AirDailyX: ADX FirstLook: Sling!

FSX/P3D. First Look! To be honest, prior to the first development announcement from FSAddon, I was not aware of this aircraft's existence. The Airplane Factory Sling is a South African two-seater light aircraft designed and produced in Johannesburg. Sorry we are late on this FirstLook. We have had this baby in our hands for almost a week now putting it through our tests and whereas it's an aircraft addon with great potential, sadly, it fell quite short of our expectations. So come with us on yet another ADX FirstLook at the Sling!

So as I just mentioned, yes, sadly this aircraft under-performed to our standards in several areas. Let's first start from the exterior. The first thing we noticed that annoyed us was the default viewpoint. It's way too far away. And pushing that little "+" button on the keyboard does not help as all. All it will achieve is zooming in on the entire scenery loosing all depth of field and peripheral vision. So if I wanted to see it up close, I had to do it while zooming on the entire scenery areaa. Yes, I know I can edit the .CFG to fix this, but I really should not have to and besides, that can be time consuming anyway.

Getting around to the interior, all is quite simple as most of what we need to fly this baby is incorporated into the EFIS.

Now at the default eyepoint, please tell me if you can read anything on the EFIS screen? Luckily, I use TrackIR and had to sit forward towards my monitor to get close enough to read. For those without T-IR, you are going to be hitting that "+' button often.

Another thing here is the interior textures. Not bad but could be better. but what caught my eye was the somewhat blurriness of the wording fonts on the panel.

There is an animated safety pin that keeps the parking break handle in place when not in use.

Again, the interior textures are something to be desired.

What I will say is she has some good takeoff and climb performance at 900 ft/min we were airborne in seconds.

Can you read the screen? The graphics on the EFIS could be much sharper as well.

And only 2 liveries... Really? The aircraft handles a bit stiff but the flight dynamics are for the most part acceptable for an aircraft in this class. Now the only thing I have in my hangar to compare this bird with is my BayTower Vans RV/7 which is far sharper, has better flight dynamics, and much easier on frames.

The Sling brought with it microstutter issues and far lower frames in comparison to the RV/7 and RealAir Legacy.

Both Mark and myself experienced the same performance performance issues.

I can't help but get the feeling that this is the very first attempt at aircraft development from this developer. And if this is the case, then I respect the work done here and I look forward to the developer enhancing his technique for future developments.

Otherwise, I have to admit, it looks a bit rushed...

So whereas it's a beautiful aircraft, as you can see, it could be much better.

A nice plus to the package are the 2 little cute gyro-rotors that come in the package. They are both fun to fly and are great for VFR sight seeing. Just don't try to hover or land them like helicopters or you will stall. The frames on these were quite good.