I'm following along with Tutorial #1, and am having trouble leveling off at my altitudes. As you can see in the screenshot, I blew right past the initial 5000 ft target, and am still climbing at a pretty good rate. The autopilot will eventually go into a descent trying to get back to my altitude, but then will pass it on the way down too. It keeps doing this with bigger oscillations until I either stall or overspeed if I don't disengage the AP and intervene. Any ideas what I might have missed? I've gone through the tutorial a few times to be sure I didn't skip a step. Thanks for any help!

 

 

Try turning all weather off (the screenshot makes it appear to be off, but if it isn't, try that).

Other than that, it just seems like things are out of sorts. The F/D drives the A/P, so it really shouldn't be that far off of the flight director. Everything looks to be in the right mode, though.

I have the weather set to clear skies, per the tutorial. I also tried deleting my FSUIPC4.ini file on the off chance this was related to the known climb bug mention in the PMDG knowledge base. No dice.

Hardware trim axes?

Good idea, but unfortunately that didn't seem to be it. I removed the elevator trim axis from my Saitek trim wheel, in case that was messing with the automatic trim. No change.

I just tried the flight again, and this time it got to around 2500 ft before it went into a dive until it was overspeed. All of the autopilot components seem to be properly set and are displaying the correct mode on the PFD. Very strange.

This looks very odd, I think you should submit a support ticket.

Basic advice, but did you reinstall?

 

 

Sent from my iPhone...typing errors imminent

Not yet, but it's a fresh install. I'll try reinstalling, and if that doesn't work, I'll submit a ticket.

Okay, I figured it out. I'm using a Flight Illusion force feedback yoke, which runs a separate application to manage the force feedback, autopilot follow mode, etc. That was interfering with the vnav. Disabling it fixed the problem. I'll take a look on Flight Illusion's forums to see if there's a better work-around than just disabling it. Thanks for all the suggestions.

Yeah Travis - the NGX's autopilot and stuff are fully custom and exist outside of what FSX "knows about" internally. For something like this to work with the NGX it'd probably require that the manufacturer program a driver using our SDK.

Yeah, that makes sense. I sent an e-mail to Flight Illusion's support to see if they have any suggestions or work-arounds. I'll report back if they have anything useful, in case someone else is trying to use one of these things.

I know that I am really late on the subject, being that you already figured it out... but just by looking at the pic, ... Your Altitude Hold is not turned on. Might want to check on that. Also, I see that you have AutoThrottle turned on, but there is no Mach selected, or speed in the box, and the IAS/Mach buttons are not turned on.

 

coupled with the programming software of your controller, I am sure that all of this might play a really big part in holding 5000' @ 250 KIAS.

 

 

Just Saying.

The speed box is blanked because he is in VNAV, the VNAV constraints are shown in magenta on the PFD. The speed box would only show a number if he used speed INTV.

From Flight Illusion support:

....

Currently we look at the internal MS-FS autopilot offsets, but possibly PMDG uses other offsets to set/read the autopilot modes. If you can get these I can see whether we can make these references configurable to match the add-on(s).

 

Should I point him to the SDK? Where can I find that?