Posts by Jet-Pack (IPACS)

Another thing worth mentioning: Typically the autobrake in the A320 is set to LOW for landing. Even in Innsbruck this is usually enough unless you have a very heavy load. In real life they use LOW most of the times to avoid break wear. You can always refill the fuel tanks when you use more reverse to slow the aircraft down but you have to do maintenance to replace the brakes. Also if you were to use MED your brakes would become quite hot and even with the brake fan they might not be cool enough when you want to take off again. This would cause a delay and easily outways the shorter landing distance and possibly taxi if you use MIN brake.

Keep in mind that MED is the maximum strength you can set for landing and it slows the aircraft down quite rapidly. The MIN setting is what is set automatically in the Aerofly FS 2 when you set the aircraft into the final approach.

Yes the outside sound volume is quite low but this is not just the Q400. Thank you for pointing that out

Quote from J van E

...then I would have to renumber everything.

Why not restart the numbering in each phase?

(would make it a lot easier to expand later on and it isn't that problematic for other to reference: climb step 5. Or descent step 3.... IDK... Just saying step 42 is wrong, then later on you add in another step, everything is offset... just my thoughts)

Vegas is a bit tricky because you need to descent steeply with the mountains near by. Depending from where you're coming,...

The airport elevation is 2181ft, I'd use +2000ft above that, so 4000 or maybe 5000ft.

I think at final approach fix (last turn on the flight path) you should be 3000ft or less above the airport, so in this case roughly 5000ft. If you are exactly at 3000ft above field elevation for the last turn you are on the 3° glideslope if I remember correctly. It's not as easy to slow down from there, may need to extend the gear a little earlier than usual and maybe use a bit of speedbrake until 2000ft AGL. Then work with flaps only for the last 2000ft.

So if you can try to use 4000ft or 4500ft. That gives you better deceleration and the vertical flight plan should bring you to that Altitude as well.

You can also enable the approach guides for the first test, then you see the planned route as green rectangles as well as rectangles for the approach. If you stay close to them you should be fine... (if the approach doesn't happen to go through a mountain )

If you want to try an easier approach use KSFO runway 28R ILS approach. There the airport is close to sea level and you have all the space you need, no mountains, etc.

Quote from Jetjockey10

15. Takeoff = Rotate (Vr)

I was about to write that, yes. Start the takeoff rotation (pull up the nose gently) when you reach the velocity of rotation (VR).

During the initial climb phase you should pitch for a speed of V2 (magenta triangle) plus 10kts. The autopilot will do that for you if you engage it.

The tutorial isn't finished yet, we're working on it.

This usually works but isn't the correct way:

1) move your throttle to CLB

2) then press A/THR (if it's not already on)

Here are the correct way to activate the autothrust:

In flight to turn on the A320 autothrust in speed mode when the flight director is off and autopilot is off or they are not in an active CLB or DES mode:

1) Turn the speed knob to select the desired speed

2) pull the speed knob (right click) to select the airspeed manually. (Pushing the knob (left click) would make the autopilot automatically manage the speed for you, indicated by ---*)

3) Depress (left click) the A/THR button

4) Move your throttle lever forward until the thrust levers snap into the CLB detent

In flight during climb when the autopilot / flight director display "OP CLB", "CLB", "OP DES" or "DES" in the flight mode annunciator on the primary flight display

if the first column of the flight mode annunciator is blank (no autothrust mode active): Press A/THR pushbutton to arm the autothrust system

Then: advance or reduce thrust levers to the CLB detent

On ground when flight director is on:

- can't be engaged only armed:

1) Advance thrust levers to FLX or TOGA detent -> arms the autothrust

2) at 1200ft above the ground move levers back to CLB detent

To disengage:

A) pull the levers back to idle (used during the landing)

B) adjust the throttle to your liking and then push the autothrottle disconnect button that can be assigned in the control settings (recommended way)

C) puss the A/THR button a second time, then move the throttle levers to unlock the thrust (not the recommended way)

Quote from mickatmian

am on the runway. Anyway it is what it is and no one else seems bothered by it...

I've already noted down your concern and will forward the issue to the developer. I can imagine he will increase the PAPI light brightness towards the approach sector so that you can see the PAPIs better if you are aligned with the runway.

In the mean time try to increase the zoom of the camera so that the PAPIs fill more of your field of view and are rendered larger. If they are bigger than a few pixels they may be better to see.

Once we do simulate a reduced mass, fuel imbalance and asymmetric weight distribution will be a byproduct. I think it's easy to forget to switch the tanks in the Cessna for example. Sure failure simulation isn't around the corner currently but if some add on developer hops on board this could become near future. I can think of a lot of causes for a fuel imbalance, add on developers have total freedom in the Aerofly here.

Yes it would be nice to have one master option to display fuel in lbs or kg. The Q400 is prepared to feature both units as far as I remember. Changing the learjet is no big deal, getting the option into the different aircraft will probably be more difficult.

Quote from jcomm

Does the Q-400 come with simulated fuel consumption ?

Not yet. We have to program the mass reduction when fuel level is reduced over time yet and we need a GUI to set the fuel levels as well. And currently there is no option to refuel either, so there is some work to do before we can do that properly. But for now, yes we could make the fuel quantity go down and then kill then engine, would be nice to have a low fuel warning trigger and then see the engines actually fail

I can try to make the localizer center better by adding an integrator of the LOC-offset to the roll command. From my experience while testing I managed to get a perfectly centered loc in the q400 with a properly trimmed aircraft. But I'm going to attempt to fine tune it, so that you can approach with asymmetric thrust and still maintain centered LOC. The LOC on the HSI in the Q400 is actually a bit too sensitive. It should be less sensitive than the LOC deviation directly underneath the attitude.

