If you're into flight simming, it's the best.
Pros:
Best yoke for the money.
Cons:
It's construction is a little cheesy.
The Bottom Line:
Highly recommended if you are into general aviation flight simming such as MSFS, FlyII, FU3.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
The next best thing to this yoke is priced about $500. I got this yoke from egghead.com at only $100. Couple this with the USB rudders from CH products (also $100) and you have a great flight control combination. Apart from the x-y axis of the yoke, it has vertical and horizontal rocker switches - great for trim settings. Has plenty of buttons that you can assign for such things as gear up/down, radio frequency change, flaps up/down etc. The 3 other axis available make it great to control the throttle, propeller pitch and mixture level. Installation is easy and the USB version is recognized very easily by windows 98. The usb version is also a lot more accurate than the analog older version. Same goes for the rudders.
I have been able to get it to work pretty decent in FU3 (can't get the propeller and mixture controls to work though). In Fly2k/FlyII, it works perfectly for all functions. I haven't tried it out for MSFS2000, but I hear it works great for that too. It is recommended to download the "combo driver" from CH products website if you have both the yoke and rudder USB.
I was initially using a joystick, but after switching to the yoke, I've never looked back at a joystick again. I tried out a demo flight in an real cessana 172 and I was surprised how similar the real yoke on the cessna felt to the CH yoke. I highly recommend it.
Now for the cons: It attaches to the table via two clamps on the underside made of plastic. They aren't well designed and I had to use some cardboard strips between the clamps and the table to get them to hold the yoke firmly. Also, the yoke's seem to be operating with rubber bands inside and occasionally you can hear the "twang" sounds of the rubber band. Almost feels like you might snap a few of the rubber bands if you turn the yoke too hard. Have not had a problem so far but they do give you an uneasy feel sometimes. Also, I may need to grease the yoke axis with a silicone lubricant (most people have recommended to do this after some time). At $100, I still feel it is a little pricey but it is still a lot less than the $500 for the next better yoke out there. And it also offers more functionality (assignable buttons) than higher end yokes. I would recommend this over the LE version (which only has the throttle axis and no propeller and mixture axis).
