I wonder what was available at this time as a weather briefing to prepare their flights? Each flight was probably like a new adventure for these Pioneer pilots, and alternate diversion a common part of it.

6 hours ago, roland_lfor said:

I wonder what was available at this time as a weather briefing to prepare their flights? Each flight was probably like a new adventure for these Pioneer pilots, and alternate diversion a common part of it.

Great question! Seems there were regulated flights to verify weather aloft but its not clear from this source how that information was disseminated.

https://vlab.noaa.gov/web/nws-heritage/our-stories2/-/categories/6721988

Just the idea that an add on like this inspires us to learn more and expand our knowledge and skill sets - including learning a bit about  Morse code should we went to - makes it such a fantastic piece of work.  Best value I have seen yet for this sim!

 

Yeah; I would like som kind of FO telling me if things are about to go south. Just spent 40 mins in the air, thinking I'd got everything under control. 

Then engine one died on me. 

One minute later; engine two burst into flames.

Didn't end well. 

1 minute ago, Swe_Richard said:

Yeah; I would like som kind of FO telling me if things are about to go south. Just spent 40 mins in the air, thinking I'd got everything under control. 

Then engine one died on me. 

One minute later; engine two burst into flames.

Didn't end well. 

😂😜 

cheers 😉

32 minutes ago, Swe_Richard said:

Yeah; I would like som kind of FO telling me if things are about to go south. Just spent 40 mins in the air, thinking I'd got everything under control. 

Then engine one died on me. 

One minute later; engine two burst into flames.

Didn't end well. 

It looks like doesn't matter what you do engine will fail eventually. I had several flights ok and then out of blue in exactly the same environment and power setting engines just quit . Frankly not fun at all, especially without any clue what went wrong.

6 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

It looks like doesn't matter what you do engine will fail eventually. I had several flights ok and then out of blue in exactly the same environment and power setting engines just quit . Frankly not fun at all, especially without any clue what went wrong.

Yup, that is my perception as well. It's a real bummer. 

39 minutes ago, Swe_Richard said:

Yeah; I would like som kind of FO telling me if things are about to go south. Just spent 40 mins in the air, thinking I'd got everything under control. 

Then engine one died on me. 

One minute later; engine two burst into flames.

Didn't end well. 

Haha, yeah same for me. Somewhere in flight the engines just quit for no apparent reason. With regret I decided to have only electric failures active and now all is fine and working.

But what a Great plane! The paintwork is spot on with being old plane weathered and not shiny. And the animations are many and subtle (did you notice the radio wire moving in the wind?) From now on I won't believe AS anymore when they say they can't do things because of performance, I have great performance in this plane.

Only thing I wish for is a invisible autopilot that keeps heading and alt as to simulate a co-pilot.

25 minutes ago, Gerwil said:

Only thing I wish for is a invisible autopilot that keeps heading and alt as to simulate a co-pilot.

It should really have a visible autopilot to be honest; there was one on the real thing.

1 hour ago, sd_flyer said:

It looks like doesn't matter what you do engine will fail eventually.

 

No, I had many hours meanwhile.
Had the same experience at the beginning until I realised I haven't taken care about RPM.
Do not say that this is "your weak point" but maybe there's also one item you oversee.

Since then, as long as I stay in the ranges everything works:

RPM lower then 2100
CHT about 200F and above
Oil pressure between 60 and 90 psi
Manifold in the white range
Carb heat 100F (however i find this high)
Oil temp below 167F (but wasn't reaching that as it is winter)

right oil grade of course and be aware to not mix oil grades (e.g. when you top up with a different oil grade)

Oil shutter should be used in small steps and then observe what happens. Needs some time until there's an effect. Oil temp affects oil pressure.



The only thing where I'm not sure if there's a bug is, when you make a longer pause (ESC)
Had engine failures after longer pauses, but have not made thourough testing about this. Short pauses (15min) does not harm, for sure. But have to test and observe if longer pauses make enginge failures happen.

beside this, I can handle her meanwhile without errors.



But yes, some notices why engines have failed would be very useful and would be a good exercise to learn about this engines.

