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Tim_Capps

Aerosoft DC-8 v5 Fuel Management

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I have tried the Aerosoft DC-8. It is a more polished product than the JustFlight one (which still has its charms), but fuel management did not work as advertised. In their forums, this issue is blamed on a failure to properly initialize and at one or more points patches were released to introduce a delay of some sort, but the latest release was supposed to fix that. Anyway, I don't want to continue to chase this rabbit unless other people have found fuel management to work in the Aerosoft DC-8 as it's described in the documentation. And this is for v5, which I know is not supported, but otherwise seems to work with few problems. Thanks.


 

 

 

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Tim - it appears to work as it should. I was curious and did a flight. I had no problems feeding off the respective engine aux tanks and or mains for each engine. I was then able to turn off the main tanks and run off the respective wing aux tanks. I was also able to take fuel from the wing centre tank and feed it into the main wing tanks (topping them up) while running off the wing aux tanks. I was also able to then feed from the fwd aux tank ( it feeds to both the centre tank and the wing mains at the same time). I was able to shut off the mains from the centre aux tank feeds and let that fuel feed resume into the respective wing auxillary tanks with engine fuel flow selected to take fuel from the aux not the mains. The digital and analoque readouts for the respective tanks seemed to work normally and an arithmetical cross check with the main fuel quantity indicator confirmed they were reading correctly (+/ about 5%). My conclusion was that it all worked. My only observation is that the flow rates have a little lag so the counters do not shift immediately but begin to tick over ok. It appears the fwd aux feeds into the wing aux's and  the centre aux both at the same time, the guage quantities all stabilised except the fwd aux tank which decreased over time. (I was keeping the wing aux at the magic 7000 lb marker). So the respective, fill and pump switches were working and the tank selector levers were working. I did not take the system to exhaustion due time but see no reason why it would not have done that leaving one to feed the engines off the respective mains for the remainder of the flight. The flight manual has notes about keeping the wing aux with fuel in them for weight and balance reasons but it is not exactly a simple system to get to understand either. You can see why they had a flight engineer!

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Tim I do think the fuel system is working correctly. Now the INS is another story altogether - drives me nuts - erratic in operation to say the least!

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5 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

I do think the fuel system is working correctly. Now the INS is another story altogether - drives me nuts

Just the opposite here. I have tried the tutorial and followed it to a T and could not get the fuel to transfer according to the manual or the tutorial. Could be something with that particular flight. I'll try with a different flight entirely. Yesterday I went back to the JF DC-8 and I think I'm onto something there. I got frustrated with the fuel feeding from right to left across the panel and just did a CTL-E mid-flight. I'll be darned if the fuel worked as expected afterwards (which is not as advertised, but did work). Today I tried another JF DC-8 flight (these are all back and forth between KSFO and PHNL, which says I have too much time on my hands). This time I started with CTL-E from the beginning. I watched engines one, two, three, then four start. At cruise, everything looked pretty good, so I pulled the center tank handled down and left everything else untouched. Worked fine. When the center tank ran dry I started on the four alts and that worked for a while, but there were some weird imbalances I could not correct. I decided it was close enough not to worry too much, but did have to adjust once in the dropdown menu. Looks to me like AH bugged the fuel system, but CTL-E does something very different from the way you're supposed to start. Next time, I'll just try CTL-E and not touching anything having to do with fuel. I have a hunch it will feed from the center tank then the others evenly.

Using the registry hack, my Aerosoft DC-8 wound up here: C:\P3D4 Addons\Aerosoft DC8. I guess through the magic of .xml that doesn't make any difference.


 

 

 

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3 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

Tim move it all into the the P3DV5 Addons folder it should work then

You still vastly overestimate my computer skills 😄 I solved the JF DC-8 fuel management problem, broke the Aerosoft fuel management system, lost most of my autopilot functions on the JF DC-8, have the Aerosoft INS working perfectly. Between the two of them, there's a really nice DC-8 in there! But it doesn't matter because lately I face a new little green circle of death (or at least coma) lately where P3D becomes unresponsive. Sort of like my kids whenever they remember where I live and I start talking about what it was like whenever and I can see that little green circle going round and round in their eyes. They get all milky-looking, too, but that might just be my cataracts.


 

 

 

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For the sake of completeness for anyone who finds this thread, getting the Aerosoft DC-8 to work in P3Dv5 required replacement of the original xml loader app to an updated version. When you start that, it gives you an option for P3Dv5, and now the fuel and load manager works and the fuel management system works as advertised. It's cool to see how the 1 and 4 alts automatically feed their mains once the latter are below a certain level. The Aerosoft's working INS is also a plus. I don't regret the JF purchase, because there's a lot of good fluff and fuel management is a real challenge (though not a realistic one). It's a fun hop-in-and-push-the-throttle-forward type of airplane and includes a lot of different models and history. But for investing in a long flight, the Aerosoft one is the way to go.

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