Flame outs ?

[Guest juvat2]

Hi ya Jim,You'll see it more often when you load "nasty" storms. I never worked on Beechjets, so don't know if thats accurate jet engine performance modeling for that aircraft. But I was a jet engine mechanic in USAF(fighters)for 20yrs, and even on those high performance engines, they can be stall/stagged when the given engines performance envelope is exceeded.Ummm.. the "fix" while I was in the service was R&R stick actuator. Heh, just poking you there. But it is true, pilot had caused several of the stall/stags. You can literally starve the engine of air, or pack to much air pressure against the engine compressor. End result not very good. Regain an attitude and speed that the aircraft engine was designed for a successful aerial re-start.Take care,JimB.

[Guest R_Driscoll]

Peter James (LGS lead programmer) in one of his last posts in this area claims it is realistic behaviour, deliberately modelled. I.e., if you dive too fast, your engines should flame out with a jet. Too fix it (as Jim says), you have to fly within the envelope - stay within the design parameters of the motor! FU3 is full of little features like this - if you don't like them you're not ready for realistic flying. Checkout the clamshell reverse thrusters on landing - they MOVE, and Peter even modelled the effects of keeping reverse thrusters on after stopping - find out for yourself what happens. Moving reverse thrusters was not done is M$F$ until recently (as far as I know from reading ComputerPilot) - with a commercial add-on plane.Another way to see the effect of diving is to observe the rapid increase in air pressure, which changes the measured airspeed rapidly pushing the plane into the barberpole red zone.Goota go, Cheers, RObd

[Christopher Low 5,352]

Rob,Maybe I should e-mail Peter James regarding this ? I asked him a while ago if he would visit the FU3 Forum here at AVSIM Online, but I am not sure if he has done so. He did respond to my e-mail, so I know that he received it. Maybe I should give him another "prod" :-)The reverse thrust feature of the Beechjet is one of the best attributes of FU3 (in my opinion). I love landing in this plane with the "bass" knob of my subwoofer set towards the high end. The roar that I get when the reverse thrusters are increased to maximum power is FANTASTIC ! The same is true of Ansgar's 747.....and I can't wait to hear the sound effects from his upcoming Concorde :-eek With respect to "keeping the thrust reversers on after stopping", I assume that you are referring to the Beechjet starting to roll backwards ?Did FS2002 actually include the effects of reverse thrusters ? My own (rather limited) experience with this simulator seemed to suggest that the "thrust reverse experience" was either very poor, or non-existent. Maybe this has been corrected for FS2004 ?Chris Low.

[Christopher Low 5,352]

Jim,This is apparently what caused the crash of the Tupolev 144 (the Russian equivalent of Concorde) at the Paris Air Show in 1973. Apparently (according to a documentary that I watched), the French secretly sent a Mirage fighter jet to try and take close range photographs of this airliner (they wanted to study the small canard winglets that the Russians had added). However, this Mirage "apparently" (I'm trying to be politically correct here) got too close, and the pilot of "Konkordski" had to take emergency action. This resulted in a flame out of at least three of the four engines on the Russian plane. The pilot put the airliner into a steep dive to try and re-ignite the engines, but the plane broke apart due to aerodynamic forces.At least, that's what "apparently" happened ;-)Chris Low.

[Guest Motormouse]

>Peter James (LGS lead programmer) in one of his last posts in>this area claims it is realistic behaviour, deliberately>modelled. I.e., if you dive too fast, your engines should>flame out with a jet. Too fix it (as Jim says), you have to>fly within the envelope - stay within the design parameters of>the motor! FU3 is full of little features like this - if you>don't like them you're not ready for realistic flying.>>Goota go, Cheers, RObdnailed it in one hit there Rob!!I seem to remember that there was a 'F.A.Q' pagesomewhere on the web,with that response detailed (and other stuff by Peter James) maybe someone can remember where to look??:-wavePete

[Guest Jim Lynch]

Good answers, all ! Actually the answers that you gentleman provided are the ones that I was hoping for. My personal criteria is realistic flight performance, and I'm just fine with this kind of realism since you good people have confirmed the flame outs as "Normal". I will continue to fly it within the envelope, and enjoy the heck out of it !Thank you for putting me at ease. > Jim

