That's a goog idea. How do I do that? Where is the ini-file and what should I look for?

I'm not on my FSX rig right now, but you go to your root FSX install>pmdg>pmdg 737ng>aircraft. There you will see your aircraft .inis for your different liveries. You want to open the one that you have the most hours on, and copy the last two sections (they will have a bunch of numbers and say something like [failure groups] for one section and [failure items] for the other). After this, go into the other livery .ink you want to copy this data to, highlight it, and choose paste. Remember to save your file when you paste it. Hope this helps, like I said I'm doing this from memory as I don't have access to my FSX computer right now, so tell me if you need more help because this might not be 100% accurate, but hopefully you'll be able to figure it out with these instructions.

Ok. Good tips above. Thanks!

 

So I have learned how to copy the failure settings from one livery to another. And that you can input a workload number for a livery (maybe 85 hours per week). But when I open the .ini file I don't understand much about those numbers. If I want to input a specifik hour for my livery, where do I do that? What exactly are the numbers that I am looking to edit?

I'd like to resurrect this topic. I was going to post something, but this member above has the exact same question I have.

 

Very similar situation, I can only fly an hour or so a night. I would like to have it so that when I start a flight, the failures are serviced based... but random.

 

A real pilot goes to work in the morning and gets into a plane to make their flight. That flight has a relative random number of hours flown on it since the last maintenance check. Could be a few.. could be hundreds up to the limit of service, to the pilot, its random.

 

For me, when I sit down in the PMDG, it only has hours accumulated that I flew... and that's if I save the flight the night before and pick up where I left off (as far as I understand). Part of the problem is I have completed my round the country circuit and now just pick and choose random routes every night. I'll load from the FSX menu page. I'll pick an airport, a time, and load at the gate with the default 737, then load the NGX. When I do this, am I correct in assuming the "log" for the failures is reset to 0? So when I fly every night, I'm getting a freshly serviced airplane. I do not want to have to open up an .ini file and manually randomly shuffle the hours before every flight, which if I understand is the solution discussed in the above posts.

 

What I'd like to do is load up at the gate and have a random number of hours logged into the airplane. Is there a way to do this? And failing that... if my own accumulated hours are all I can go by, should I be saving the panel state at the conclusion of every flight, and then reload the panel state at the start of the next one?

 

Some background on my assumption: When I was picking up where I left off, it was obvious the oil quantity went down ever so slightly every night, similar with the hydraulic fluid. Eventually, I had to get it serviced. Since loading fresh every night, the oil quantity is always 98-99 percent, similar with the hydraulics. For this reason I assume it starts fresh with every re-load.

 

Thank you

Hours will accumulate in an airframe whichever panel state you start with. Quantities will always be the same if you load from a fresh panel state. If you load from a state saved after your previous flight, oil quantity will be what is was so will reduce each time.

Kevin thank you for the info, I didn't realize I was accumulating even when starting fresh at different airports. The full quantities made me assume they weren't accumulating.

From the lack of responses to this post, I'm guessing what I am looking for doesn't exist. It seems that although my hours are accumulating, I have the similar problem of the original poster; the hours are accumulating very slowly.

 

For future consideration, it might be cool to have a failure option so that the hours are shuffled at the start of each flight... or a shuffle button on the PMDG settings page on the FMC.

 

Example, you load up, go into the FMC and click "shuffle hours" or something -

 

Then the plane will generate a random number of hours logged and either be more prone or less prone to having an anomaly show up during the flight. Perhaps random items will go inop (maybe a light or two burn out) and the oil and hydraulic quantities shuffle. Maybe you could even activate a maintenance report too to bring yourself up to speed on the state of the plane.

You can get the same results as your suggestion by using random events instead of service based failures. See Introduction starting on page 94.

Kevin, you are correct. However, I am in agreement with the original poster in that it appears that the minimum you can set the random events to is one per ten hours - and I think that's too frequent.
 

On an average night, I'll fly an hour and a half.. an hour in the air. If I set the random failures to 1, that means I'd probably see something wrong about once a week. How often do real world pilots see a failure? I honestly have no idea... is it once a week? month? year?

As I mentioned, I have no idea but once a week seems high to me.

Perhaps they didn't model it this way because most people probably either do or they don't... as in they want to see / practice failures (training) or they don't want to see them at all. I think I'm an oddball as I want to see them, but I want them to be very rare.