Carenado Beechcraft T34 Mentor
Reviewed by Ludo Lambrechts
Over the last few years Carenado has made a name for themselves in the flight simulator community. Whenever you hear the name “Carenado” you’ll always hear something good about their products. Their Beechcraft T34 Mentor is no exception to the fact that Carenado is an amazing company, and their planes are just about perfect. Carenado has done a great job at re-creating the T-34 which was based on the Beechcraft Bonanza, and was intended to be used as a trainer aircraft. This aircraft carries amazing detail, and comes at a quite low price making it a must-have in your fleet!
There is a lot of great things about this aircraft, namely it’s stunningly realistic detail. On this plane everything is detailed, there is not a bolt or edge on the exterior that isn’t modelled. Everything on the exterior model has been built to perfect scale. On the outside of the plane you can also see the pilot sitting in the cockpit. This pilot has amazing detail, and looks better than a real person does. The pilot included moves his head; this is a great feature as it contributes greatly to making your Flight Simulator experience much more realistic. The other great additions to the T34 is accurate animations, the gear go up like their supposed to, and both exits open as they would in real life. In their product Carenado has invested the time to get all of the little details right.
Another amazing component of Carenado’s T34 Mentor is it’s Virtual Cockpit, the VC is amazingly detailed and everything is in place as it would be in real life. The T34 is a two person trainer aircraft so in reality it has two panels from which you can fly from, Carenado has built the Virtual Cockpit so according to detail and realism that the plane can be flown both from the front panel or the back panel as both are fully detailed and fully clickable, the Virtual Cockpit is a joy to fly from as it gives you a feeling of actually being in the plane.
The one thing which is a bit of a “downer” but not a necessarily bad thing is that the T34 only came with two liveries. Both liveries are amazing in detail, and quality, and both have had a lot of time put into them. But, there isn’t a variety on which variation to fly so you need to find some textures online, or make one yourself. This isn’t a problem, and I don’t think that it hurts the quality of this plane; it would just be nice to have a few more liveries to fly with.
Carenado also created highly realistic flight dynamics with this model. In general the T34 has been described as a smooth flying plane, and Carenado has ensured that it flies just like it does in real life. Carenado’s T-34 in the game is a quite smooth plane to fly in the game under good weather conditions but it is highly realistic when it comes to turns and you need to know how to manoeuvre and operate the Mentor. In rough skies the T-34 reacts just as it would in reality, it bounces around a lot and shakes, and catches a lot of turbulence when flying under these conditions. Just as it would outside the FS world the Mentor isn’t very fun to fly in a storm. Carenado has done an amazing job at making the flight dynamics for this add-on aircraft highly realistic you will not feel as if you’re flying an F-18 or a Cessna 172, you will feel as though you’re flying a Beechcraft T-34 Mentor.
The Mentor has great detail, and has great features. These features are amazing graphically and looking at screenshots and pictures of them make you think that it’d be very laggy when you fly it in the game. The Mentor isn’t the best on frame rates, but they are quite good and are still very nice to fly in. All computers would likely be able to handle the Mentor as it is very efficient with frame rates despite the amazing detail on the model. On yet another product Carenado has done a great job on creating an aircraft that has high detail, but yet maintains a high level of detail.
Yet again Carenado has lived up to their reputation of quality, performance, and realism. This aircraft is yet another great example of why they have so many fans in the FS world, and why so many people buy their products. The Beechcraft T-34 Mentor has amazing details, good frame rates, and amazing realism which make it a great add-on to have. The aircraft is also a great value for it’s price, to purchase the Mentor it only costs $19.95 USD. I would recommend this aircraft to everyone who enjoy trainer aircraft from the late ‘50’s as this is to date the best re-creation for the flight simulator. Overall I would award the Beechcraft T-34 Mentor by Carenado a 9.3 out of 10.
Written by Ludo Lambrechts
Administrator of Canadian Pilots.
CEO of CPair
Carenado Beechcraft T34 Mentor, Review
[GK-customfield]FSX[customfield-GK] 
Good dollar value too for payware, considering all she is. 
Am sure that this simpi would enjoy her.
. Happpy flying.
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