This might be the wrong place to post this question, and if it is, then I apologize. I am trying to learn the art of aircraft design and I'm starting by fixing planes designed for FS9 and editing them to work in FSX. One recurring problem I have with several aircraft is a black bar at the bottom of the screen during simulation (size varies with screen resolution and aircraft) which squishes the picture vertically. Does anyone know what causes this or how to fix it. I have been through the aircraft.cfg and panel.cfg files without and sucess. One place I want to try is the .air file but I am not sure which program to use to open them. Wordpad only displays part of the file, and the rest is symbols. Thanks in advance for any help.

I am going to bet you are in 2D panel view when this happens.In your panel.cfg file you will find something like this://--------------------------------------------------------[Window00]file=PanelMain.bmp size_mm=1024window_size_ratio=1.000 position=7visible=1ident=MAIN_PANELrender_3d_window=0window_size= 1.000, 1.000window_pos= 0.000, 0.000This is where FS defines the size of the "panel" window. If your PanelMain.bmp (or whatever yours is called) is not the same size as in "size_mm=", or your window_size / window_pos is off, what happens is that you tell FS that your artwork is smaller than the window you have asked for and so it displays the rest as black.In the Deluxe version you will find the FS X SDK, with info on how to set these options in your panel.cfg.

The problem occurs in 2-D, VC, and all external views, however, on your advice I was able to do a little tweaking and get a 2-D panel to work. Do you think the actual plane .mdl file has to be modified to fix the 3-D problems?