It's Historical; But it doesn't Date!, 7 Oct 2001

However, there are some VERY interesting types here, and some not so attention grabbing planes too. Half of the selection are of course WW2 planes, others date back to the 1930's and the rest are post war jets and one helicopter. There are no WW1 types which is a surprise!

My favourites are the 2 Beaufighters and the Lysander included. The Beaufighters are wonderfully different, not just in their liveries (one is from Malta and the other a night fighter without the familiar Redial engines, but the less common RR Griffons), the guns are correct too. The other bombers also have guns that fire in roughly the right direction (i.e.the Halifax, Wellington and "Malta" Beaufighter's rear guns shoot behind - still nearly impossible to hit an enemy attacking from astern though!). The bomb doors open on SOME planes and the flaps all do their stuff, with a few cockpits having "pop-up" panels of Throttles and enlarged instruments so that you can actually read them. This because of the minute detail level that the cockpits have, soi that the 2 Spitfire panels look completely different to the CFS standard Spit panels (more realistic I guess?). The outside views are certainly excellent, the Spitfire's are both a massive improvement on the terrible CFS renderings! They are still the Mark 1 and 9 though.

That brings me to the other sub-types included. There are 2 Mosquito's, one as you would expect with cannons and bomb capacity, the other is a high altitude reconaissance version in blue, NOT what the people really want for the necessarily low level combats of CFS. The panels are sublty different as in reality they were. There are also 2 Tiger Moths, one being a trainer in bright yellow. This all gives the impression that this collection is a compromise between the CFS and FS 98/2000 users, as the VC10 is certainly unarmed, as are the Hawk trainer(with patriotic Union jack tail!), Nimrod (hardly like the mighty Biblical hunter its named after!) and Chinook helicopter (the only one that made it to the Falklands).All these would appear to go better in the up to date environments of FS, though I have successfully tried a mock in-flight re-fuelling behind the VC10 and a Red Arrows team display in CFS quick combat mode (because ALL of these planes appear in the Quick combat selection automatically, as well as in groups of Pre-WW2, WW2 reconaissance and post-war etc...a very good feature.

Finally, there is a co