California USA - Picking the way through clouds - GA flying

[Rogen 1,087]

A bit of flying in California USA and finding my way through clouds in the trusty A2A C182 (trusty only provided it's kept maintained that is).

The A2A C182 is a great plane to fly, load it up with passengers and cargo and it handles very differently to just a single pilot and can be quite the handful to fly.

And it you don't do the walkarounds and neglect maintenance it's just as likely to fail (see end pic...)

Found a gap!

And into it I go

And out the other side.

Lack of maintenance on a A2A accusim aircraft can result in falling out of the sky!

[bernd1151 5,854]

Fantastic shots, I really like the second and fourth one! But what happened later on, did you run out of fuel or forgot to clean the spark plugs? No way to sail to the ground? 😊😊

[woodhick 504]

No kick the tires and light the fires for you.  Fun airplane and yes, forget or simply ignore maintenance at your peril.

[mjw25 42]

Rogen, nice shots, thanks for sharing.....

[rightseat 277]

Dropped the flaps over the max speed, eh?

[Rogen 1,087]

Hey Folks,

Thanks for the comments.

The last three pics are from FSX-SE back when the A2A C182 was my first A2A purchase / experience.

And yeah I treated it a little roughly (didn't know much about A2A aircraft back then), most planes I was flying back then (the defaults) didn't seem to care or matter if the flaps were dropped at speed or otherwise abused.

However the last three pics were the result of a total unexpected and completely sudden failure, I guess the flaps had accumulated enough damage from my rough flying to just suddently cause the type of fail seen.

Taught me to actually perform the walkarounds, look for damage and review the aircraft in the A2A hanger a bit more often (than not at all  ).

Cheers

[gaab 111]

Nice pictures 🙂

I see you are using "Real Trim".

This addon looks interesting. Could you give some feedback.

Thanks.

Gérard

 

 

[Rogen 1,087]

1 hour ago, gaab said:

I see you are using "Real Trim".

This addon looks interesting. Could you give some feedback.

Well, hmmm.

It works by the pilot first positioning the joystick for level flight, then you hit the Real Trim key and release the joystick, at which point the joystick is "Trimmed" and you can fine tune it with the mouse wheel.

It installs a vjoy driver which was a bit of an issue for myself due to having it already installed (a really old version though) but I worked through it.

P3D needs to be configured in the axis dept. so that the vjoy driver is what controls the elevator, simple to do as it is just axis assignments.

There is a tool for inserting the required config into aircraft, I only did it once to test, then with the sample configuration I redid to make the otherwise bigass RealTrim button in the LH bottom corner a lot smaller and very transparent so as to not be so noticable, and similar for the RealTrim gauge in the top LH corner.

I then use the pre-configuration to manually insert the modified RealTrim config into the aircraft.cfg file, note it's not difficult, essentually it is just a copy of what the tool does but it's me doing the copy and pasting and number updating.

There are a few quirks.

Occasionally it hangs and you loose all elevator control, killing the RealTrim exe off in Task Manager and reloading the aircraft gets elevator control back.

The RealTrim.exe also doesn't quit when P3D is shutdown.

Otherwise it works well enough, the bigass button on the LH bottom corner was my biggest pain but with a little config it is no longer a prob.

Cheers

[Phantom88 3,287]

***Amazing Clouds***

[gaab 111]

12 hours ago, Rogen said:

Well, hmmm

Thank you for this detailed feedback.

Cheers, Gérard

[P_7878 6,593]

I do not recall, in recent memory, seeing, here, such methods of "Picking the way through clouds - GA flying"...🙂...

Yes, amazing clouds for sure, but amazing pilot too...!