In FSEconomy
In FSE, it carries (up to) 5 passengers, and can be had from ~$240,000. The monthly cost for an upgraded model is ~v$1,500.
In FSE (as of October 2025), there are only 4 planes listed as for sale, with the lowest at v$240k (as mentioned above), which I assume is the “move now” price. However, there are ~200 models available for rent worldwide.
In Microsoft Flight Simulator
Fixed landing gear; tail dragger.
The plane is included for free in MSFS 2024, however the default tank setup
does not match FSEconomy. To fix that, I created a variant with the “right”
(and larger) fuel tanks (see “Recommended Downloads” below). The
plane does not have an autopilot (by default), although one can be added
surprisingly simply through a mod (see again “Recommended
Downloads” below). I’m not sure you’d really want to attempt the
stated range of ~800 nm without. There is a GPS and the top CDI can be set to
track it to fly you fly that GPS course. Online, the concensus is that it trims
out well (i.e. to maintain level flight on its own), but I stuggle to get it
flying completely flat and find it has a tendency to want to fall off to the
right, although the later could be a controller issue is me forgetting to
flip the fuel switch (between the seats, use CRTL + 7 to
change the view and find it) to feed off both tanks, rather than just the left one.
In MSFS2024, the default panel is very dark and so it make be worthwhile looking up another (lighter) livery.
A couple more tips:
- the instrument lighting, such as it is, is from the “projector” in the roof above and behind your “head”. When on, it provides a red glow to make the instruments visible at night. The knob on the side of the “projector” controls the light brightness, and the middle toggle switch turns it on.
- the default setup is to only feed from the left tank, so you’ll want to swap it to feed from both. The selector is between the pilot and co-pilot seats; use CRTL + 7 to change the view and find it. This does appear to persist between flight sessions.
Recommended Downloads
My FSE Tanks variant is available to downloadable from GitHub or discuss it on the FSEconomy Forums. Also included is a second variant that FSEconomy maps to the Cessna 182 Skylane. My variant is based on the included (wheel) “fairing” model.
One of the nice changes in MSFS 2024 is that variants and liveries are now separated, so liveries should work with my variant above without other changes.
An AutoPilot is also available on FlightSim.To. This overrides the default Cessna 185 plane configuration, and is “always-on”, meaning it won’t show as either a “variant” or a “livery” for the plane. The autopilot itself is a recreation of the Bendix/King KAP 140, the same model as used in WBSim’s Cessna 152 or the Retrofit DC-3, but all three of them are slightly different implementations, and so work/respond slightly different.