Today I decided for the first time to activate failures of the category "nuisance" After a few hours (when I got myself a cup of coffee) I heard "WHOOP,WHOOP". Getting back on the flightdeck the aircraft was turning in circles and was descending.In the RW 744 you than see on the upper eicas the cause of the malfunction ( in this case disconnected center AP) what caused this malfunction ( probably a Hydraulic #1 overheat,pressure loss). Also all related items are shown on the lower eicas as status messages. In the sim all displays were free of messages, no cautions, no status.....no nothing. Is this related to my system or is it not modelled in the PDMG 744?Ton

The sim has a built-in "pilot drinking coffee" sensor. It assumes that every time you drink coffee, some of it will spill on the control panels and cause malfunctions...Think of it as a PILOT AWARENESS system ;)But seriously, Ton... if you check through previous messages, you will find that this problem occurs from time to time. Of course, if you are not at the wheel, it's hard to say what might have caused the problem, but... rapid weather changes in MSFS have often taken the blame for things like this.Perhaps adjusting your FSUIPC weather settings could prevent this? (ask the FSUIPC experts about this)Cheers.Q>

Ton-Run a search for "winds" in this forum- and you will find many lengthy posts (by me) on the topic.Short version: MSFS weather is lousy. If you experience exceptionally wide variances in the weather being imported into FS then you can expect to see what happens if you run the flight model out past the edges of it's performance envelope.For more information- find my posts on the topic from previous days.

@Ian Thanks for the lesson about the "PDC" sensor and the pilot awareness sys :-) Maybe Robert can make a type rating course on this very important issue ;-)Last question about this issue: decaf coffee does this cause severe malfunctions or are they more moderate?@ RobertI did a search but I never put a link between wind and AP disco

Ton->On the other hand in the failures menu "AP2 failed" was red>..can this be caused by winds or could have been another>cause. Sounds to me like you had "random" selected for failures? You will get an EICAS message on most all failures- but not ALL. I do not believe the aputopilot failure comes with an advisory unless the failure is caused by some other factor.If a system on the airplane fails- and the airplane is monitoring the status of a system- it will advise you.The -400 doesn't give you "consequences" schematics (like the MD11) so it is incumbant upon the pilot's knowledge to know that if you have a SYS 1 OVHT, that there are other problems that may stem from this failure...This is a long process that the engineers and the manual writers still update to this day on the airplane after it has been in service 16, 18+ years?That's the fun of random failures though, don't you think? You never quite know what will happen next- and you have to think and react like a pilot.

If you were going in circles I would bet your rudder was deflected full to one side usually it is right on my system. I do not know what causes this since I have a registered copy of FSUIPC and have set it to slow changes due to weather updates. The usual event is a sudden yaw of the aircaft, a sever loss of speed, and a decending turn. If you catch it right away the autopilot will still be connected. If you are out of the cockpit, which "Murphy" seems to catch me at, you will return to an aircraft in a turning decent with auto pilot disco'd. I have had this happen to my PMGD 737 and 747 and my Eaglesoft Citation X. I have had this happen with and without weather turned on so I am now convinced it is something inside FS9. The next time this happens jump to spotplane view and look at your rudder. I have seen on the 747 anyway if you look at the controls in the lower EICAS will show a rudder deflection. The correction is to simply cycle your rudder pedals and everything is fine again. To the best of my knowledge I never had the problem before the FS9 update.Ray