by Jean Sabatier, Laurent Claudet and TJ

for Fly! II

After the great success of the TBM 700, Jean suggested that we should produce one of the most celebrated aircraft of the second world war, the MUSTANG !
This was immediately accepted. This type of aircraft, as long as we want to produce a rigorous realisation of its flight characteristic and not to play war game, would be totally different of what our group did produce until now.

As with our previous aircraft the TBM 700, the P51 design required a very great amount of preliminary research and the contribution of a number of person beside the ones already mentioned above such as:
- Jean Baruch who provided all the documentation required
- Christian Mafré, President of the "Aeroretro" and a former pilot of the Mustang association located at St. Rambert d'Albon
- Jean-Pierre Bourgeois, from "Rhone Alpes Simulation" and a former pilot of the Mustang based at Annemasse
- Laura J. Wetton in charge of operation at the Old Flying Machine Company Ltd
- a number of member from ROTW who did assist in all the virtual flight testing and to ascertain the performance of the new plane.
- and to conclude, Jean-Paul Mes and Rene Birot who did prepare, once again, the extensive documentation supplied with the aircraft.

Once again, the result was prodigious.
Not only the aircraft outside view in 3D is superb, but the instrument panel is of a quality that even surprised the 2 pilots who did help us.
All the period instruments were designed by TJ and were animated using DLL files produced by Laurent.
Nothing is missing, even a couple of additional instrument, such as the fuel gauges, the transponder and the 760 channels VHF, were included.

The inside views are very nice and are a true representation of the cockpit of this beautiful aircraft, don't you think !!

From inside you may scan, with no obstruction, all the view around you, except toward the back. Do not miss it. All the instruments are operating even when viewed 3/4 forward.

The fine tuning of this model was quite difficult as we had no reference with similar aircraft already designed for use in Fly! II. Initially we used the flight manual as reference. Later some pilots experienced with the Mustang did help us to refine the complex flight parameters of this exceptional aircraft. The Mustang is able to fly 3300 km from its 3 internal fuel tanks plus 2 additional tanks under the wings.
This presented some difficulties with the centre of gravity as filling the internal tanks shifted the centre of gravity very much toward the back. Also we had problem with the motor cooling.

We also found that this fighter plane was unable to fly inverted for more than 10 seconds as the motor would stop.

We do not intend to give you further information now as there is a flight manual available, both in French and English, included with the plane. Read it with attention, if not you could loose your engine and eventually your plane itself.

If you want to download the version of the plane with only an English manual, it is available from Avsim, or if you want only the English manual it is available for download from here (1.56 Mb).

For aircraft designers, ROTW provide the source code for the DLL (13.9 Kb) as long as they are not used in commercial products.

Also available for download, a check-list at P51-chklst.pdf (70.4 Kb).