GWJ FBO: Flight Simulation Catch-all

If everything went smoothly all of the time, it wouldn't be as enjoyable when everything goes perfectly.

DonD wrote:

If everything went smoothly all of the time, it wouldn't be as enjoyable when everything goes perfectly.

Ha, quite true, as long as the sim gives some feedback so that you can learn what you did wrong (which I think it did in this case).

At about 22:35 into this video from one of the 310R testers he reduces ALT on his AP from 8000' to 3000', with a VS of -800. You can see the airspeed creeping up toward 200 knots, and at about 24:00 you can hear the metallic shaking noise start to kick in, causing him to reduce MP again.

I thought that I had already reduced MP about as much as he had, but maybe not. The noise was of course a bit more violent in my case. I don't have any video of my flight to go back and review.

I did, however, take a screenshot a few minutes before starting my descent.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/umz0n3i.jpg)

Earlier in the day, above Auburn University.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/EbuhST6.jpg)

This is the entire video from the tester. Unfortunately the audio on this video isn't great; the narration is overwhelmed by the engine noise.

I just read that Honeycomb Charlie rudder pedals will be available for preorders in July, possibly for August shipment.

Well I'll be honest $65 (promo price, then $70 when the -600 comes out) for the PMDG B737 is less than I expected. I was totally expecting $100+. I suppose if I'm so impressed I hop onto the -800 in a few months thats the $120-$130 I was actually expecting for the -800.

I'm perfectly content with the Zibo -800 in xplane, but this could be an excuse to actually try to fly a real commercial flight on VATSIM in MSFS.

It seems like there are a bunch of folks that are upset over the pricing (because getting the entire 737 series will cost more than previously), but I think the price is very fair for the 737-700, BBJ and cargo variants. That's really all I wanted -- passenger, cargo, and charter ops are all covered.

Yeah. In my experience, flight sim message boards are the same cesspool as most gaming message boards. Its ironic because Flight Sim rivet counters consider themselves so superior to "gamers" to the point where some will belittle people who dare purchase the game on Steam... god forbid.. instead of getting a box of DVD's to install one by one.

I see this as a deal as I can ala carte the aircraft I want. I actually don't have interest in the -600 or the -900 for that matter. I suppose a MAX would be fun, but who knows when that will ever come out. Right now I don't see me getting the -800 since I have Zibo so I'm happy with just the -700.

I haven't watched any of the streams.. I'm hoping to get some info on performance though. Seems like every streamer has a 3090ti and the newest CPU. I'm waiting until Xplane 12 to come out before I upgrade my PC, so I don't fly like a slideshow

And its released with the same server problems as a WoW patch and just about the same reaction from customers.

Fabio, in his streams, has said performance is similar to what he gets with the FBW A320. I'm running a 1070ti, so I'll report back after I give it a go later today.

PMDG said post-release plans include a year or so of updates to the aircraft and that any updates that the other models get will also come to the -700.

I can confirm, it doesn't seem any harder on framerate than any other aircraft I fly. I'm just doing the tutorial flight from PDX - SFO, but so far everything works as advertised.

awesome. I'll grab it today and do my good ole KBUR to KOAK flight. I have to remember how to do the cameras in MSFS... so less intuitive than Xplane.

As I'm wont to do I've spent the last 90 mins or so fiddling with cameras and settings and not moving the aircraft.

The only pet peeves I have so far (again without actually flying)

1. Can't start C&D without stair truck attached. Not sure why you can't default the pax entry type to Jetway. You can default the aircraft type to not have airstairs installed, but the stair truck will still attach, even at the gate. Maybe because the gate types at KOAK are labeled as "gate small"? I can find another airport with larger gates to see if I get the same result.
2. As expected.. difficult to map non-standard controls. I'd like to map VNAV, LVL CHG, ALT INTV and SPD INTV buttons, but since those aren't regular commands I can't map them.
3. Can't figure out how to map reversers. I think I hacked it somehow and got them to work but we'll see when I land.

Performance wise, yeah.. again without actually flying, seemed to be no better/worse than any other aircraft and I loaded up at KOAK.

Just finished my first flight KOAK to KLAX in the 737.. overall it was a good flight. No real issues other than trying to get the gear to work. A gear lever control basically is a constant press of a button so if you have it mapped to "gear up" it constantly presses gear up, sometimes jamming the gear, and making it impossible to put the gear into the off position. I did find a workaround on PMDG boards which I will give a go next time.

Landing wasn't great.. the plane seems higher than it really is and I was surprised I touched down when I did. Very floaty.

Here are some screenshots.

