Altitude-Autopilot with Wilco B737-500

[Guest]

I am a fairly recent user of Fly! (Fly!2K), which I use now alongside my old fs98. I am limited in the sims I can use by my system. I find Fly! great in its panel details an nice skies. I recently downloaded Wilco B737-500. The system requirement is Pentium 200Mhz. I run a 200MMX. So, it should be ok. The B737 continuously "porpoises", however, when I use the AP to maintain a given altitude. I figured at first it was my system, but now am not so sure since the plane flies very smoothly in configurations that would seem to require even more computational power, such as AP approach during an ILS landing. There the plane descends very smoothly all the way to touchdown! So why should it have difficulty maintaining smooth and level flight when simply on auto-altitude?Oshi.

[Guest Fly II Pilot]

Oshi:It's been quite a while since I last used Wilco's 737 but I do remember that they released a patch. Did you also download and install it? Go to the very bottom of this page: http://www.wilcopub.com/Download.htm and make sure you download the correct one.You may also want to go to the old forum and read a couple of messages. Here are some:http://www.avsim.com/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboa...ID4&archive=yeshttp://www.avsim.com/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboa...ID4&archive=yesGood luck!Alejandro AmigorenaCheshire, CTAthlon XP 1800ABIT KR7A-RAID768Mb RAMGeForce 3 64MBSB Audigy GamerCH Flight Yoke USBCH Pro Pedals USB

[Guest]

Thanks for the suggestions, Alejandro. I had d'loaded the patch at Wilco Pub, and had installed it over the Wilco B737. Before installing the patch, I had noticed some anomalies in the 737: the aircraft weights showed in the FlightPlanner's Aircraft setup didn't make sense, the E command didn't start the engines... That's why I went searching for a patch at Wilco Pub and found the one you mentioned (patch 1.0 to 1.2). The only question mark there is wether the B737 downloaded just recently from regnow.com might not have already had the patch in it, in which case I would have patched it again with perhaps some negative consequences. After patching, the weights made sense. The E command still doesn't work but that doesn't bother me since I enjoy starting the engines manually. I think the patch is probably ok since the Auto-thrust works fine, auto-throttling the engines quite efficiently (that seemed to be something added on by the patch, according to some of the older posts you directed me to). So I have no way of knowing if the "porpoising" Alt-Hold is a permanent feature of the patched Wico B737. The only thing I could do is reinstall it and repatch it. I have noticed that the V-speed hold is quite effective in maintaining altitude smoothly when it is activated with a v-speed rate of zero. Altitude is held nicely even when making a long turn. But it gets a bit trickier when trying to keep altitude and at the same time varying the aircraft speed. So zero v-speed can be used as a work around for the faulty altitude-hold, at lest to some degree. But i still don't know if the patched 737 is actually supposed to behave like that.Thanks, Oshi.