[Guest Dann]

A long time ago I spoke with a real Beechjet pilot after several frustrating engine restarts. I described the problem to him, ala Flight Unlimited.He said it was overmodeled. The engines are simply not that sensitive to descent rate and if they were they would never have been certified for use in a commercial jet.Dan

[Guest R_Driscoll]

I can't find PJ's original comments - possibly they were in a flight magazine, not in posts,but he does refer to it here - comments on flameouts right at end: Behind The Looking Glass By FlightSim.Com Staff WHAT WENT WRONG? Looking Glass Studios out of business. No more Flight Unlimited series. You'd better get your copies now, of the greatest flight simulation ever made, Flight Unlimited III. So many have not even heard of it. I know all about it, I designed it. Even I speak most of the time about FS2000, FLY!, and most recently X-Plane. But still, there is one sim with better weather effects combined with stunning cloud, storm and sky visuals no one has even attempted to beat. Flight modeling is not too sensitive and feels just right. The purr of the props, the whine and hum of jet engines, the rumbling of a touchdown. The swirl of the air around you on the ramp as a summer thunderstorm nears. The raindrops. Who could forget the raindrops? Those glowing sunsets magnified only by high Cirrus and the darkening earth twinkling under a patchwork of puffy cumulous. It's all there folks. The most stunning visuals ever. Oh, yea, the pure photographic scenery is cool too. Or even the night landing at Bremerton where in the beam of your landing lights, a deer darts across the runway, just inches from your nose. There is so much to see, discover and experience here, I urge you to run to your nearest store and get Flight Unlimited III, not to boost sales in hopes of there being another version, but for your own personal enjoyment. I want you to have one. I am proud of it, and want to share its magic with you. As a flightsimmer with thousands of hours of desktop and real world flight time, I designed this sim with you in mind, getting so many great features included no other sim has ever had. You've got to see it to believe it! Trust me. Go get it. The only limitations FU3 had was not being able to run in more than 800x600, the lack of photoreal scenery beyond Seattle and San Fransisco, and a limit of the entire flying world kept to the western one third of the USA. 3rd party development was never opened up, so additional aircraft and scenery could not be developed. If FU3 had all that, there is no doubt the next version would have become the personal favorite sim of every single living flightsimmer on the planet. I will say that, and would be flabbergasted at anyone who after using FU3 for a week, would not agree with me on that statement. If you are a user of FU3 now, you know what I am talking about. So what happened to Looking Glass? Before I answer that and get into the "dirt behind the scenes", I'll answer why so few out there have even heard of Flight Unlimited. It's called a pure lack of care. It all started with the management of Looking Glass. In my year and a half as Lead Designer I began to get the feeling I was the only one with the real love of what we were developing. There was little enthusiasm shown for FU3 from the higher-ups, and that trickled down to all the programmers and others on the team. What was at the beginning, a very happy and enthusiastic crowd of young programmers, artists and audio guys, became a grumbling group of depressed and sometimes angry group, at least around the lunch table. Why is it that the non-management people have better ideas, smarter plans and better thinking taking place than management seemed to have? So many of my co-workers had a right to be upset, as some of them had been with LG for years and knew they really didn't care about flightsims. Their bread and butter were the shooter/3D action and adventure games that capture the biggers percent of gamers worldwide. After many months of vague interest from management, it became clear that there were no plans being put together for add-ons or a future version. Since I wanted to make this a fairly lengthy stay of employment for myself, I immediately began developing feature-sets and ideas for FU4. I was told by our producer to pass them in to management and they would come up with a plan. Well, the only plan for the future was to see how sales were on FU3 first. So, in essence, nothing was going to be done until many months after the release of FU3. This really doesn't work when you need employment. Electronic Arts was distributing and marketing our new masterpiece, or so was the plan. When FU3 was 90% done and beta testing was very well into its final stages, we took the product to Oshkosh. The reception was great! This was a boon to our optimism. It was short lived. Just because the public liked FU3, didn't mean that EA was going to do anything great in terms of marketing the sim. What I was thinking needed to happen, and was hoping would happen, would be a massive ad campaign all over the print media, newspapers, and game magazines. I even got LG to run some ads in FLYING and AOPA magazine. Well, EA wanted to only invest enough money for a one time ad in each publication, or so it seemed to me. I never saw ads appearing more than once in any big time game nor aviation publication! You can't place one ad and expect the product to sell. Look at all the ads the other games got. We were getting bombarded by FS2000 ads at the time. FS2000 was in every magazine with an airplane on it. We were supposed to be doing that! We were told we were, early on, and something fell through. As far as I can see the folks at EA didn't want to bother with FU3. I heard they were really not keen on flightsims after recent lack of sales in some of their combat sims and the folding of Sierra's Pro Pilot line that same year. Did they really want it to die? There was a general attitude by some higher-ups that FU3 had to beat FS2000 in sales or quality to be "worth" the development costs and to spawn another version. What foolish thinking. Yes, we have a better product in my mind (barring the lack of open format), and the true simmers will know it, but we can not compete against MS, and trying to do so is foolhardy. LG would never be able to spend the advertising dollars MS had on FS2000, but we certainly must spend more than a few ads here and there. But, they never did. I even went to New York City one day with our Marketing Manager and did interviews about FU3 for some noteworthy print media, and radio shows. I never even found out if it was all a waste of time or not, I never once heard about them being published or even broadcast. Our Marketing Manager's hands seem tied as well. All his great plans were never brought