.

[00:05:54]All right. I did set up my uh hotel. So, I should have this all working. Left, forward. Okay, that is not right. I need to invert that. All right, I got that figured out now. So, we need to close the aircraft's door. Okay, let's do that. Nicely done. Yeah, I mean the modeling on the interior is very nice.

[00:06:13]Look at that. You can see our sectional chart back there, but fuel. We got uh 3/4. I was wrong. It's not half on both sides. Okay, wonderful. Uh turn on the master switch. Oh, you can zoom in, by the way. That's really cool. Okay. Yep.

[00:06:27]There we go. Anti-al light. Uh we can't touch those yet. Okay, cool. Pump the primer three times. Okay. Oh, nice. We have to do that. One, two, and three.

[00:06:38]There we go. Turn the key to start the engine. Okay, let's hold the brakes down when we do this. I don't know if the parking brake is set. Uh, we're going to find out, aren't we? Let's do it. Clear prop.

[00:06:51]Oh, she came to life. Okay, at least the brakes. We're good. By the way, I'm going to remap controls and then I'm just going over here to in aircraft. I'm selecting my T flight hotass one and then going to axis calibration. Axis 2 invert. Apply. Now we have a working throttle. Sweet. Safely taxi to the runway. All right, let's do it. Thought you'd never ask. Throttle limitation in place for first taxi. Okay, thank you very much. Look at the movement there.

[00:07:20]That is so cool, man. All right, that is very nice. Landing lights, nav lights.

[00:07:26]Can't touch any of the lights yet. Okay, just kidding. I wonder if I can change the FOV, though. It taxi is really nice.

[00:07:35]I will say that. Oh, we could simply go into control options and you can use invert pitch, y'all. Right here. A lot faster. Okay, I looked to see if I could change the FOV in any way, but I could not successfully find that. So, that's okay. Throttle limitation in place for first taxi. We know that. All right. So, I do have it to where if we can change between camera views with the button here. Check that out. Nicely done.

[00:08:05]Looks like a Buffalo Airways DC3 back there. Very nice. We're going to taxi out to the runway. Have a look at that wind sock. Looks like winds are variable, but remember they are out of the south technically.

[00:08:19]So, that's what we're going to end up going with here. But, yeah, you can change between three different views.

[00:08:24]That's interesting.

[00:08:26]That's as zoomed out as I can get. Uh, I'm going to go ahead and put our Nacha flaps in. There we go.

[00:08:33]Yeah, I'm going to continue going out here to the runway because I assume that's what we're supposed to be doing here. Although the winds are coming out from that direction, so we're going to go down here and back taxi. That's what we're going to do. Oh, there we go.

[00:08:46]Okay. Yep. So, now we can do whatever we want, but we're going to back taxi and turn around and take off. That's what we're going to do. I know it says unbound on everything there on the right, but uh it's a demo play test, so it's probably just because I'm using a custom controller and not the default stuff. You might be wondering why we're taxiing all the way down to the end of the runway and turning around to take off into the wind. Well, that is because as a pilot, if you have the runway, use it. You never know, you know, if you're going to have an engine out procedure or anything like that. So, more runway the better to stop, too. So, we don't need to chance it. No need to be a hero today. I love how fluid this all looks. This looks really good. The game looks really nice. All right, let's go ahead and take off. Let's do it. Use a rudder to stay on the runway. You got it. Let's see how sim it is. I can dance on the rudder. Oh, yeah. You need rudder to take off. Okay. Little more rudder to the right. Little more rudder to the right. Okay. Yep. She is kind of crazy, but we're in the air.

[00:09:58]All right.

[00:10:02]Yeah, that was wild. Bring our flaps up.

[00:10:05]Increase our air speed here.

[00:10:09]And we have to practice trimming the aircraft and observe. Oh, okay. Well, we need to go north.

[00:10:17]But we're going to turn out here to the right. I think that's going to be for the best. But I need to set up trim. Oh, I did set up trim controls. I'm an idiot. I remember now.

[00:10:28]All right, we're going to go over this way. Let's pull our power back a little bit.

[00:10:33]see how sensitive it is. Okay, I see.

[00:10:36]Yeah, 2200 RPM's fine here. Now we're to the west. Just getting a feel for the airplane. You know, I'm very impressed with the uh controls. Like that is actually really nice.

[00:10:50]This is day and night compared, you know, whenever I played the the original like pre-alpha back in the day at Expo.

[00:11:02]All right, let's trim the airplane. So, this is nose up. We got that. This is nose down. We got that. Beautiful.

[00:11:11]Complete a successful landing at Morton.

[00:11:13]You got it.

[00:11:16]That's Morton right off our nose out there, isn't it? So, we know the wind's out of the south, so we should probably uh we'll shoot a left downwind for the runway. We're pretty high up right now. Just getting used to it, you know. See the different views here.

[00:11:35]Let's go ahead and do a uh before we do that, let's let's do a power on and power off stall to see what those are like in the airplane. Yeah, look at how nice this is. This is beautiful. I'm really impressed.

[00:11:48]Quite impressed, honestly. All right, back inside. Let's do a uh power off first. We're in the white arc. We can put in a little bit of flap here.

[00:11:59]We're going to do full flaps. So, this is simulating a landing, a stall during a landing. So, right there's good. Let's go ahead and just pull our power all the way back. Let's let the airplane stall.

