Although the textures used for some of the aircraft’s lights can get a bit blocky closer up (as is the case with many aircraft), they do look good from a little further away. Luckily, the amount of detail and the precision of the modeling in both textures and positions/relief makes up for that, more and more with each new release.Īt night, the Panthera still looks great. This would be most apparent on the outside, but could also happen inside, especially looking out at the plane’s wings, for instance. What I mean by the plasticky look is quite easy: some models, especially in XP10 before PBR, tended to look like a semi-glossy plastic. While still having a little bit of a plasticky look to it, which isn’t necessarily good, it is definitely going in the right direction. Over the years, Aerobask has improved their modeling dramatically. This can be tricky, as the front visibility in the Panthera is a little poor, due to the high panels and engine looking forward while descending nose-up at a low speed, or flaring, is challenging. It may not be smart to cut the throttle completely, but once you get good enough at it, you can land it sort of like a Cessna let it stall onto the runway.
Flaring a little bit before landing, at the right speed, should make sure you can touch down fairly easily and gracefully. Keeping the power in and controlling your pitch is essential, as it can catch you off guard with ease. Landing the Panthera isn’t too difficult it won’t sink like a brick that easily, but will slow down very quickly when lowering flaps.
Perhaps I should not have loaded any luggage or people beyond the pilot and fuel, but the Manual with the performance data table doesn’t state anything regarding weights. I’m not sure how accurately the plane follows the given performance data, however: I tried to replicate the climb and cruise speeds, but found myself consistently slower than the indicated speeds in the provided documentation, even with a relatively low load. Weight compensation is also good flying with a disbalanced load that has more human weight in the left seats and fuel in the left tanks doesn’t throw it off it keeps the Panthera level as it should! I’ve flown around with 20 knot crosswinds, and the autopilot still keeps on the magenta line very nicely. It never seems to overshoot (or undershoot) the altitude and does a nice job of correcting for crosswinds even when they get heavy. It can overshoot your intended course, but usually does a good job of keeping on the flight line. The autopilot is nice to use, as it doesn’t throw the aircraft around too much. Dropping or raising flaps has a significant impact as is common for GA aircraft, so keep an eye out for that as well. It’s very responsive and light, meaning that small stick inputs can already have very big effects, very quickly. However, it’s not advised to not pay attention to the Panthera while hand flying it. Once you’re up in the air, after using the powerful engine to get to rotation speed pretty quickly (around 60-70 knots), things are pretty straight-forward. Alternatively, at lower speeds the plane is easy to turn, while not turning on a dime as some other planes seem to like doing.
Turns can be a bit dangerous, because you do not want to go too fast turning tends to be a little ineffective, especially when only using nose wheel steering instead of both that and the rudder. You don’t have to be very careful about overspeeding quickly, because the engine’s power is distributed quite nicely along the power lever no suddenly acceleration here. It starts rolling quite easily and turns smoothly. This is a pretty easy plane to fly and move around on the ground.
The manuals are quite clear, so looking things up and reading through them for learning purposes shouldn’t be an issue.
The manual for the GTN 650/750 counts a hefty 25 pages, whereas the Skyview manual and its addendum come to a healthy 39 pages total. Featuring extensive documentation for the GTN and Skyview systems, as well as checklists, manual for the plane itself, recommended settings, flight planning and a small explanation of the quick look views, there is no shortage of documentation. Document wise, Aerobask has you covered pretty well.