After FSX Control panel is up and aircraft, airport and flight plan selected, click "Fly now" screen goes black white window and progress bar as scenery, terrain and everything loads. Start flight and sometimes black screen and progress bar flash then flight resumes, this can occur any time during the flight. Only had a couple of instances where the "flash" stayed and FSX was locked up.

Any ideas on where to look?

 

FSX Gold, FSUIPC4, UT Alaska, Anchorage X

Whenever you have a black screen where you are viewing the aircraft, it indicates that you are running low of resources and FSX is trying to catch up with all of the demands you are requesting.  One of these causes is the loading of photoscenery.  Even though you do not plan on flying over a particular piece of photoscenery (most Orbx/FTX products like PNW, are photoscenery), the scenery will still load and FSX has to do all of this plus load your flightplan scenery, plus load the weather, the AI, Autogen (Autogen is loaded in many cases even though you have it turned off as all .bgl's in the FSX/scenery/World/scenery file are loaded whether you want them loaded or not).  If you have high fsx.cfg and/or display driver settings, this will increase the load times.  I remember with my photoscenery, I had to wait over 20 minutes for my aircraft view screen to start displaying the aircraft.  I had to wait another 20 minutes after loading FSX.  This is when I found out about all of the photoscenery loading and recommended everyone get SceneryConfigEditor and disable all of the scenery you will not be using during a particular flight.

 

Another reason for the black screen could be the aircraft is not properly installed and is having trouble rendering in the aircraft view.  This happens mainly with individuals installing a non-commercial aircraft, a freebee.  If it is not installed properly, the screen will be black.  It happens rarely but it happens.  Most of it is caused by the scenery loading and high settings. 

 

Another reason for black screens could be a bad tweak.  It was not set properly in your Fsx.cfg or the tweak just does not work for your computer system.  The only way to troubleshoot that is to rename your fsx.cfg, restart fsx and let the config rebuild.  If there are no problems loading, then it was most likely a high setting or tweak.

 

If during a flight you have fsx reloading everything again, then you need to turn off synchronization with the fsx clock in the FSUIPC (registered version only) or, if you have an addon that controls FSX time, then you need to turn off synchronization.

 

When all of this happened to me it scared the heck out of me as it usually happens at the strangest times and I really worry a crash will ensue. 

 

Hope this helps.  I hope too that I understood your question.  Just remember, anything fsx goes black, whether flying, at startup, wherever, it's because your system is having issues rendering.

 

Best regards,

Deleted - Jim's answer is a lot better!

 

:lol:

Thank you gentlemen. This first started after installing FSUIPC and enabling the clock synch, so that will be my first change.

Deleted - Jim's answer is a lot better!

 

:lol:

Finally!  Maybe I did something right for once.

 

Best regards,

:lol: Right on the money Jim. Turned clock sync off, FSX loaded faster and not reloading. Thanks again

Nice one, James!