Edited April 6, 20224 yr by guenseli

Did anyone have luck to contacting developer. I email support but it's been several days no response yet. Do they have discord channel or something? 

41 minutes ago, Chock said:

It should really have a visible autopilot to be honest; there was one on the real thing.

 

As far what I ahve read not on every version, especially the early ones.
But would be very helpful, yes, as you have a very heavy loadout with engine observation and navigation.
Simply ALT and HDG hold.

Beside this, you can trim her really good, so she keeps the course and altitude more or less

2 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

Did anyone have luck to contacting developer. I email support but it's been several days no response yet. Do they have discord channel or something? 

He is very responsive normally, but I have heard that he has now a week off (rumours)
I have also no contact since some days, but before he was very responsive.

 

1 minute ago, guenseli said:

 

No, I had many hours meanwhile.
Had the same experience at the beginning until I realised I haven't taken care about RPM.
Do not say that this is "your weak point" but maybe there's also one item you oversee.

Since then, as ling as I stay in the ranges everything works:

RPM lower then 2100
CHT about 200F and above
Oil pressure between 60 and 90 psi
Manifold in the white range
Carb heat 100F (however i find this high)
Oil temp below 167F (but wasn't reaching that as it is winter)

right oil grade of course and be aware to not mix oil grades (e.g. when you top up with a different oil grade)

Oil shutter should be used in small steps and then observe what happens. Needs some time until there's an effect. Oil temp affects oil pressure.



The only thing where I'm not sure if there's a bug is, when you make a longer pause (ESC)
Had engine failures after longer pauses, but have not made thourough testing about this. Short pauses (15min) does not harm, for sure. But have to test and observe if longer pauses make enginge failures happen.

beside this, I can handle her meanwhile without errors.



But yes, some notices why engines have failed would be very useful and would be a good exercise to learn about this engines.

Just curious did you have flight longer than 1 hours?  Carb temperature more than 100F is always causing fire on my end. I actually had more luck flying without touching carb heat at all. I predominately fly in California, Arizona, Nevada in MSFS. I tried to use SAE30/50 with completed oil change (as per manual) but result is the same 😞

I'm pretty sure I've been careful with power setting and engine gauges monitoring. My oil rarely above 110F. In fact predominately stay cool even when I do runup for 10 minutes with oil cooler closed. In my experience oil warms up a bit after 20-30 minutes. of cruise with oil coolers shut If open oil cooler just a bit oil temps drops dramatically. I have never experience anything like that IRL (I flew many airplanes build in late 40th, 50th, 60th, 70th). Perhaps most frustration part is when engine quit or goes on fire there is no way to find out what was a cause. All I can see is one message " engine fail please restart". I can manage DC-6 manually for hours but I can't B247D for more than 20 minutes. Very frustrating!

 

1 minute ago, sd_flyer said:

Just curious did you have flight longer than 1 hours?

Yes, 3 hours e.g.

 

I fly always with live weather and here we had the last days always between 0 and 10 °C. Higher temps I have no experience till now.

PMDG DC-6, sorry to say that, does not have a real complex engine simulation. It is far away from A2A.
So, I can't say how and if the B247D is realistic as I'm no real pilot, but I know and learned a lot with A2As addons and for me the B247D feels reliable.

Will test in warmer climates now ...

32 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

Did anyone have luck to contacting developer. I email support but it's been several days no response yet. Do they have discord channel or something? 

Pulled from another forum. Posted about 7hrs ago

T45

"Good afternoon everyone!

First of: I am absolutely blown away by the way our 247D was received by the community. The amount of good wishes, congratulations and praise is overwhelming. I can’t thank you enough for it and I know that the rest of the team feel the same too.

I know that it might seem as if I went radio-silent. While I did have to do some catch-up on my sleep in the last few days, I still read everything that’s being posted here with great interest and I make notes of potential issues and things we could improve upon.

I also want to let you know that I am hopelessly behind my support-tickets, so if you sent me an email over the past few days, be aware that I am getting to it eventually, it’s just that the volume of emails is… a excessive… so it might take some time. Please be patient!

I want to address a couple of issues and try to outline where we are with the add-on.