fourth. So, our weekly meetings were devoted to the products LG really loved, namely Thief and Thief Gold. Not that they shouldn't - that is one stunning masterpiece in itself, with unbelievable medievil graphics and adventure I've never seen before! But don't forget about FU3! Well, they did. Finally when "gold" time came and we actually were finished with the product 9 months late, there was little fanfare, enthusiasm or communication about what is going to happen next. After a small gathering for dinner with team members after the release, the next few days were spent finding out how many people are quitting. Programmers, artists and more. One by one. Not all just the team of FU3, but other projects were loosing staff as well. People really hated the company and the management. I never understood the large amount of complaints, after all having a fairly well paying job in a major game company really shouldn't spawn such attitudes. I think that everyone was worn out by everything and the lack of effort and direction. Again, all the smart people seemed to be the ones doing the work. There were lots of smart people there, the ones I worked with directly only wanted some recognition and promotion of the product they worked so hard to get finished. So, once FU3 was out in the stores, no one knew of it. Few of the online and print magazines had previews, reviews or anything on it. There were flightsimmers that had no idea it was out, or even what it was. I knew that was a real bad sign, and personally blame EA for acting like FU3 was some little side project, not worthy of attention. They didn't even rent top space in stores. Each store I walked into either had a few copies on the bottom shelf by the floor, or none at all. FS2000, and FLY! were on multiple shelves all the time. There was always a battle going on concerning opening up the product. Myself, our producer and project leader told management that add-ons and 3rd party development was the only way to insure future growth. But, they didn't want to hear that. Any plans we put together on add-ons were just forgotten about. They thought the world would rather have a smaller area to fly in that had world-class photorealistic scenery only. But unless you offer the world as every other sim does, people won't want it, plain and simple. Everyone wants to fly over there own hometown. Period. If we were to provide world-wide coverage of our scenery, the cost would be prohibitive. And, even though flightsimmers would pay hundreds of dollars each for a truly awesome sim, the other 95% of our purchasing public would not pay more than $50. Well, as it turned out, there was no purchasing public, because it really was never in stores to start with! It costs a couple million dollars to make a sim. That's a lot. Some of the costs are really needed, such as aircraft research (photography, audio, actual flying), artist talent, and programmers. Marketing, not quality is what determines sales. We had the quality. I am amazed FU3 turned out as well as it did. I had to really push for development of the BeechJet and all its systems. This was a daunting task for the programmers who came on from FU2, a basic simulation with not even an autopilot. Despite the lack of enthusiasm by many programmers, it all came out a real gem. Kind of an accident maybe, given the morale and poor guidance from others. I was the only one with a true love for the product. I was the only pilot, and the only flightsimmer in the group. Not one person in the entire team, not one of them, was a flightsimmer in their spare time. They all loved games, and had to force themselves to learn or enjoy the sim for the time they worked on it. When they went home, FU3 was not part of the plans. That's not right. You can't force people to want to build a flightsim if they are not simmers. Period. Just like I wouldn't want to build a shooter. I don't have any hard feelings toward any of my coworkers - they're all great people! I am sorry they were not listened to, and I can't blame them for not caring. This is a huge reason I feel no other version would never happen. I was the only one who cared. Other flightsims have entire teams of simmers and pilots. That's the only way to do it. I think there'd be an FU4, if the entire company was a flightsim company to start with. Weak management (people's hours were never monitored - some worked 15 hour days, some only 2), poor project planning and a lack of enthusiasm. All this never showed up in the end product, once again an outstanding sim. But it did lead to being far too late on release. Maybe EA was once excited about the project, I'll never know. I quit LG to prevent myself from being laid-off. They never once said what they would do with me. I could be of no help to the other games, nor would have wanted to. I wanted to get FU4 going. I knew flying and flight simulators, that's all. When I quit, there was only about two peope left on the FU3 team. All the others had gone to other games, or left the company, not even employed yet at other jobs! So, when the Christmas season came and went, without further FU3 ads, I knew it was all over. I told people every day there'd be no other version. Still, I hoped I would be proven wrong, maybe by a buy-out of LG, or some other company with smart minded flightsimmers would get the rights to FU3 and go from there. The sales figures for FU3 were even more abysmal than those of FU2. Maybe tens of thousands at most. With numbers that poor, I wish it was all the die-hard flightsimmers that had copies. Instead, the die-hards didn't even have it. You guys all missed out! Now the company is gone, having lost funding to other projects. The real crime is that the team that worked along side us the entire time FU3 was being built, just got the Flight Combat simulation finished after 3 years of work! To be the very finest WWII air combat flight simulation ever. I mean it. FU3 quality with guns in Europe. What a great combination. A masterpiece that got canned only weeks to release! Not even EA wanted to sell it. No one cared. Only the "little people" care. That's always the case it seems. The ones with the small paychecks have all the ideas and greatest enthusiasm, until management steps in. Now, I'm mad. You should be too. Go get FU3 if you can find it. I have found them in most CompUSA's, Best Buy's and other big chains. It's about $12 in most areas. The box is worth that. It's your flightsim, made by one flightsimmer for flightsimmers. Watch that N1 decrease by 2%, when you switch on that anti-icing switch, or the engines flame out when your rainy crosswind gets the best of you. THAT's REALISM. And there's a lot more where that came from! Just don't wait 'till they're all gone. Unlike Wendy's Monterey Chicken Deluxe, Flight Unlimited III's won't be back.

