Dear Captains,

 

Yesterday was a single most disastrous flight I had for a very long time.  So many problems that I eventually just gave up mid flight.  So I hope if anyone has some hints as to how they went wrong to please advice me, as the problems are still here.

 

I shall now give a description and highlight the events that went wrong.

 

Background/Preflight

So now I decided to fly with a VA, I am positioned at LFPG and hoping to fly back to ZGGG to report for duty.  So I looked up a flight on flightaware, took out my PFPX and did some flight planning to give me some figures.  I initially set some passengers and payload on PFPX for calcs, but when I insert the ZFW in the T7 FMC, I was surprised that the load % was so low!  As I always loved heavy planes, that's what I tried to do in planning.  Anyway I readjusted the weight to about 84% load, replanned the flight through PFPX with this new value, and exported the PLN and RTE files for AS2012, EFB and PMDG to import.

 

Cockpit Preparation/Flows

It was a long fuel uplift, I had to uplift for something like 92t of fuel and it was a long turn time.  So I decided to get the aircraft decently powered up to run off ground power.  Had the ADIRU aligned and everything, inputted the CO route and that was it.  It was a bad practice on my part that I didn't bother to take the OFP and check it against the values it inserted.  Which soon became one of the problems I experienced in air.

 

During the uplift, I went out (literally) to get dinner and returned with another 20 min to go before pushback.  This allowed me time to continue with the rest of the flows.

 

Pushback

One of the pre-pushback items IIRC was to check flight controls are ok.  So I pushed back, started the engines (with only Elec hyd pumps on, after starting the engines I turned the other ones on), and checked the flight controls. Problem 1: As I checked the flight controls, I realised my rudder input did not work, my throttles were jumpy, toe brakes weren't working.  So I checked on the overhead and everything seems fine, no warnings, no advisories.  Then I went into FSUIPC and see they were sending controls to FSX Only.  Which wasn't how I set up last time.  I however did change the settings on another profile as I've only flown the NGX for the first time after a complete reinstall.  So I had to setup controls for that.  This is the only difference I made from all other successful flights.

 

It took me a very long while to get the controls to work almost as they should, the way I did it was for rudders, I set direct FSX control in FSUIPC, while enabling the controller through FSX.  This way it seems a bit dodgy to me, but it was the only way I could get it working.  I also looked around for solutions, but couldn't find anything that was useful to me.  Soon I also realised the THRs weren't working that well as well (in flight).

 

Taxi

On taxi, I realised Problem 2:  My legs pages' vertical profiles were empty.  I can understand that they remain empty until I have exec the perf page which I did in my FMC flows.  I somehow can still arm my VNAV, but it was just not showing on the page.  Soon after, I was getting "VERT PATH FULL" message as well.  From researching around, it seems to be a debug message from the NGX days which Ryan had mentioned on one of the other threads, but there was no solution to it.

 

With a lack of experience on the T7, I am aware of the problem but have ignored it as I was interested to see what does the VNAV do when there was not Vert profile.

 

Takeoff/Climb

So without VNAV, I hand flew the bird till about 3000 ft when I activated AP.  VNAV/LNAV took over, and immediately, Problem 3 arose:  I was receiving an Insufficient Fuel warning message which is not something I haven't seen before.  I kind of ignored it till I was well under AP control.  I examined the FMC to confirm my suspicion but the FMC tells me literally that I had 0 fuel remaining when I get to "UURT"?????  "UURT"?  Why isn't it ZGGG?  So I went back to check the route page, destination was indeed showing UURT (or whatever it was I can't remember).  So I thought maybe that's why!  I quickly adjusted to ZGGG for the destination.  This time, VNAV stopped.  No vertical profile still and no arrival fuel/time information for ZGGG on the PROG page.

