T-38A Talon

Most payware aircraft are either general aviation or airliners, it seems to me. This is an example of something else, a military jet trainer. A bit of variation can be fun, so I decided to try this out.

It's not a complex systems aircraft; Just get in and start flying like any other X-Plane aircraft.

Only thing which didn't work right from the beginning was standing still on the runway -- when I did it vibrated forcefully in roll plane. Disappeared when it starts moving -- to get rid of the effect I increased the number of flight models from 1 to 2 per frame. This is one of the things I don't see addressed in the concise and clear manual, which unusually also includes information on how you assign keyboard and joystick commands.

Easy to fly and the brief manual says almost all you need to know in that area, basically appropriate landing speeds. I've never flown a real one but performance and handling seems all over like what one would expect for an aircraft like this, with one exception and that's G onset rate; Throughout the parts of the envelope I've tried the sustainable G levels are about what you'd expect but sometimes you can make it go from 1 to >8 G in almost no time by yanking on the stick and it will then for a short time rapidly fluctuate between 4 and over the scale. I can't say the onset rate is impossible, but most of the time you can't get it to happen, so I suspect it's not how the real T-38A flies.

The liveries are quite detailed but my impression of them is that they are all  rather low contrast. For example the two tone modern trainer scheme most of the time looks like black and white to me in photos (yes, I know it's really dark and light grey) but here the dark grey looks too light. Also in some other liveries I think the national insignias look washed out. But most of the time I don't look on my aircrafts' outsides, so this doesn't matter much really, to me. (There's a NML image file for the default livery only, but it seems named so it's not actively used.)

However, there are some problems in the cockpit; The canopy frame has a clearly visible unsightly seam in the middle and the AoA gauge doesn't look like it belongs compared with cockpit photos where it's always just plain black and white and possibly the stand by horizon is blue instead of light grey. As this would have been easy to do differently and the rest of the cockpit does look right (apart from the altimeter which isn't exactly right but not as noticably and harder to correct) I'm not going to say for sure it's wrong though.

Apart from what I've mentioned and maybe not even all of that, there's nothing wrong with the aircraft. There are separate versions for X-Plane 9 and 10 which is good. My impression is that considering the complexity, detailing and accuracy it's slightly over priced. But, apart from the canopy frame seam which isn't shown in the images where it's sold, I didn't expect more

Available for purchase here.