The Challenger Two, first introduced in 1984 is a tandem seat two place pusher in a trigear configuration. The aluminum tubing fabric covered craft uses bolt and rivet construction covered in either dacron sail cloth or conventional aircraft covering materials. Building times vary depending on the type of covering materials used. The design was one of the first true three axis control two place ultralights on the market and has survived to this day as one of the leaders in the field.. There are reported to be nearly 3200 built and flying to date. It has evolved though the years and now there are clipped wing,  ski and amphibeous float versions!
                              The Challenger Two can be powered by a 447 or 503 Rotax fan cooled engine although most all customers get the 503.. The engine sits upside down at the rear of the craft and uses a belt reduction drive system. Flying them is enjoyable and there are many clubs and small fields where the Challenger is the most prevelant plane seen in evidence. I don't believe there are two Challengers in existence that are similiar and they range from bare bones aircraft to completely decked out fast small GA planes with full avionics!  Our models attempt to portray typical Challengers as you would find them at most small fields. Most Challengers do not use cockpit controlled mixture control and every Challenger owner has two or three sets of carb jets to swap according to season or operating altitude!
                                    We have chosen to model this aircraft as I built and flew a Challenger Two in the late 80s and the red and black Classic model portrays my paint scheme. It was great fun and making this model has brought back many happy memories!

                                                          
INSTALLATION:
Installation is a matter of clicking on the qccinstall.exe file.   The installation program should automatically install the QC Challengers, sceneries and related files to your default fs2004 installation without over writing any  default or third party files. Please do not manually install this file as you might miss something and be unhappy with the results! 

PLEASE READ THE REST OF THIS DOCUMENT BEFORE BOOTING UP SO YOU CAN PROPERLY ENJOY THE ULTRALIGHT FLYING EXPERIENCE!!

PLEASE!!!! PRETTY PLEASE..;o))

After reading the rest of this document boot up and make sure your settings are as follows:
AIRCRAFT REALISM: Full realism and enable "automixture"!
AUTOGEN: Recommend maximum but highest you can live with!
AI TRAFFIC:

FIRST, TURN OFF THAT UGLY RED UNREALISTIC TRAFFIC LABEL THING THAT FLOATS IN THE AIR ABOVE AI PLANES!!!!!                                      

  There is environmental as well as Challenger AI traffic included.  The amount of aircraft AI traffic at the club field is graduated so that you should start with 10% and increase till it starts to impact frame rates! We find that 20% is fine! You should always run traffic as it really adds to the sim.

PANEL: There is no need for a 2d panel in such a simple aircraft therefore  none are included to obstruct the view!

NOTE: It is recommended that you start with the flight " QC2 Test Flight" to become familiar with the Challenger Two!

There are 16 included flights each showcasing each aircraft! Please enjoy them all!                                    
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AIRCRAFT OPERATION:

The real Challenger when waiting to be flown rests on the main gear and a small tailwheel. When a pilot and passenger are on board the aircraft rocks forward onto the nose wheel. There never is much weight on the nose wheel so it makes for some bouncy taxing on rough fields..:o)  In the sim it is necessary to add the crew using the / (spoiler) key before doing any flying!  Most Challengers are equipped with flaperons which not only provide aileron and flap functions but are also the method by which the aircraft is trimmed in flight! The overhead crank gets a lot of use in operating a real Challenger and it can be trimmed to maintain a climb or for higher speed cruising. Use two buttons on your joystick for the flap function and you'll soon be using them as much as the elevator!! Our local practice was to put in full down Flaperon and hold full back on the stick while taking off and climbing at a very steep angle to impress the fence sitters..;O))

          This aircraft has engine damage modeled into it so if you run in the red on the temp gauge for too long it will FAIL!! Try to keep it cool by keeping rpms at 6000 or below most of time!

DO NOT USE THE 'L" KEY TO TURN ON THE NAVIGATION LIHGHTS AS IT WILL ALSO TRIGGER THE ENGINE FAILURE SMOKE EFFECT!!!

Each year on July 4th the club holds a flour bomb contest! On that date a flour bomb will appear in the aircraft and a painted target will appear at the field. The bomb effect is not perfect but it's fun to see how close you can come to the bullseye!  Select the "bomb Run" flight to set it up and good luck..;o))

Please read the Checklist in each plane before operating each aircraft to fully enjoy the included features!

Virtual Cockpit Operation:

The virtual cockpit has been designed so that most functions can be accessed with the mouse It helps to have "tooltips" operational to become familiar with their use. Also printing out this text as a reference will make things easier. If you desire, the virtual cockpit pan rate can be adjusted in your main fs9.cfg file from the default 400 to 900 which allows much faster more realistic panning using the hat switch. These aircraft have been designed so that 100% zoom should be used in the Virtual Cockpit.  I would highly recommend getting the great Active Camera program and setting head latency at 0.5 ! It has literally transformed our flightsimming and we couldn't fly with out it now!!!!!

