Introduction

FlightGear (http://www.flightgear.org) is an open source flight simulator that is even used in flight schools to train basic maneuvers, radio communication and navigation tasks. It is available for windows, mac and linux. I am developing since 3 years different aircraft , hot air balloons and vehicles.

In this article I want to introduce my development of the BushKitty, a Bush plane based on the Cessna 172.

Features

Full instrumentation, all animations in multiplayer mode and real flight characteristics. A full animated STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft for landing and starting on every surface with extreme short distances. First of its kind in FlighGear with real flight dynamics.

Development steps

1:1 Model of the c172p modified in Blender: new 36' Wheels, new tail wheel, front wheels moved more to the front, new yellow livery based on the Kitfox model.
I impoved this aircraft from the official version of a Cessna 172 to a new variant. The realistic FDM was a long difficult way of try and error. My help was the video series from Jonas Marcinko on Youtube link. Here I got the idea of the flight performance and tried to get my aircraft to the same values.
This work was done in XML text files. Here is an example of the new function of lifting the tail: It looks if the wheels are on ground (wow=true) and makes a product with the thrust. This number is the thrust number if both wheels are on ground. The second part then lifts the tail to -60 from the normal postion of -47.64. The most flight dynamics are done in the file: c172p.xml

<channel name="Tail Gear Position">
          
            <fcs_function name="gear/unit/z-impulse">
                <function>
                    <description>Lifting_the_tail_due_to_thrust_on-Ground</description>
                    <product>
                        <property>propulsion/engine[1]/thrust-lbs</property>
                        <property>gear/unit[1]/WOW</property>
                        <property>gear/unit[2]/WOW</property>
                        <value>1</value>
                    </product>
                </function>
            </fcs_function>

            <fcs_function name="z-position-tail-gear">
                <output>gear/unit[0]/z-position</output>
                <function>
                    <table>
                        <independentVar lookup="row">gear/unit/z-impulse</independentVar>
                        <tableData>
                            0   -47.64
                            300 -47.64
                            500 -60
                            600 -60
                        </tableData>
                    </table>
                </function>
            </fcs_function>
            
        </channel>

Adding ground effects for different surfaces: snow, sand and grass.

Adding a female passenger (Sonja).
Removing all errors in the log file so that this version fits my standards.
Adjusting the lights for taxi and landing in the special light system of Rembrandt.