Flying the Baron B58 and learning about asymmetric flight.

How can you set up a random engine to fail ? In the failures menu you can set up failure for engine 1 or 2 triggered by a variety of parameters. But then you know in advance which engine is going to fail. Do you have to set up both engines to fail at some point over say a time period and just hope both don't fail in short succession ?

Cheers Tim

To my knowledge (fuzzy) you can only set failures up to happen at a certain event (speed, altitude, elapsed time, key press) OR totally random.

What you are looking for (if I understand correctly) is to have a random of either left or right engine fail at a random point in time right "around" liftoff, right?

I think you can only set up a random "mean time between failures", so the engine may fail during the takeoff run, during climb, cruise flight, landing or when parked...this is hardly helpful in training.

I recommend getting a second person setting up an (unknown to you) engine to fail at V1 or maybe at 1 feet altitude - this is what real pilots practice, the engine failing at the worst possible time (an engine failure during cruise flight is a non-issue).

Maybe someone could also write a lua script for this.

Thanks for the response (and yes you understand my requirement exactly.)

Unless I'm missing something (high probabilty) then it seems rather weird. Xplane is such an excellent training aid with the potential to randomly or predictably fail a single switch, spark plug etc. To have to "Heath Robinson" a solution for a random in time and side engine failure in a twin just seems ..... well weird !

Cheers Tim

58 minutes ago, thepitts said:

To have to "Heath Robinson" a solution for a random in time and side engine failure in a twin just seems ..... well weird !

If you think about it, real engines don't really stick to a "Oh, the other one failed, I must not fail now" code of conduct either. It's pure luck that most engine failures on multi-engine aircraft only affect one and not both.

You can try to set a MTBF for each engine in the failures menu and see how mean X-Plane's random number generator is.

I also have a utility that increases the chance of engine failure if you overstress them, but it will also fail both if the random numbers are not in your favor and it predictably does nothing when you run them below their parameter limits.

Edited Sunday at 01:07 PM2 days by Bjoern

2 hours ago, thepitts said:

then it seems rather weird. Xplane is such an excellent training

If you really use X-Plane as a professional training aid, it would be used like professional simulators are - with an instructor setting up a failure for you. This can be done in X-Plane by using the "instructor station", preferably networked to a second computer. Then the instructor can (just like in the Level-D simulators I have to go to every 6 months) set up a failure without you seeing it, and also set up the "trigger" (or trigger it manually).

I agree that it would be nice to add a "fail either left or right engine at..." option. I will talk to Austin about it.

Edit: Austin will look into it, the feature request number is XPD-18212

Edited Sunday at 01:46 PM2 days by Litjan

I have written a small program using FSUIPC for this back in FSX days, input speed range and number of engines so I can practice V1-go/no-go on airliner, I think It'll be earlier to do so with FWL?

XPD-18212

Thanks for that. See what the X-plane team make of it and how easy or not it is to implement.

Cheers Tim

Get a friend or family member to fail it from either the ios or ipad application.

1 hour ago, thepitts said:

XPD-18212

Thanks for that. See what the X-plane team make of it and how easy or not it is to implement.

Cheers Tim

Austin already implemented it (I would post a screenshot if Avsim did not insist on image posting policy more fit to the 80s than the 21st century 🫣). I believe it will be fielded in 12.5.

Well AVSIM's screen shot policy maybe stuck in the 1980's.

If X-plane's Customer Responsiveness / Services is indicative of the 21st Century .... I'm all in !

Great news. Roll on 12.5.

Cheers Tim