In addition to the normal controls  "Hot Spots" have been assigned to perform certain functions:

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Radio/CD Player Operation

The  Radio/CD player can be used to play your favorite music while you fly!!   You can assign your own favorite sounds by going to "windowed mode" and right clicking on the each preselect AM/FMbutton! If you experience poor flight sim performance when the Challengers are used it may be that your video card or operating system will not handle the radio/cd player. You can disable the radio/cd player by removing the radiocd4q.gau  file from your gauges folder!  The Radio/cd player has been generously provided by Rob Clark! Thank you Rob for enriching our flight simming experience!!

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GPS Operation

The GPS was created by Chuck Dome and generously allowed to be used by others in small aircraft like these. It contains 3775 world wide waypoints.   The upper left portion of the gauge displays a pointer to the chosen waypoint. To the right, the top number simply identifies the waypoint for possible future reference. The next number indicates the distance to the waypoint in nautical miles. The third line displays the selected region of the world, and the fourth line displays the selected state or nation-state. The bottom line displays the selected airport name.      The airports are arranged in the following
sixteen regions:

NORAM NW (North America, Northwest)
NORAM NC ( " " North Central)
NORAM GL ( " " Great Lakes)
NORAM NE ( " " Northeast)
NORAM SW ( " " Southwest)
NORAM SC ( " " South Central)
NORAM SE ( " " Southeast)
AFRICA
ASIA
CENTRAL AMERICA
CANADA
EUROPE
HAWAII
HONG KONG
OCEANIA
SOUTH AMERICA

In Chuck's words:

Within each region the airports are arranged by state or nation-state.
Within each state they are arranged alphabetically by the local city or area
name. For example, New York's LaGuardia airport is listed in the New York
City area. To keep the gauge from getting too large, I decided not to
display the local area name. To find LaGuardia, you would select the NORAM
NE region, NY state, and look through the Ns (for New York City). Because
this process can be tedious sometimes, I have included AIRPRTS.TXT which
lists all 3,775 airports by number. A quick word search can help you find
your desired airport.

The "buttons" on the GPS gauge function as follows: the PWR button turns
the gauge on and off, the R button cycles forward or backward (< or >)
through the sixteen regions and the S button similarly cycles through the
states, within each region. Sometimes a state will be divided between more
than one region. Among the four buttons at the far right, the > button moves
forward, one waypoint at a time, through the list of airports and the <
button moves backward. The >> and << buttons jump ten numbers at a time, for
faster searching.

Be sure to turn off the GPS before selecting another flight!!
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
                                 


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KEYBOARD COMMANDS:
If you do not want to use the mouse in the Vc  view follow these keyboard commands:

Put Pilot and Passenger On Board= Push the / key...
Start Engine= Hold M and + keys till engines catch or Control-E
Adjust Trim= Use F6 and F7keys...


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AI SOUND REPLACEMENT :   Just for fun and if you are a real ultralight enthusiast we are including replacement AI sounds so that the AI Challengers sound like they have Rotax engines. Back up your current  ai_singleprop01.wav and xai_singleprop01.wav files found in your main sound folder and temporarily replace them with the enclosed files while you are flying from the club field.  They sound like real ultralights now!  Replace them with your current sounds when you are done ultralight flying!

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OLD VIDEO CARDS:    If for some  unknown reason you haven't upgraded to one of the new inexpensive fs9.1 compliant video cards you are really missing out on a lot of good features in fs2004. There is a file included in Custom Classics Extras called oldcards.zip. Unzip it into your main fs2004 folder and it will overwrite the window and gauge reflection files in the texture folder so that at least you'll be able to see out of the plane!

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THE REAL THING:

If you would like to know more about the Quad City Challenger Two visit their website at

http://www.quadcitychallenger.com/

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CONCLUSION:
We hope you enjoy using these models as much as we did in creating them!! These models were built with FSDS2, the super building program from Louis Sinclair! Thanks to the Microsoft Flight Sim Team who did an outstanding job on Fs2004!
We owe a  very, very special thanks to Tom Constantine for all the hard work in making the neat AI traffic that makes our scenery come alive! Thanks much Tom!

A special thanks  to all the wonderful GES Guys who  suffer through all the beta testing and keep us going through the rough spots!

Please let us know what you like or don't like about this project so we can direct future efforts toward creating more realistic and enjoyable virtual flying experiences...:o))
Lynn and Bill Lyons
Custom Classic Aircraft
Support Forum at The Old Hangar