Well, it was one of those days, I guess.  I told someone I'd do a test flight to try something out.  Planned a flight from KATL to KIAD.  Nice weather...nice plane.  Everything went wrong. 

 

First attempt:  Decided to do it in a different paint of the airplane.  Found out that my mouse macros (yes, I need mouse macros for this plane) don't work in the other repaint.  Stop the sim, go back to the other repaint.

 

Second attempt:  The FSX flightplan that I filed got modified by FSX when I changed the cruise altitude and I got sent to a fix that I don't even know what it is.  Stop, try again.

 

Third attempt:  Check the flight plan, altitude is fine but the ATC program didn't recognize the altitude and kept telling me to decend to 0.  Reload.

 

Fourth attempt:  My MCP got a glitch and kept turning off and on the autopilot.  Restart the MCP, reload the flight.

 

Fifth attempt:  Reaching for the menu I accidentally touch the titlebar of FSX, I resize the window.  I resize it back but FSX crashes.

 

Sixth attempt:  Edit the flight plan text file, load it, everything is working.  Fly all the way to 2 mile final...graphics card crashes and I get a blank screen.

 

Ugh.  So many little things can go wrong with anything and everything and it amounts to sim hell.  A one hour flight turned into five hours.  The last flight was beautiful and busy...until it died.

Yup, the best laid plans ...

 

I don't know if you use FSUIPC but if you do I thought I'd mention that I always do my aircraft assignments to take advantage of the substring matching. At the start of my FSUIPC4.ini:

 

ShortAircraftNameOk=Substring

 

Then as an example suppose all my RA Duke B60 paints in the aircraft.cfg have the substring "RealAir Duke B60 V2", so I assign to a profile like this:

 

[Profile.Twin Engine Prop Yoke]

1=RealAir Duke B60 V2

 

Mostly likely any new repaint will use the same substring in the title= line, so I don't need to do anything to assign the new paint to the correct profile, it will automatically match.

 

 

I don't know if you use FSUIPC but if you do I thought I'd mention that I always do my aircraft assignments to take advantage of the substring matching. At the start of my FSUIPC4.ini:

ShortAircraftNameOk=Substring

 

I actually have that set.  For some reason it didn't work.  I just reloaded and tried it again and *surprise* it worked.  Still...one of those things that can go wrong.