Departing KOAK on the CNDEL5 departure. I fly from KOAK to southern california a lot, and I'm very familiar with this departure and it looked great.
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/6yrqxdx.jpg)

On the IRNMN2 arrival into KLAX. Its a tricky approach with a lot of altitude and speed restrictions. I'd say it did pretty well. Pretty high overspeed at SYMON and BAYST but I didn't input wind data so maybe that impacted it. Probably should have pulled the speedbrakes to make the speed, but I didn't bother.
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/kpOx9lU.jpg)

On the STAR about to make the base turn to KLAX, passing over downtown LA.
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/0xGheUR.jpg)

And on final onto 24R KLAX.
IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/yBNWF4m.jpg)

Thanks for that. I had all of that set except the reversers so I'll do that. As you can imagine the last 30 seconds or so is my real complaint

I was able to solve my Cold and Dark setup problem so that's good.

Finally braved my first VATSIM flight with MSFS and worked well enough. Its a good thing I waited for the 737 though as I'm familiar enough with the systems where if things don't work, I know how to correct them quickly.

Something is up with the VNAV and Autothrottle on climb... I think it has to do with the GW changing between pushback and lining up. The PERF INIT seems to reset itself because the fuel you burn in taxi even though its usually less than 500 pounds (out of a minimum of 14,000 or so), seems to upset the PERF INIT enough that you have to reset everything. 2nd time that something didn't go right on setting VNAV AP on departure. Could have been user error, but I'm pretty sure I'm doing everything right.

That being said, it is a pleasure to fly... comparing to Xplane/Zibo... I think its basically a draw. For me the inability to map my honeycomb bravo without a 3rd party paid app is a big negative that gets compensated for with the better visuals overall.

I will say that now that I'm flying out of larger airports, I'm actually quite disappointed in how poorly those default airports are laid out vs. the real thing. KBWI for example, a major Southwest hub is literally missing its normal-ops landing runway in the default. Its been fixed by users, but unless you have a Navigraph subscription, you can't actually load procedures for the updated airport. KBUR another major west coast hub, has office buildings for its terminals, even though the actual thing is basically a one-story simple terminal. Forget about the fact that every taxiway and gate # is wrong. My term that I use is that MSFS default airports are Beautifully Incorrect.

I've found with the 737 that sometimes I can't arm LNAV and VNAV prior to takeoff, but if I cycle the flight directors off and on, then it all works. I haven't really noticed any other wonkiness.

As for airport scenery, MSFS based it's airport generation on satellite imagery that's at least 5 years old, so it doesn't represent the current airport layout in many of the big airports. Off the top of my head, BWI (unflyably bad), ORD (missing an entire runway), LGA (the entire terminal structure is wrong), PHL (missing the taxiways and the runway extension at the start of 27L). I'm sure there are a lot more, but these are the ones that I remember offhand. Users have jumped in with custom scenery for a lot of the airports. Flightsim.to is the main site for MSFS freeware.

I'm also a big fan of the custom bridges that people have made, since the default's are pretty bad in many, many places.

That being said, Asobo did say they wanted to revisit the US next year with another update.

Yeah, I get it. KLGA and KORD have had reonvations in the last 24 months, but missing runways is pretty unbelievable. Its just crazy that I can pick out my house, but they'll forget to place a runway. KBWI has had 15R/33L forever.

I've made it a habit to check airports in Little Navmap before flying (even in Xplane), but it is still pretty annoying.

Is there even a freeware fix for KORD? I've looked and don't see one.

Carlbear95 wrote:

Is there even a freeware fix for KORD? I've looked and don't see one.

I haven't seen one.

In other news, the Fenix A320 has been released to streamers and is expected out this week. ~$60.

Yeah. I'm on the fence on that one. I have all 3 payware a32X family aircraft on xplane all of which are well modeled, so I don't particularly feel the urge to get the same thing on MSFS. Flying the PMDG has reminded me that indeed at 30000 feet xplane and MSFS look the same, and at least in Xplane the correct runways are in place

Getting the A320 would be more for European ops as its the much more common aircraft there. I really like flying VATSIM in EU (if you haven't done it Don, I highly recommend it... the stereotypes of German efficiency are true for VAT Germany), but given I'm 7-10 hours behind them I generally don't have that much time to fly there.

I will say one thing about the Fenix 320, if they just sold that EFB as a standalone plug-in f that can go in any aircraft I'd pay $20 for it

I'm still loving the $#!&* out of flying the 310R. Since my autopilot incident near KATL, I've made 8 more flights without crashes of the sim or of the aircraft. Not all of my landings have been pretty, but they've been getting more consistently decent. From ATL I headed south via KJAX to fly over KSC, then over Orlando to St Petersburg KSPG. From SPG it was down the west coast to Naples, then eastward over Miami and out to Bimini in the Bahamas.

My current plans have me heading around the Caribbean to South America, then maybe up through Central America to Mexico and California. Nothing etched in stone, though.

In the near future I'll be away from flying for a couple of weeks, on vacation. Coincidentally my flight from KSPG to Naples KAPF went right over our vacation destination, so I got some lookahead images.

First, I passed over Orlando at night.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/nheyVPJ.jpg)

Looking back toward the Atlantic and the dawn.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/o3bSUb8.jpg)

The next day I flew over Captiva and Sanibel islands.

