Autopilot "fix"

[Kronzky 34]

It seems a lot of people have issues with the autopilot going crazy.

I just had a nice, uneventful flight over a few hours, mostly controlled by AP, but noticed that, once I go into Active Pause, that's when it lost its mind.

It looks like the problem is not actually caused by the autopilot, but by the plane itself. I was working on a generic AP, so I tried checking and resetting all kinds of parameters, but no no avail. BUT — once I reloaded the plane, all problems went away!  So, if you have developer mode turned on, just reload the plane, and everything should be fine again. Sure, if you do that in the air, you might have to do a few quick corrections, but at least you have your AP back!

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

26 minutes ago, Kronzky said:

It seems a lot of people have issues with the autopilot going crazy.

I just had a nice, uneventful flight over a few hours, mostly controlled by AP, but noticed that, once I go into Active Pause, that's when it lost its mind.

It looks like the problem is not actually caused by the autopilot, but by the plane itself. I was working on a generic AP, so I tried checking and resetting all kinds of parameters, but no no avail. BUT — once I reloaded the plane, all problems went away!  So, if you have developer mode turned on, just reload the plane, and everything should be fine again. Sure, if you do that in the air, you might have to do a few quick corrections, but at least you have your AP back!

Could you help me out active pause - I hit pause break but sim does not pause what am I missing - thanks 

[michaelray 236]

17 minutes ago, Richard Sennett said:

Could you help me out active pause - I hit pause break but sim does not pause what am I missing - thanks 

Rich there is more conventional pause commands that you can assign to the keyboard. Go into your keyboard bindings and search pause. When you see them it will make sense.

These will act like pause as we were used to except the sound will remain active.

[kerosene31 349]

You want to look for "Set pause on" and "set pause off".  That's regular pause.  I use p for pause and [ for unpause.  The strange thing is esc is mapped to the pause toggle, but that brings up the menu (and does pause).  So, i think you need 2 keys.

Active pause does cause problems.  Your airspeed can drop to zero with active pause which will leave you in a bad spot when you resume.  It isn't the autopilot, the AP can't help if there's no airspeed.  

I've had no AP issues since I stopped using active pause.

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

Ill look into it guys thank you much

[raymar 969]

I recommend you use two different keys one for on one for off.  Toggle is not good.

I assigned P for pause and CTRL +P for unpause.

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

5 minutes ago, raymar said:

I recommend you use two different keys one for on one for off.  Toggle is not good.

I assigned P for pause and CTRL +P for unpause.

Great 🙂

[ThomseN_inc 1,128]

To pause the sim i just hit ESC.

Just curious: Is there any difference between pausing the sim (with its assigned command) and just hit ESC to stay in the Menu?

Edited September 13, 2020 by ThomseN_inc

[Kronzky 34]

4 hours ago, ThomseN_inc said:

Just curious: Is there any difference between pausing the sim (with its assigned command) and just hit ESC to stay in the Menu?

I'm not 100% sure what's causing the AP to go haywire. It's not that whenever you pause the game that it goes crazy.
It seems to have more to do with how long the pause is (as in some situations the airspeed will continue to decrease during a pause, and once it goes to 0, I suspect that's when things go wrong). But it has happened to me when going into dev slew mode, and I suspect (in the right circumstances) that it can also happen in the regular Esc pause.

But now, that I have a fix for when it does happens, I don't worry too much anymore about why it happened in the first place... ;)

[andyjohnston.net 617]

Yes, I've found if I Active Pause for just a few seconds to look around, resuming isn't an issue.  But if I have to go do something else then come back, the sim will have gone crazy in the meantime.

[fppilot 4,371]

5 hours ago, ThomseN_inc said:

To pause the sim i just hit ESC.

Just curious: Is there any difference between pausing the sim (with its assigned command) and just hit ESC to stay in the Menu?

I have found three ways to pause:

Active Pause.  This is the pause type that is problematic if left paused for any considerable length of time.  I've had read 30 seconds.  I have read more than a couple of minutes.  Airplane goes crazy when the sim is taken off of pause.

Set Pause On/Set Pause OFF (in keyboard setup/key assignment in Options Controls).  My experience is that this method is reliable.  I assigned the adjacent keys "P" to Pause on, "O" to Pause off.  This keeps you in the cockpit where you can study an make some changes, I believe mostly to camera positions. Thanks to Bert P. for pointing that out to me.

Use the Esc key.  This takes you away from the aircraft/cockpit, but Resume takes you back in the aircraft.  Have also found this to be reliable, though you are not in the cockpit where you can study or make changes.

[mjw25 42]

Thanks Frank, it worked for me.....

[Flyfaster_MTN002 412]

18 hours ago, Kronzky said:

It seems a lot of people have issues with the autopilot going crazy.

I just had a nice, uneventful flight over a few hours, mostly controlled by AP, but noticed that, once I go into Active Pause, that's when it lost its mind.

It looks like the problem is not actually caused by the autopilot, but by the plane itself. I was working on a generic AP, so I tried checking and resetting all kinds of parameters, but no no avail. BUT — once I reloaded the plane, all problems went away!  So, if you have developer mode turned on, just reload the plane, and everything should be fine again. Sure, if you do that in the air, you might have to do a few quick corrections, but at least you have your AP back!

Had same after active pause (ESC) not only did it go berzerk, it did it repeatedly when switched on.

Also noticed same issue after time warping ahead to 'descent' portion of FP.

Edited September 13, 2020 by Flyfaster

[Kronzky 34]

Yeah, once the autopilot loses its mind, there's no way (that I have found so far) to reset it — other than reloading the plane.

Like I said in the OP, I was working on a generic AP, and tried to manually reset all kinds of internal AP-related parameters, but not only did none of them look suspicious, resetting them didn't have any effect either.

[Elvensmith 165]

The autopilot still goes bananas. even without active pause.

Decided to do a quick flight from Cardiff to London in the A320. Very hard to get it to maintain VS mode during climb, it boosted to a ridiculous 5000fpm instead of 1800.

On approach to London City I wondered why the altitude wasn't holding to intercept the ILS and noticed it had gone off. And don't get me started on the A/T!