[Guest Motormouse]

I mean the one of Rob's above, the 'Behind the Looking Glass' one??I've never read that before, merely an abridged versionthat was on Mike Magatagan's site (I think) or maybe Pegasus'.Seems like Peter James sure had a falling out with EA.I wonder what he would make of FU3 now, with all the user add-ons we have!!:-wavePete

[Christopher Low 5,352]

Pete,I will e-mail him regarding this. I really would love to see him here, just so that we could show him what has been done to enhance the flight simulator that he loved so much. I agree with him that the Beechjet is an absolute gem, and a joy to fly. I can't thank him enough for recreating those great thrust reversers ;-)Chris Low.

[Guest DanielBu]

Hey I remember reading that - I bought FU3 rather spontaneously because I remembered how much I loved FU1. What happened to looking glass was a real shame - they had such great games, the FU series, Thief, Terra Nova ... and above all, now I'm kinda stuck with FS. Damn...-Daniel

[Christopher Low 5,352]

Daniel,If I was stuck with MSFS, then I wouldn't bother with flight simulation AT ALL :-)Did you say that you have a copy of FU3 ? If not, then you can always bid for one on eBay.Chris Low.

[Christopher Low 5,352]

MESSAGE SENT.

[Guest DanielBu]

Well, I do have FU3 and I have it installed on my Notebook (which gave up on me today ... again grrr).FS does have its advantages, but most of the time, I spend time fiddling with stuff. In FU3, I was off and away having fun in no-time...-Daniel

[Guest CaptRolo]

I can understand Peter James plight and only wish we could have somehow influenced the outcome . I can't thank Him enough for His devotion and love for Flight Unlimited ,for there is nothing yet to compair with, that gives you that feeling and thrill of really flying with accurate flight dynamics. Communications ,and weather.CaptRolo