North Captiva here is a bit too pricey for us. They have a small grass strip there, too.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/5Uouy0r.jpg)

The place we're renting is right down there.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/KwOqEH1.jpg)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/sii4t7y.jpg)

I hope the causeway looks better when I need to drive across it next week!

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/CBbD81B.jpg)

I bought the 310 once it was on the in-game market and fired it up that day for a quick run. I got distracted for a minute and when I came back I was in a deep dive and spin that I couldn’t recover from. I finally started it up agains yesterday and both NAV frequencies are stuck at 0.00. I tried the various GPS options and they all also had the same problem. So far I can’t find mention of anyone else running into this, but it’s not obvious to me that any of my addons would be a cause.

If you are using any GPS mods, try removing them and see if that fixes it. If you downloaded any additional liveries, you can try removing those as well. These would be the top 2 things that might cause the issue.

Ahh, I didn’t think liveries would cause an issue, I suspect I had some still active, I’ll try removing those next.

There was at least one person in the C310R thread on the MSFS forum that had the 0.000 issue.

Friday225 wrote:

I can’t tune my NAV radios. They read 0.00 and won’t tune at all. Comm and ADF radio works fine, just the NAV won’t tune. Doesn’t matter if I have the Asobo GNS530 GPS or just the radio navigation selected in Options, still the same. I also tried moving all add-ons from my community folder and still not working. When I load up a default 172 they work fine in the default 172. Anyone seen this behavior before?

EDIT: I reset the failures to never and restarted the plane, it must have been a failure. Seems to work now.

As you can tell from one of the Orlando photos above, I'm still using the OG radio stack with none of them fancy screens.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/nheyVPJ.jpg)

Thanks! I had missed that post in that thread. It is indeed a failure. I hadn't yet read the manual, so didn't realize the status page on the table only covers major failures. To see other failures (or potential failures) you -have to click on the DME readout an look up the values in the manual to see what they mean. In my case, it seems to be a permanent circuit failure. So far I don't see a way to repair it, otherwise than overhaul.

I too prefer the old school equipment, the navigation is a good chunk of the fun for me right now.

The overhaul by itself wasn’t sufficient to get things working again. I’m not sure if I just needed to reload afterwards. Instead I first set the failures to never and then reloaded, and it’s fixed up now.

I'm glad you got that sorted out and your 310 didn't have to spend too much time in the shop.

Afternoon simmers. After a long hiatus I've reinstalled MSFS and am getting back into it. Pretty basic stuff at the moment - using a fair bit of assistance but gradually dialling up the realism. I want to try some realistic GA flights, but because I'm not a real pilot, nor do I know any, I've no-one to ask what would be a sensible flight.

For example - my nearest airport is EGNR (Hawarden in North Wales). I thought it would be nice to fly the King Air from there to Caernarfon (EGCK) and check out the nearby scenery. It's a short flight, especially in the King Air, and the direct GPS flight path takes me right over snowdonia, containing the highest peak in Wales. After clearing the mountains it's quite a descent to Caernarfon, and I was struggling to descend and reduce speed at the same time. I had to go around twice and still almost botched the landing. Granted a lot of this is down to my skill as a new pilot, but would a real life pilot plot a route around the mountains instead?

kergguz wrote:

. After clearing the mountains it's quite a descent to Caernarfon, and I was struggling to descend and reduce speed at the same time. I had to go around twice and still almost botched the landing. Granted a lot of this is down to my skill as a new pilot, but would a real life pilot plot a route around the mountains instead?

Quickly descending, while reducing speed simultaneously is not something an aircraft generally wants to do. In this particular case, with such a short flight and a powerful aicraft like the B350 i'd say the aircraft doesn't quite match the mission. Try the good ole C172, or if you fancy a Twin, the DA62 and I think you'll find it much easier to manage your speed and altitude. Regardless of what aircraft, the only way you will just maintain speed (airspeed, not vertical rate) while descending is to reduce throttle, and you increase vertical descent speed by reducing throttle further. 4 forces, physics, blah blah, will tell you that once you descend by pushing the yoke forward you will gain airspeed. Also unfortunately the B350 I don't think has gotten much love in MSFS or even in the mod world. I don' think its well modeled so you're fighting that as well. If you really like the B350, then you need to remain a lot slower at cruise than normal, and/or start your descent sooner, and/or limit your descent rate to probably 500-700ft/minute and if you need to circle to get lower, go for it.

For me as a relatively new "real life pilot", I would definitely plot around the mountains, northwestish to the coast, and follow that down. Probably a lot nicer view, and I would plot that way not just because I would be worried about descent management but because if I had an emergency, I don't want to be over terrain. Someone more experienced or confident could just fly over the top, just circle your way down to pattern altitude. I'll admit, I have no idea how airspace rules work outside of the US, so not sure how realistic that would be in this area, but its a flight sim.. no one is watching