[00:12:15]There we go.

[00:12:19]There it is. I mean, we were losing altitude there for a while, but uh I wanted to see how that that behaved. All right, bring our flaps back up.

[00:12:30]A little bit of air speed here. Not too much. Bring them all the way out. Now, we're going to do a power on. So, let's go ahead and go power.

[00:12:40]And up we go.

[00:12:43]Should probably do it in this view here so we can actually see what we're doing.

[00:12:46]There's the stall. This is based on angle of attack.

[00:12:51]Oh, nice.

[00:12:54]That was a good stall. Okay. Very cool.

[00:12:59]Very impressive.

[00:13:01]We got ourselves a little simulator here now, don't we? Yes, we do. All right.

[00:13:06]Let's enter a left downwind for the runway.

[00:13:10]We need a lot of altitude to lose. And to lose altitude while not gaining a lot of air speed, you do a ford slip. So, we're going to do exactly that. So, let's go right rudder.

[00:13:23]and use our left aileron as needed.

[00:13:27]Look at that board slips. Slips are your best friend in a tail dragger airplane.

[00:13:36]I got my tail wheel endorsement in a Ia Champ back in the day.

[00:13:44]That was a lot of fun.

[00:13:49]Slow down here.

[00:13:52]We're looking pretty good. And so since we're VFR flying, we're going to basically figure out how we want to shoot this approach just off of the visuals here. So I can see that mountain. Clearly, we don't want to fly into the mountain, right? No, we don't.

[00:14:06]All right.

[00:14:08]Getting low on fuel, it looks like.

[00:14:11]Or it's just saying that there is fuel located there. I'm not sure. Um but yeah, so you can see we're on our left downwind now. So we see that line of trees out there. That's going to be our base and then our final will be um pretty much where the pointy end of that is. Okay, I'm liking this. This is so cool, man.

[00:14:34]All right, let's get our view all set up here for the landing.

[00:14:38]We want to be at about uh cuz this is more like sea level over here. So, more like 1,000 ft or so. Let's get in the white arc here. Got one notch of flaps.

[00:14:51]That's going to help us out.

[00:14:56]And now we can trim the airplane back just a little bit. Next notch of flaps.

[00:15:03]There we go. Just feeling it out.

[00:15:07]All right.

[00:15:10]And we'll go ahead and dump the rest of the flaps in here as we roll off on our base leg. And now we're going to turn to final.

[00:15:20]A lot of the reason why you saw me do the uh power off stall was because I was getting used to what this airplane feels like. Um so I can, you know, won't stall it.

[00:15:36]We're shooting a short approach rowing 18.

[00:15:41]When you're an old tail dragger like this, you can you can do short approaches no problem. Look at that. Oh, we even have papy lights. Working papy lights at that. All right, we're right on it. Right on the money. Now we're going to do a threepoint landing here.

[00:15:56]We want to land it on all three at the same time. Try to at least. Right rudder. A lot more right rudder. And we're down. And dance on that rudder.

[00:16:05]Left and right.

[00:16:08]Very nice.

[00:16:10]Actually to Morton's briefing hut. Yeah, we'll we'll go to the briefing hut. I just want to fly more, man. This has been fun. The uh flight dynamics are fantastic, by the way. Fantastic.

[00:16:23]I don't know what I expected, but I did not expect it to be this good.

[00:16:30]Okay, we made it here to the briefing hut, which is off our nose. Oh, I see it now. It's that little gray building there.

[00:16:38]We got a fuel truck over here.

[00:16:41]I love the attention to detail, but imagine, you know, we have a big map.

[00:16:48]We're flying cargo and stuff, different, you know, different flight conditions.

[00:16:56]Imagine flying on this map, you know, and you've got all the weather conditions that change on you. You have to fly cargo and all that, but you have to take care of the airplane as well. I think that is incredibly exciting. All right. You see those little T's here? We want our wings level with the uh the long white horizontal one here. That's what we want. Those are the tie down spots.

[00:17:27]There we go. That's pretty good right there. We don't have a uh parking brake.

[00:17:31]Doesn't seem like There's our trim wheel. Uh fuel tanks. We're set to both.

[00:17:36]Uh but you can go left or right if you wanted to. Let's just kill the mixture here.

[00:17:42]There we go. She's shut down. And we don't have We didn't turn on any avionics at all. So, I don't know if avionics are working in this or not, but you would want to turn those off before we touch those mags. But, we're good.

[00:17:55]Open the door. Oh, that's the uh the kneeboard.

[00:18:00]Look at this. You got a timer there, a pilot log. Okay, that is cool stuff, dude. Cool. Cool. Cool stuff. All right, we're going to get out of the airplane.

[00:18:10]Ramp check. Infractions. Flew IFR without rating. Flew at night without rating.

[00:18:16]Um, we're getting a ramp check right now. No notable issues found. Okay, we got we just got ramp checked.

[00:18:24]That means the feds were here. Uh, and they just uh checked to see if we had our airworthy certificate and everything else uh on board the airplane. So, let's go ahead and head into the briefing hut.

[00:18:35]All right, so that's our first look at the game and uh to actually fly around uh and do the intro mission. I really really enjoyed what I saw here. This is pretty solid and uh it's got a lot of promise. So, let me know what you think of it in the comments below. We'll check out the flight school next time.