Do X-Plane 11 users have a way of accelerating flights beyond the rather limited CTRL-T functionality, or more preferably, to skip ahead to a point further down the planned route?  I see that one dev, Toliss, has a skip-ahead feature built into their A340, so apparently it can be done, but I haven't found any utility or Lua script to make that happen generically with any airplane.  Slewing ahead by dragging the plane in the map view doesn't work beyond the relatively short limits of the local scenery tile, and the regular built-in time acceleration won't go above around 2.8x, which isn't really enough to reduce 8-12 hour flights to a manageable duration.

Any hidden gems out there?

I only know about it having been implemented on the various Toliss Airbuses. I used it extensively with the Toliss A319. Was flawless.

Alt-T speeds up GS 2,4,8,16 times.

58 minutes ago, Pivot said:

Alt-T speeds up GS 2,4,8,16 times.

If you use groundspeed acceleration, you'd have to manually adjust your time and fuel load when you come out of warp. 

Somewhere I'd read that the Traffic Global traffic add-on has an issue with CTDs if you change the time.  Is that (still) the case?

Unfortunately, it also presents a problem if you use a plane that won't allow an inflight fuel load change (e.g. the Challenger 650).

That said, any generic skip-ahead option would have the same issues.  That's what makes having the capability built right into the panel such a good idea, especially on long-endurance acft.

Regards

 

7 hours ago, Bob Scott said:

the regular built-in time acceleration won't go above around 2.8x, which isn't really enough to reduce 8-12 hour flights to a manageable duration.

Any hidden gems out there?

There's a trick you could try. Time acceleration is limited by your actual FPS, so if you max out your FPS, you can get up to 16x acceleration.

To do that, switch to external view (should be SHIFT+4), and then fast zoom out (SHIFT+. on my keyboard layout) into space, until the Earth and even the background stars disappear. This way, you should get much higher FPS and reach 8x or 16x time acceleration.

Just get back into virtual cockpit (or any other view) to reset the view settings.

 

One last solution to this "problem" would be this:

Imagine you fly from Frankfurt to Los Angeles. A trip that can take about 11 hours. But you are only interested in the takeoff and landing part (hence your question about skipping ahead).

Now you load up your flight in Frankfurt, program the FMS, load the fuel, take off and fly until you are at cruising altitude. Now you shut off X-Plane, go have dinner, play some frisbee outside, walk the dog.

Now you go back inside, load up the same plane in Las Vegas, load just enough fuel to get to Los Angeles, and start the flight to L.A. Once you are at cruising altitude you say to yourself "Tada, I almost made it all the way from Frankfurt! Wow, I am such a long-haul bad***! Look at me, ma! Now only to nail the approach and landing after this long and exhausting flight!"

In other words - if you don´t want to spend 9 hours of looking out of the window (and I can totally understand why you wouldn´t after having flown the real 747-400 for 6 years), the obvious answer is: Don´t! 🤣

It's very specific of the particular aircraft being flown.

Aerowinx PSX has it in a form which was more or less adopted also by Toliss - jump to next fix / waypoint.

It is very acceptably done in the Toliss A319 ( and probably all other airbuses by Toliss ), ut it implies calculations of fuel consumed, details about engine and the various systems operation for a given period of time, adaptation of forecast weather along the route to any calculations performed by the FMCs, etc...  Not an easy task in order to make it interesting, but surely a feature that could be made available for aircraft meant to fly long routes.

Be far easier just to fly shorter routes.

24 minutes ago, mjrhealth said:

Be far easier just to fly shorter routes.

That's what I opted for long ago... Longest I flew in the last months was a Paris CDG - Lisbon .... Most of the time I fly LPPT - LPMA / LPFR / LPPR and return 🙂

Short and easy and family-friendly 🙂

Now with my new Beluga, some pack deliveries will make it even more interesting 🙂

10 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

Be far easier just to fly shorter routes.

I do some short legs, but the feel/performance when taking a heavy into the air at close to MGTOW and getting it to cruise is a lot different than taking one into the air with a light fuel load good for a couple hours.  Plus, some interesting airports really don't lend themselves to short legs to any meaningful destination--Anchorage and Honolulu, for example.

