Grounded

 

my demise...started mid air, 15,000 AGL over The Sheep Mountain Wilderness, Destination Burbank, CA. , when my joystick's connecting/support post suffered catastrophic failure by breaking in half.

 

...control ...in my hand...wires exposed...connected....to nothing...

 

...screaming, in certain and dark rage, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO..."

 

...the horror, knowing....I will be...

 

...in mere seconds, hopelessly out of control...helpless.

 

It was to be an eight minute-thirty-two second scream...cursing God......

 

..my pre-flight checklist? Could I have...

 

...after only three minutes the insane ...repeating, soon-to-be-dead-animalistic curses...devolve into ragged, whistling, air gasping hyper breath.

 

?..calm....MotherFu....think

 

....what can...I..

 

......thinnnnnnnnnk!!!!

 

...My body is tensing for the almost vertical impact, to follow...when? Everything but my main flight control still works....lets see...10,560 feet now at...2012 feet per minute ...spinning now...*******, maybe the Gs will black me out..Please!....God!!!

 

Less than five minutes...sick....awwwshiittt...vomiting into my just cleaned control panel...can't read the guages...G forces keeping me from raising my head, my arms, to clean away my lunch from the altimeter.

 

Four minutes ten seconds...before my eyes, my lips, my toes, fingers, my tongue..my guts become indistinguishable from the twisted aluminum and shattered carbon-fiber fuselage pieces ...blown further apart and consumed by the aviation gas fireball ...spreading lascivious tongues of orange and oily black tendrils into the sky and over rocks and desiccated scrub of the Burbank hills ...spinning faster...

 

...rudder can't correct...autopilot??...Won't lock...too ...Late...

 

...three minutes -thirty-something-seconds at...I can read the Altimeter now...and the VSI ...my gorge streaming away ...partially clearing the gauge faces by the centrifugal force -2530 feet per minute...

 

A rippPPBANG! To my right...

 

Wowwwwwww...right wing...departs...red speed brakes...scissored-up into extension...in hopeless prayer..

 

Wing....pretty....lazily tumbling ...above my plexiglas canopy...speeding upward and away.. still fluttering...... Like a spiraling, broken angel...

 

...can't..move....Gs....fuuuuuuc.......dark...thankyouDark...darker

 

..an image forms in my shadowing mind...family pictures from the mantle of the farmhouse....circling my head...my wife, son,my daughter, my estranged-by-distance younger-brother, my best friend mom, dead, eight years...

 

....I love Mayla…

 

love you Christ...ian…

 

love ....Halleyy....so.sorrrrryyy...I never...kissdyerkids..beauti…

 

…love youSterling...I wish.....

 

....darrrrrrrrrk.....

 

…Mimiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii..................

 

....

 

..

 

.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some Days You Just Have More Fun than Others - Johnman B)

  That's a great story. Funny as heck! As for the joystick, it looks like a quick and easy fix at your local machine shop. Just do the disassembly/re-assembly yourself, to save some cash. The cost of the aluminum will be minimal, it's the machining that can cost. For a little piece like that, maybe 5-10 minutes work. Certainly will be cheaper than buying a new stick.

 

Jazz

They're not cheap, but the Thrustmaster Warthog has a lot of steel, it is precise and quite heavy.

 

Reminds me of an old story about the instructor pilot sitting in back asked the student in front to give him the stick and the kid pulled the stick out and handed it to him.

  The base may be steel, but that handle is aluminum, or worse pot metal. Aluminum can be tig welded, pot metal would have to be carefully brazed.

I think his better option is to have a local shop make a new piece. It might cost him a bottle of whisky, or rum, but he will have a much sturdier repair. 

 

Jazz

The base may be steel, but that handle is aluminum, or worse pot metal. Aluminum can be tig welded, pot metal would have to be carefully brazed.

 

Aluminum would be lighter would it not? And if pot metal , would not the brazed section be weaker than the original structure?

 

Thanks,

Chas

 

 

Reminds me of an old story about the instructor pilot sitting in back asked the student in front to give him the stick and the kid pulled the stick out and handed it to him.

lol

 

 

Aluminum would be lighter would it not? And if pot metal , would not the brazed section be weaker than the original structure?

 

Aluminum may lighter, but it really depends on the type metals that make up the pot metal alloy. (ie, zinc, aluminum, magnesium, lead, copper)

As for the brazed section being weaker, the brazing material will usually be stronger than the surrounding metal being brazed. It is usually the original material that will break again. 

  Brazing pot metal is very difficult to do. It is so easy to overheat the material, and have the whole thing turn to a puddle of sludge right before your eyes. I learned the hard way. 

 

Jazz

Rudder and trim, man! You could have made it!!

puddle of sludge right before your eyes. I learned the hard way.

 

...jjust ran across this… https://youtu.be/Sh5W0xbZ9es ...I have a similar alloy rod for brazing aluminum or "welding aluminum… Can't remember the name of it but it's pretty cool... Uses the same principle as solder melting at lower than its constituent parts separately.

 

Chas

Rudder and trim, man! You could have made it!!

without ailerons or elevator… theoretically...you might be right...Please show us In your next vid...I'm always up for not dying ...'sides, Alan, I was just dramatizing and using poetic License over the physical breaking my TM HOTAS Warthhog joystick in twain... Any event that should never happen considering the cost… Keep up the good work!

