FSX-SE Screen Goes Slowly Black

[jmdriskell 178]

I had a strange thing happen on a flight from KBFI to KBOI today. I was about 45 minutes into the flight when my screen started slowly getting darker until it went completely black. 

I'm running FSX-SE in Win 10 on a Dell XPS 8500 i7-3770 cpu @3.4GHz w/8GB Ram and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. I have a ASUS 24" monitor that's about 5 years old, connected to the video card with a HDMI cable.  I was running Active Sky 2016 and flying the PMDG DC-6.  I had about 800000 of virtual memory available.  Temp of the video card was about 54c.  I use FSUIPC and had FSTramp running.  I used the ASUS Tweak utility to turn off the unneeded background activities.  I had the same problem a few weeks ago but attributed it to an older video card that has since been replaced with the current one.

I'd appreciate any ideas upon where to look to try to solve this problem.

Thanks in advance,

Jim Driskell

[David H 6]

Your virtual pilot actually blacked out. In the PMDG DC-6 the screen will slowly go black above a certain altitude (I believe 14000 feet) if the atmospheric controls aren’t set right. You need to set your cabin altitude to correspond with the appropriate cruising altitude otherwise you will black out and lose your flight. I speak from experience; several times I have forgot to set my cabin altitude and have had to do a quick dive to a lower altitude to compensate before I blacked out. 🙂

 

David

[jmdriskell 178]

Duh!  Of course, it's "elementary my dear Watson" as someone used to say.  There I was, cruising at 15,000 and I ran out of gas. 

One time in the real world flight, friend and I were returning from the Grand Canyon via Lost Wages in a Piper Aztec enroute to Palomar Airport in northern San Diego County, California.  I was flying as we turned south and started climbing to cross the San Bernardino Mountains whose highest peak, is San Gorgonio at 11,500 feet.  As we cleared the highest peaks, we saw a solid wall of smog that extended up to about 15,000 feet.  We kept climbing until we cleared the smog, all the while making sure that neither of us was loosing it.  After that, I was all down hill to home.  The funny thing is my friend was a Marine C-118 driver, the exact version of the PMDG model that I like to fly.  Of course, he had a crew chief to adjust the pressurization and all I have is myself.

Lesson Learned.

 

Thanks,

 

Jim Driskell