1. Checklists
I hear you! I’ll be working on some interactive checklists, meanwhile Eric also got started on a PDF version of it. It’s kind of anachronistic, since checklists weren’t “invented” by the 1930s, but I understand how useful they are in this case.

2. Sound issues
We’ll keep working on the sound and a lot of issues that you fine people pointed out are already on our list to fix. Before an update is ready, I’d highly recommend to disable the “headphone simulation” in the audio settings, since it still seems to be causing some issues. And yes, the missing audio for the right flywheel is a bummer…

3. State saving-issues
I’m investigating what’s causing the issues with the state saving. It seems that in some cases the initialization code, which synchronizes the lever position with the internal simvar states, doesn’t always execute correctly. While this issue is unsolved, I’d recommend to wiggle engine distribution dial, the tank distribution dial and the mag switches before flight, to make sure they are set to the right value internally.

4. Starter issues with controllers like Honeycomb
I would highly recommend you create a controller configuration for the Boeing, which doesn’t use any starter-events! It seems that some of you can’t start the engines, because the engine-start events are not called properly and at least sometimes it can be traced down to the controller assignment used.
I’ll try to get to the bottom of this in the next update. The big issue is that I need to catch the right events from firing - and there’s a LOT of events related to starting engines.

5. Documentation
For the update, I will also spend some more time explaining engine management and the damage model.

6. Ts and Ps
This is a big one…
As you know, we’re using our own physics models to calculate temperatures and pressures - among other things. I saw that some of you already dug into the config file and found the extensive parameters for the oil circulation, which should give you an idea of the complexity of the system.
I am confident that the physics behind those calculations is spot on. However, with so many parameters to tune, there got to be problems with it too. It’s the old garbage in-garbage-out issue. Your calculations are only as good as the parameters you feed them with. I do believe that the oil temperatures are currently off the mark. The value displayed on the gauge is in fact Fahrenheit, but as some of you pointed out, the temperature range doesn’t seem to be right. The good news is, that this is merely a matter of scale. From a simulation point of view it makes no difference if the operating range lies between 80 and 110F, or 100 to 150F - it’s just a matter of tuning the parameters to fit the expectations.

A completely different matter is the cylinder head temperature and this is a tough one!
Some of you reported that the cylinder head temperature never seems to go above 100F during cruise, which is a problem that needs to be addressed. The question is, whether or not this is a problem with the simulation, or it is a problem with engine management - I’m quite divided on this myself.

In the real world, things don’t always go as planned and physics can be unpredictable at times. If you see your engine temperatures falling, you’d troubleshoot the problem (leaner mixture, more rpm, more manifold pressure, close oil shutters), however, if nothing helps, you’d come down to land and try to figure out what went wrong.
Obviously the second part - figuring out what went wrong - is quite difficult in the sim and I admit that we didn’t provide you with a lot of tools to trouble shoot.
But there’s also another part to this: sometimes it is simply not possible to operate your aircraft in the current conditions, because it’s not built for it.

It seems that those who experience a low cylinder head temperature with all its consequences, fly relatively fast through relatively cold air. In a way you’re super-chilling the engines doing so. Since the 247D doesn’t have cowl flaps to regulate the engine temperatures, there’s really not much that can be done at this point. The remedy could be: try finding some warmer air, run your engines faster, maybe try flying slower (drop your gear for a while?) or ultimately, land and wait for better conditions.

At the same time, I understand that the parameters for chilling the engine could be way off in our simulation - but the tweaking of such a parameter is not easy. If I decrease the “chill” effect of the wind, you might also have some real trouble keeping your engines cool during climb.

Long story short: I will keep working on those parameters and try to find a better balance between cooling the cylinders and heating them up. However, I would also like to ask you to keep an open mind with the level of simulation. We implemented real-world-physics (oppose to the usual look-up tables), and because of this, you will find yourself situations that can’t be explained easily.

Final thoughts

Once again, I want to thank you all for all the support and love you keep throwing at us. It is a very humbling experience.
We will keep working on this airplane and work through the issues you pointed out and I hope that, with your help, we can make her better and better.
Lastly, please be patient with us! I’m doing my best working through the support tickets, mails and messages, but the day only has 24h.

Much love!

Otmar and team
Wing42