Hm, I'm going to check the speed charts that I used.

Does the 4° come from the real aircraft or from the pitch angle that you saw in the Aerofly? The further you deflect a flap the lower the stall angle becomes. Without any slats the stall angle of the wing with 35° flaps may be just that low

Quote from bbrz

Nice video and the flying (and talking) was about a million times better than the one on the previous video

Three questions

1. Why didn't the Q400 Autopilot track the LOC correctly ?

2. The stall speed is 98kts. This seems to be a bit too high, given the fact that V_REF at MLW is 123kts AFAIK.

3. Closely related to the question above; What's the simulated weight of the Q400 ?

1. for several reasons:

a) rudder was not trimmed so he had a constant slip angle and constant side force.

b) Autopilot currently assumes a symmetric aircraft and doesn't correct a constant error (not needed for all other aircraft)

c) the localizer for this runway is at an angle to the runway in the database.

2. V_REF with flaps 15 is 122kts as far as I remember. He approached with 35° flaps where the speed needs to be lower. The effectiveness of the flaps is a bit too high for flaps 35. But the smaller flaps settings are pretty good. It's probably unseen in real life that a Q400 approaches a 3.5 or 4km runway with flaps 35. Maybe London City airport but for such a long runway as in KSFO, use flaps 10°... or 15° max.

3. Current Mass calculates to 24942 kg in total

RC helicopters typically feature electronically assisted stabilization. At least for the tail rotor. Most RC helis have symmetrical airfoils and no twist in the rotor blades.

A helicopter like the R22 doesn't have that any assistance for example and you need to use the tail a lot more. Also RC helis are way more powerful compared to their takeoff mass as well. That and aerodynamics are a little bit different at greater Reynolds numbers (more particles and less honey like viscosity compared to the size of the blade) and fully sized helicopters have transonic effects on the rotor blade that advances into the wind (part of the air is going super sonic in fast forward flight). It's this high impact velocity on one side of the helicopter's rotor which causes a lot of drag and increases the power demand and the other side of the rotor has to fight great angles of attack and even reversed flow direction in the inner part as well as stall effects. RC helis don't have that much of a problem with their higher rotation speeds or at least I think it is, have not actually run the numbers yet.

And when you fly down low the rotorwash physics could be expanded, also when you are descending though your own downwash that should be simulated better as well I think. Don't know how far the RC physics are simulating this.

If we want to create a realistic implementation of helicopter physics for full scale machines we're eventually will have to implement the transonic effects as well as more advanced ground interactions, maybe some turbulence when cutting through the own tip vortexes or when transitioning from hover to forward flight. At some point you're leaving the air mass around you that swirls around because you pushed it downwards before and you get into fresh air that is much smother, thrust increases, etc. I don't think the RC physics model that yet, there the effect might not be noticeable since your headspeed is much higher and your pitch is much smaller and air-ground-friction is greater compared to the size of the helicopter...

So yeah there are numerous differences, mostly we want to get the helicopter physics as realistic as possible for a fully sized helicopter.

The windows are only available in my developer version as I wrote in the post. Since this isn't fully functional right now this won't be added to the public versions just yet. Sorry but you'll have to wait a bit for that feature.

I actually read about the Airbus flight controls laws on this page couple hours ago. Very interesting page, thanks!
Another good page is http://www.smartcockpit.com/

There you can find a number of flight crew operating manuals.

Quote from bbrz

With the TOD indicated on the screen it's not likely that you are going to miss it and you know that you should descend.

It's much more likely that ATC doesn't let you descent when you want/need to (about 90 times out of 100)

For that reason the Airbus wants you to decelerate as you are already too high/fast as you are apparently not able to descend for whatever reason.

That makes sense, yes. If ATC doesn't clear you down at least start to reduce the energy of the aircraft by reducing speed.

Thanks!

But actually you speed up during the descent to catch up with the profile.... so it's actually not "slow down" its "get down"....

I would have written "DESCENT" instead.

The 747 just goes from VNAV PATH to VNAV ALT and pops out a message on the FMS: select lower or something like that.

This message comes on if you have flown over the top of descent but the descent has not been initiated yet.

I don't know why airbus called this "DECELERATE"...

Quote from J van E

Funny little 'bug' or oddity in the Airbus: when the PFD showed MORE DRAG I could see the top of the letters DRAG on the videoscreen next to the door. Seriously! I checked it a few times (turning the speedbrake on and off) and DRAG showed up everytime on that videoscreen! LOL No problem at all, of course, but quite odd.

Uh that is interesting! Nicely spotted!

Steam doesn't check if you edited the files manually. This is why there is a user-folder in the Aerofly that is untouchable by Steam.

In the Aerofly RC series we had the option to create modifications of the aircraft and store them inside this user folder as well. Currently there is no in game option to switch between modifications of the same aircraft so all you can do is copy paste the Learjet folder to the user directory and have your personal setups there.

I'm afraid if you didn't backup the files prior to the update they're probably gone. With the changes of this update you wouldn't be able to directly use your files anyway, but you could have copied over the cameras at least to restore them.

These game folders are "hot" and subject to change. Never assume your manual modifications are safe there. I'm sorry if you lost your files this way and really hope you have some backup hidden somewhere.

Hi Ray, maybe delete the all assignments to the airbrakes and start new. Jeff repeatedly said this may be required, so please try this for us.