Author - Jerry Paxton

Design
The Pro Flight Yoke’s design is a thing of beauty. It’s dark molded plastic has a slightly ‘wet’ look, making it a much more sexy yoke than, say, the CH Products Flight Yoke. The grips are slightly contoured for your hands as well, making this yoke very comfortable to handle. The steel shaft helps make the action smooth and the increased spring force helps keep you from over controlling. The base has a large footprint, however, and we needed to make alot of space on our desk to mount it. In our unit, the buffer plate between the screw mount and the desk would pop off at certain times if it was not mounted just right. Additionally, unlike the CH Products’ yoke, the shaft does not emerge from the back of the base, it is kept internal which is a great feature. There is a built in lcd display which functions as a chronograph to time the legs of your flights and it doubles as a system time clock and a USB hub which is very nice on a cluttered desktop.

Performance
We tested our flight yoke on Microsoft’s Flight Sim X and Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2004 using the standard USB mapping – we did not install the Saitek software. The remapping in both simulators was quick and easy – sometimes a bit daunting as the Pro Flight Yoke/Throttle Quadrants are loaded with switches and buttons. After setting up our axis and maps, we set up a free flight from a local airport. The throttle/mixture/propeller levers move smoothly and have a detent at the low end past 0%. The aileron and elevator actions of the yoke are VERY smooth and very realistic in feel. You can actually use the yoke with one hand, functionally! In contrast, you cannot do this with the CH Products yoke which requires two hands to operate the elevator axis. After flying in the pattern for several minutes whilst getting use to our control mappings we turned out to do some VFR exploring. The yoke and throttle quadrant consistently performed and was a pleasure to use. The increased spring tension helped keep me from over controlling my aircraft and the whole flight was a much improved experience than using a normal joystick or even CH Products flight yoke which, while good, cannot compare.