I was recently going through what people are searching for when they find my blog, and I noticed somebody was looking for Cessna C414 procedures.
Well, as I noted previously, one of my favorite things to do in FSX is fly in multiplayer mode with the Cape Air virtual airline at Boston Virtual ATC. In real life, Cape Air flies Cessna 402C’s. Unfortunately, nobody has created a C402 addon for FSX yet. The closest addon plane is the Premier Aircraft Design C414, so Cape Air Virtual asks you to use this plane for operations in their network (they also offer a paintkit for the default Baron). The C414 is basically the same plane as the C402, except it has a pressurized cabin (hence the smaller round windows instead of the larger square windows on the C402C).
Premier Aircraft Design is an excellent and prolific FS freeware aircraft addon site. I highly recommend visiting them and getting any airplanes they have which might interest you. I have a link below to the version of the plane I use that includes the Cape Air paintjob for the aircraft for use with Cape Air Virtual Airlines.
As far as procedures for the plane go, an excellent reference for flying the C402C can be found at http://www.9kpilots.com/, a complete reference of Cape Air’s flight procedures for their pilots. For FSX, here are the checklist and reference files I use for the C414 (these files go in the aircraft folder for the C414 in FSX – more on that in a post I’m working on for later). Or you can download the full aircraft I use for FSX here – C414. To install the plane, just unzip the “Cessna 414” folder into your …\SimObjects\Airplanes folder in your flight simulator directory. I’ve included many of the files from Cape Air’s flight procedures website in the “Manual” folder inside the aircraft folder.
P.S. I’ll go over this in more detail later, but, never install your FSX program into the “program files” or “program files x86” directory. I highly recommend installing it to the root directory of your disk, or, even better, if you have multiple disks, install it to the the root directory of your second disk. This will help you avoid some of the UAC problems you’ll encounter with Windows Vista or Windows 7, especially if you want to install addons, and will also improve performance somewhat. While XP doesn’t have the UAC issues that Vista and Windows 7 have, it’s still a good idea to do this for that operating system as well.
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