 

Chas

As you all who read this topic know, I've lost my joystick, and I am Jones'n to fly...I can get my paid FSUIPC to let the mouse wheel zoom, and trim and look....I CANNOT get Mouse as Yoke (MAY) to work...

 

NOTES:

1.MAY DOES work when I Check allow P3d controls in settings/Controls, so;

1a. it looks like FSUIPC is somehow influencing the use or lack there of, of MAY...or;

1b. there is a conflict with FSUIPC ONLY running Thus MAY NOT WORKING and;

1c. Not a conflict when BOTH P3D controls & FSUIPC running...Thus MAY IS WORKING which;

1d. sounds totally counter-intuitive and screwy.

 

2. I've assigned a HOTAS THROTTLE button through FSUIPC to directly toggle MAY and it and;

2a CTRL Y still toggles "+" sign on the screen INDICATING MAY is active but;

2b. mouse movement forward or back produces no Pitch variation and;

2b1. Moving the mouse left and right produces no Aileron events.

2c BOTH Elevator and Ailerons had their FSUIPC calibrations reset(NOT SET) as a test in furtherance of the MAY goal.

 

Scratching my noggin here folks… Any ideas?

 

Thanks,

 

Chas

 

 

 

 

Any help?

Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, 12 years of flying almost everyday.  Best piece of hardware I've ever owned.

Chas, that was a great story to go along with the catastrophic joystick failure.

 

Thanks again stans!

 

This is the right link to the Complete Teardown of the Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog Flight Stick

 

 

to determine cause and remedy of the Catastrophic Failure of the support/connecting rod...physically decapitating the stick from the base...like a a master surgeon removed your head from your body - leaving all the the nerves and blood-vessels pristinely intact...Whoa!...howzat for nightmares!...

 

Anyway, since

1. Thrustmaster did not return my email plea, save a notification that they HAD received my request for support and or parts and;

2. This stick is over 5 years old...4 years out of warranty, I decided to open it up and see if I could fix it.

 

IT IS DEFINITELY FIXABLE...you will see in this vid that a REPLACEABLE PART detailed in all of it's 3-d rotating glory... failed...a part that was;

A. not properly affixed to the pot-metal-like Flight Stick body...because;

1.Only one of the two machine screws locations were anchored, the other was EMPTY, and;

B. The body of the Flight Stick AND the support/connecting rod has not enough iron content to attract a Neodymium magnet.... it IS steel feeling but..not;..and;

C. Stick body and support/connecting rod assy, are way too heavy for aluminium, so most likely it's an alloy.

D. As one of my Flight Sim Colleagues suggested, probably ...Pot Metal...great for precision Die-Casting....kinda sucky for strength especially the way it was designed with a "waist"...or narrow part of the support/connecting rod, .this area is precisely where the failure occurred..lets not mince words...it broke in two.

 

It is an the ONE area of ANY joystick, real or simulated that is SUPPOSED to aid in "Turning and Burning" in the A-10C....thus subjected to the most stress...and;

1. I was NOT in a Warthog...rather my Lancair Legacy in bumpy but manageable weather...

.

 

I did this project because I saw nothing on Youtube on the Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog Flight Stick Disassembly...base disassembly for the "stiction" problem....yes...

 

...but not the Flight Stick itself.

 

 

 

Chas

Update....While I wait for the arrival of my decapitated Joystick handle from Thrustmaster...replacement...Promised for today, I Have been trying an alternate controller for the last two weeks...

 

I finally got wireless and roll/pitch sensors working...hours ago. A PS3 Dual Shock 3...emulating either itself with Assignable buttons/Switches/Axes OR;

Emulating an X-Box Controller

https://youtu.be/9cCmrVamMBI

Hardware:

I7-6700K/GTX 1080,

TrackIR V5

 

Prepar3d V3.3.5 .17625

Orbx North American land class

 

AS16.ASCA/Rex Soft Clouds -The clouds you see coming in from the west are real we're due for a storm so I took a dip in the pool just before editing this…https://imgur.com/znKf9EP... I can hear the thunder getting closer as the as I write this… Grin

 

Are we having fun yet? ...

Real Air Lancair V2 for P3d

K69 Carnes Farm AirPort and FBO Courtesy of ScruffyDuck's ADE PhotoReal Scenery of Carnes Farm and all visible buildings done in Gmax, textures updated for P3dv3 by Chas using Arno Gerretsen's wonderfully designed and supported ModelConverterX.

ViewGroups as Drawn from My and Beau Hollis' interpretation of Mark Hargrove's wonderful ViewGroups Tutorial https://db.tt/88Dtkwu1

PS3 Dual Shock Wireless Controller:

1.Set-up through FSUIPC Direct Axes / Motion Joy - See

Roll, Elevators Axes set

Buttons:

Throttle Up/Down Left/Right Shoulder Buttons

,Gear-Right Dpad

SpeedBrakes(Spoilers Toggle ) Left Dpad

Trim up/Down(Aigned to DPad up/Down

Note: Both Left and Right Triggers are actually Axes

 

Enjoy

Chas