 

Cruise

During the early stage of the cruise at FL330 it was fine mostly, then comes Problem 4:  Speed is leaking very slowly, down to the yellow bar before the yellow box around the speed reading starts to blink.  I could not advance the THR because it was under A/T.  And the aircraft chose not to correct itself, leaving it keep going down like that.  TAT showing +47, the temperature just under the fuel readings shows -2C.  So I took it off A/T then pushed the THR up myself to get some speed.  I did exactly that and Problem 5:  I found myself that I cannot push the THR even further than about 99% N1.  When I did do that, it would jerkly jump back to about 98% N1.

 

Finally

After playing around and googling all over the place, I decided I had enough.  This flight took me already 4 hours and I haven't even been established on stable cruise.  So exited and switched off my computer.

 

Now I am looking back at it.  Knowing PMDG's work, I choose to trust that it was something I did wrong and not something A/C technical.  Therefore I ask here, to see if anyone could help me with any part of the errors?

 

Thank you for reading up to now, I know this has been a long post.  It's not just a questions post, but more something to release my frustrations.  Hope you (the readers) don't mind.

 

Again, thank you in advance, and looking forward to your replies!

 

Cheers,

One other thing I noticed was that during FMC preflight, some of the figures that the FMC is required to calculate, inside the CDU was flashing quite rapidly, similar frequency as the mouse flicker in the NGX?

No suggestions?

I can't help but all I can say is that it probably just one of those things, I too have seen weird things but more like missing fan blades and no external lights, perhaps your sim should have been restarted, if it happens again then let us know.

AFAIK, as you said, your TAT was +47 in the cruise, that's UNNATURALLY high, hopefully it's just a typo, but if it isn't, I'd suggest taking a look at that to solve your performance issues with the aircraft.

+47 is too high

 

Maybe weather program injecting wrong temperatures at that altitude causing engine not to produce required thrust.

 

The higher the temp, the lower the thrust output is.

Indeed the temperature I remember very clearly is +47.  Now I've taken the flight again.  This time its ok.  So I assume it is the weather injector's fault (which I've been having throughout many flights). My main concern currently is my VNAV path I couldn't get a calculation on the LEGS page given that my PERF is inputted correctly.  And my Destination details on the VNAV page reads 0000Z/-453.6.  Any ideas on that?

 

Though I hate to say it, from scouring the internet and the books, and the lack of information, could it just suggest that it might actually be a bug in FSX or the product itself?

Hi !

 

Did u check any single legs of the leg page? To check if there is any waypoint that have an odd distance? For example sometimes i import a saved flight but one of the waypoint, even if with the same ID, is placed at 2500 nm far from the previous and this mess up pretty all fuel calculatation and so on.

Hi !

 

Did u check any single legs of the leg page? To check if there is any waypoint that have an odd distance? For example sometimes i import a saved flight but one of the waypoint, even if with the same ID, is placed at 2500 nm far from the previous and this mess up pretty all fuel calculatation and so on.

 

Hi Alfredo,

 

I did not (probably should).  The most difference I had on this flight is that when I load CO Route, the destination airport is automatically inserted as one of the airports that I overfly on the FP.  So I manually changed that to the correct arrival airport.

 

Other than that, I can't remember seeing anything strangly wrong.

 

One other thing.  I still left the aircraft flying overnight for the arrival this morning.  When I woke up this morning, I find that the aircraft had VNAV data, except the cruising altitude is somehow set to something like 2780ft (rather than what I inserted in the PERF page, which is FL330).

 

I manually changed that again in the VNAV page to read FL350 (which was what I was flying at after step climb) and everything seemed fine hereafter.  I still can't find the cause of the problem, so this question is essentially "Unsolved"...

I suppose the problem with VNAV arose from somehow corrupted/not-to-spec exported CO ROUTE file. If I see something similar, I usually discard the route and input by hand. It does not take more than a couple minutes.

Yea that probably does make some sense.  Anyway PMDG was pretty good with technical support in terms of turnaround time... They are still investigating the problem so still not solved :(

 

I will try that flight another time, this time do it by hand and see whether that problem remains.  I'll report back.  Good suggestion Pete!