I wrote a Lua script that repositions the airplane and tested it with the Felis B742.  It did the reposition OK, but apparently changing the position with the XPLM function forces a reload of the plane in XP11, and the cabin altitude after the reload was reset to the same as my flight level...it took nearly 15 min for the cabin to slowly descend back down to a normal ~6500 ft cabin altitude.

Another option to "position" your plane for the last stretch of the journey is of course the map mode. Spawn at an airport close to where you want to start the remainder of the flight - and then use the map to position yourself (you can slew position, altitude, airspeed, heading...).
 

You are correct, setting up the systems to be in "mid flight" can be challenging, and sometimes it is necessary to increase the altitude in steps to not freak out the environmental control system...

An interesting development on this...I invested a few hours in some tedious Google-Fu and came up with a plugin written by Sandy Barbour back in 2013 called "PositionAircraft" that was updated somewhere along the way to v1.20...turns out that it works in XP11.  It can take input from a text-based config in a .pad file. 

So I wrote a quick-and-dirty OpenOffice spreadsheet that takes the lat/long of my desired skip-ahead waypoint in minutes+decimal seconds and adjusts it to a point 8nm this side of the waypoint on the reciprocal of the outbound course, converting it to the decimal minute format used by the plugin.  I do that so that my ATC program (Radar Contact 4) and the FMC will sequence properly at waypoint passage.  I flew the takeoff and departure, and once stable at cruise I got clearance direct from Radar Contact, fired up the plugin, loaded the .pad file I had created, and presto...I was moved a few thousand miles up to a point 200nm from destination. 

I still had to manually adjust the fuel load and time using data from the Simbrief flight plan, and in this case with the Felis B742, I had to punch off the cabin alt warning and let it repressurize (so I had to have blackout effects turned off in the sim itself).  I froze the physics engine while I made those changes and then turned them back on when I had everything reset for the arrival.  So a 12-hour intercontinental flight can be reduced down to a couple hours without suffering the 12-hours of droning at cruise.  I have plenty of real-world experience doing that...don't need any more.

Wow!  I know of a few guys who would really like to profit from it Bob !

Quite an ingenious process !

6 hours ago, Bob Scott said:

So a 12-hour intercontinental flight can be reduced down to a couple hours without suffering the 12-hours of droning at cruise.  I have plenty of real-world experience doing that...don't need any more.

Hmmm... Wouldn't the trick I suggested above be much easier than your method? 16x acceleration would speed up a 12-hours cruise down to 45 minutes. Zooming out takes a few seconds, and time acceleration doesn't cause all those other issues (wrong fuel, wrong FMC calculations, pressurization issues, etc.).

1 hour ago, Murmur said:

Hmmm... Wouldn't the trick I suggested above be much easier than your method? 16x acceleration would speed up a 12-hours cruise down to 45 minutes. Zooming out takes a few seconds, and time acceleration doesn't cause all those other issues (wrong fuel, wrong FMC calculations, pressurization issues, etc.).

Nope...I just did a flight in the FF767 from Miami to Santiago, Chile.  Ran my spreadsheet when I did my flight plan (2 minutes tops) and created the input file for the plugin, flew a heavy takeoff and climb until I was stable at cruise over Cuba, then ran the plugin to reposition myself (30 sec), then updated fuel and time in the X-Plane menu (2 min), and resumed from a point 250nm N of Santiago to fly the arrival, descent, and landing.  So maybe 5 minutes of setup to avoid 9 hours at cruise.  Even at 16x, it'd take around 35 min of accelerated flight looking at outer space to accomplish the same.  With the Feris 747, the only mentionable anomaly I've observed is the pressurization, which self corrects, albeit somewhat slowly.  The FF767 took it pretty much in stride.

Something else I've observed is that many--most, even--add-ons can't fly stable at acceleration rates above 4x--the PID loop in the autopilot reacts too slowly to the rapid deviations at accelerated speeds.  Same thing happens in P3D.  I wrote a utility for the ESP sims a long time ago called QuantumLeap that does essentially the same thing--still use it for my long-hauls in the PMDG B744 and B772 in P3D.  Have been beating my head against the wall for the better part of a week trying to get this to work in XP, and I'm a happy camper to finally add that capability to my XP tool belt.