1 hour ago, polosim said:

With your power switch on, hovering over this breaker will show you the battery voltage as it charges (assuming the sims
tooltips are on). Eventually, your clock will show voltage too and your annunciator will come to life, as in real
life.

It would be nice to have an option to immediately recharge the battery. When I want to fly, I am usually not in the mood to watch the battery voltage grow instead.

7 minutes ago, qqwertz said:

would be nice to have an option to immediately recharge the battery

I agree, the same thing happens in real life in the world of general aviation when you are ready to fly, suddenly the engine no longer starts due to a low battery or some other problem. 😒

14 hours ago, polosim said:

A great feature is when your battery is drained too low to turn anything on, you can “hookup to outside
power”. When you are parked at an airport, and IN a parking spot, you can click the “INOP” breaker to initiate
the battery charger. The charger will be visible on the outside whilst the battery is charging. With your power
switch on, hovering over this breaker will show you the battery voltage as it charges (assuming the sims
tooltips are on). Eventually, your clock will show voltage too and your annunciator will come to life, as in real
life.

Interesting... Thanks, will try it next time. 

Hi !

I've recharged the battery many times...

Did pump on, throttle max, seen the needle of the fluel flow rising... pump off.

Engine cold I can't start !

CTRL E start.

Engine cold CTRL E, start, mixture lean : engine stop (normal 😉 ) then manual start end engine start ! 

Engine warm : Start without pb.

I've tried a lot of position for the throttle, even the mixture without succes. 

 

If anybody can hlep me to understand...  😭

 

2 hours ago, supersym said:

If anybody can hlep me to understand...  

I think it is very finicky with regard to the throttle position. Just a tiny bit cracked, so little that I never hit the sweet spot. What I do is to wildly move the throttle lever up and down while the engine is cranked until it finally gives in and starts. Not great immersion, but better then ctrl-E

My impression is that devs sometimes overdo it when they try to recreate the experience of starting a piston engine. I haven't flown the WB-Sim 172, but as I recall the Airfoillabs 172 was also pretty difficult to start - much harder than the real 172 S on which I recently got my license. Flooding the engine or not priming enough is a thing for sure, but under normal conditions, it's not really difficult to start a 172.

a few update before I hav'nt any difficulties to start up...

fortunately, in the real life I succed to start up the c 172S without killing the battery (and the other members of my club are happy 😉)

what I do with the WB Sim : CTRL E ; mixture lean, engine stop, I don't touch the throttle, and start manualy 😜

 

Edited July 3, 20241 yr by supersym

Hi !

Nobody else have this issue ?

No idea what can be wrong ?

I used the tooltips for adust throttle and mixture at 10 and 90 % and it's working !
but it's not realistic to had to put the both at those values so precisly. I fly in the real life in a cessna 172 and it's more easy to start up !

I think it's a problem of fouling the spark plugs. I don't really know what I did, but after I got it to start, it had the volts warning on. I had to do the max throttle, lean until near cutoff to clear the engine before takeoff could be done safely. Back to the problem, I somehow started after using the external battery charger a few times and watching oil, VAC, and amps to get a feel for what the starter was doing and when to stop holding it. Throttle was all over the place even though I was aiming for less than 3%. Mixture lean to cutoff mostly. It mentions only 10 seconds of starting and 20 seconds of cooling off. This is warm weather at 69 F outside. I did try the fuel pump with throttle up and mixture full so that you actually see fuel flow increase. Doing this without throttle up may be a problem. It also can make the problem worse, but I still tried a few times. This was the floats version if that makes a difference. I used to just reset state saving and restart flight to get around this in the past. Also, Ctrl+E doesn't work if you are in this faulty state.

Hi !

The manual says fuel pomp 3 sec : but try 2 sec max. 3 long seconds and the enfine is fouled 😉

Now I'm able to start the engine every time 😍

Edited September 6, 20241 yr by supersym

The counterintuitive part is that the throttle needs to nearly full open to start more reliably in some situations. Maybe this is true after you pump too much fuel in warm weather. Most other C172s from other creators allow you to just follow the 1/4 inch open (nearly closed / pulled fully aft) procedure, and it will start.

On 6/3/2024 at 10:00 AM, qqwertz said:

Same problem here after the last update, I used Ctrl-E eventually. I also fell into the trap that failures etc are now only accessible when power is off, and I had forgotten how to recharge the battery after all my failed attempts to start the engine.

This is all well documented, but when you run into these problems during a VR flight, it sure is an immersion killer to get out of VR and consult the manual. 

If you attempt to use the exact starting sequence as in a RW fuel-injected C172, I have found that in the sim the engine will not start.

The modification to the procedure that works reliably for me to start the engine in MSFS 2020 is that you have to immediately push in your MIXTURE control knob once the starter is cranking the engine. If you leave it all the way out waiting till the engine fires up, as you would actually do in the RW after priming a cold engine, then the engine will not fire at all and so it will not start using the manual sequence.

This same issue occurs for me on both the Asobo ("Textron") C172 and the WBsim C172 Enhancement model. BUT...

In the Asobo C172, that model doesn't seem to degrade the battery CCA capacity in cold weather.  In any case, in the Asobo typically I wait till the starter initially spins the engine up to approx 650 RPM then I quickly push in the MIXTURE control; and then the engine fires to start and run.

The  slight difference with the WBsim C172 is that you have to push in MIXTURE control very quickly after the starter begins turning the engine; and then the engine fires to start and run. That works reliably for me, successfully starting the engine even with relatively sluggish cranking when in cold weather conditions - i.e. conditions in which the WBsim battery is so cold that it won't deliver high CCA's (cold-cranking amperes), just enough to barely get the engine spinning.

I hope this will be helpful!

 

On 9/7/2024 at 6:34 PM, lockemx said:

The counterintuitive part is that the throttle needs to nearly full open to start more reliably in some situations. Maybe this is true after you pump too much fuel in warm weather. Most other C172s from other creators allow you to just follow the 1/4 inch open (nearly closed / pulled fully aft) procedure, and it will start.

IIRC if the engine is still hot or warm recently running before the start attempt {i.e. check your oil temp before priming!} , you should not begin with the priming sequence because that risks flooding the engine. After the engine is flooded, the procedure to overcome the flooding involves open the throttle fully and crank the engine - see more details in the POH. So when starting a hot/warm engine, basically proceed through the startup as if you had just already completed the priming. However, see my post above about a modification to manually start in the sim, vs in the RW.

Today I ran into a different but related problem in attempting to start the WBsim C172. I'm using the Honeycomb Alpha yoke, and I've been using the magneto switch on that to start the engine. The problem now is that in the WBsim C172, when I turn the switch to Start, in the sim it keeps flicking between Start and Both, over and over repeatedly. As a result, most times the starter isn't on long enough between flicks to get the engine turning up to enough speed to get it to start. Even if I have the Battery Off, i.e. it isn't cranking the engine; the same flicking misbehavior is happening in the magneto switch in the sim.

Yet when I load in the Asobo Classic C172, the magneto switch behaves as it should i.e. if I keep the physical switch on the controller to Start, in the sim it stays at Start. I checked for any other controller programmed for MAGNETOS START function and there is no conflict. And I'm using exactly the same controllers setup for the Asobo Classic C172 in which the flicking issue doesn't show up.

This might have been occurring occasionally before on the WBsim and I had put it down to a weak battery or some such issue, but now that I have looked closer at it I have spotted this flicking switch in the sim display that has gotten so bad today that the engine will not start. And it happens even after I have connected the battery cart and let the battery voltage come up to 27.4 V or higher.