I have a question, a newbie question.

I'm making a flight and the FMC set the altitude to be at 18500'.

I have 18500' dialed into the MCP.

I'm flying in the US so the trans. alt. should be 18K right?

Well, when I went above 18K I pressed the STD button on the BARO knob and I get 18330' indicated with an STD on the ND, yet the plane won't climb to 18500'.

If I press the STD button again I get an indication of 18500' with a 30.09 BARO on the ND.

Is this correct? If not then what am I doing wrong?

 

Thanks for helping someone who's still learning.

I do not think you can cruise between the TA and TL. Either fly below 18,000 or above FL200.

Thanks, so now I know. I'm still testing this thing out and learning a lot as I go. appreciate your help.

I have a question, a newbie question.

I'm making a flight and the FMC set the altitude to be at 18500'.

I have 18500' dialed into the MCP.

I'm flying in the US so the trans. alt. should be 18K right?

Well, when I went above 18K I pressed the STD button on the BARO knob and I get 18330' indicated with an STD on the ND, yet the plane won't climb to 18500'.

If I press the STD button again I get an indication of 18500' with a 30.09 BARO on the ND.

Is this correct? If not then what am I doing wrong?

 

Thanks for helping someone who's still learning.

The AP locks onto altitude by locking into the pressure. If you leveled off prior to hitting STD, the aircraft will not adjust because it's still detecting the same pressure on the probes (doesn't matter what reference pressure you tell it to pay attention to - it's already following the pressure gradient).

 

You cannot fly in between TA and TL, but we use "lowest usable FL," which is based on the BARO pressure (29.92 or higher, TA and TL are the same.

 

Additionally, you will never cruise at 500' levels above FL180. That's Class A, all-IFR traffic. IFR traffic sep is at a minimum 5 miles and 1000' at the center level (which is what covers most of that airspace).

Thanks Kyle, that really helps explain things.

 

Appreciate it.

I have another dumb question. I have landed and shut down everything, engines are off, APU is off, BAT is off, no ground connection. Yet in the cockpit I hear sound like an APU running but outside all is silent. Is this normal?

Did you try to press Q twice to reset the sound? There is a known bug with FSX when switching views.

No I didn't even think of that, thanks, good idea. I'll try it when I fly it again tomorrow.

I have another dumb question. I have landed and shut down everything, engines are off, APU is off, BAT is off, no ground connection. Yet in the cockpit I hear sound like an APU running but outside all is silent. Is this normal?

The APU is a long way from the cockpit, I doubt you hear it ever.  You do hear fans and they are on a variety of tasks such as recirculation and equipment cooling.

I used to work these planes in real life, A&P. You can hear the APU from the cockpit loud and clear when the engines are not running.

When there is not power of any kind applied to the aircraft it is so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

I was wondering why the PMDG model does this.

I'll have to try the suggestion above about FSX's bug with the Q key.

I've had this happen on my system several when ending a long flight with a resource-intensive, high-end add-on, PMDG and others as well. Especially if I had also been using high-res scenery and real weather. It's almost as if a looping sound file for one of the systems has not closed down properly after powering off the aircraft.

When this happened the first thing I did was load a C&D panel state, no joy. Then I started the APU and powered up the aircraft then shut it down and then I had silence.

 

Probably a quirk (among many) in FSX.

This happened to me as well just now after I parked and shut everything down and removed all connections. Then I realized GSX was running. After restarting Couatl I had complete silence. Disregard if you don't have GSX.

I do have GSX running, that's odd, I never knew that. I didn't activate it though as I just taxiied into place without it.

 

I don't have this "problem" with other planes with GSX though so I'm leaning towards FSX quirks still...