rsrandazzo

Captains, During the past few releases, Kyle has taken some time to create really nice, articulate, overview videos to show you what is coming. I thought for sure we had too many things on his plate to expect another one, but he did it. If you are eagerly awaiting the PMDG 747-8, or even mildly curious how different this airplane is from the PMDG 747-400, watch this video. Will also allow you to put a voice to the face...erm... avatar....

Brian, When the time comes, we will post that information for you right here in the forum. Check tomorrow morning!

Captains, Just a quick note, in order to prevent anyone from sitting up all night... We are planning to release the PMDG 747-8 during the day on Saturday, GMT. You will see a bunch of things going on in/around PMDG's sites overnight as we are taking this opportunity to roll in a bunch of updates and maintenance... Don't panic... We WILL tell you when it is about to release. So don't disrupt your required crew rest. We will not accept cancelled flights tomorrow because you are calling in "too fatigued to fly" because you waited up all night!

Sergio, 1: There are no charges for the 747-400 upgrade. The price of the product is increasing for those who do not already own it. 2: No estimates. We are working on the 747 right now!

Mark Meet me out at the hangar tomorrow. We can use some help on that floor!

Luc, Fix that signature or we'll have to ban you. Banned customers get to spend the weekend at Kyle's cleaning floors- so we wouldn't want that to happen to you by accident.

Luc, If you have trouble with a panel state, it simply means that it was created with an older version of the airplane. We have warned you against that for many many years. But- not to be deterred- we are actually working on some changes that will make them forward and backward compatible. Just taking a bit longer than expected. See? You tried to be a smart_a** and got a straight answer. Bet you didn't expect that, did you. 🤣

Mark, We will tell you when. We distribute via amazon cloud services, so there won't be any strain on our end... Now YOUR pipeline is between you and your service provider. 😎

John, PMDG Global Flight Operations is not included in the PMDG 747-8. Global Flight Operations is a separate product and will unveiled formally soon. We did make some changes to the 747 product line in preparation for bringing Global Flight Operations to market- which is perhaps what you saw. Hope that helps!

Zsolt, You appear to be blaming us for a rendering problem within Lockheed Martin's product. They introduced this issue in P3D v4 due to a problem in their code, so it isn't something we can just "fix." Perhaps you hadn't read any of the previous discussion on this topic in the forum and were unaware of the herculean effort we made to find and solve this issue previously? I can see how you would miss that given the traffic in this forum- but generally speaking you can assume that if **we** are creating a problem we solve it.

Gents, You guys are talking about two different issues entirely. The engine thrust data that you set during FMS initialization remains. To quote kyle: How dumb would it be to pull out existing functionality? What I am talking about when referenicing the cost of data is specifically the takeoff performance calculations that are done by dispatch or in the EFB in order to determine runway/climb gradient performance... That data is not present due to cost. If you don't know the difference- then don't panic- you won't notice anything different because the EFB stuff is NEW functionality. Everything you are used to seeing is still in the product.

Brian, Thanks! You will enjoy it, I promise.

Now now! You make it sound unsafe! LOL There is definitely a "new airplane" myth in charter circles that costs clients lots and lots of money they don't need to spend. Our bird is very low time (7,300hrs) compared to most airplanes her size (normal for this age is about 15,000) and continues to be really well maintained. Lets just say that a well known bizjet manufactuer asked if they could hire our airplane to fly a mechanic to a location to trouble shoot the flight controls on a 1 week old, $65M copy of their latest offering... So... the age of the bird doesn't always tell the client how things will go. LOL When I make charter recommendations, I generally tell people to focus on the training/pilot skills side and not worry about airplane age. Plenty of very new airplanes have crashed due to poor piloting skills- and plenty of old battle worn birds have soldiered on at the hands of skilled crews. I love this little machine. Is very quiet up front once you get up to FL370-FL430. Much more so than anything else I've flown. And the view for the pilots is pretty darn nice too... but you can say that about anything when you are looking out the front windows.

David, Never give up. You just never know what opportunities might come your way. TKS is interesting, and I have collected a veritable library of information about how it works and how best to use it. I am a *huge* proponent of continual, professional training so I go to FlightSafety annually for recurrent, but even at FSI there seem to be few people who really understand how the TKS fluid works and what strategies to recommend for it's use. I have learned that TKS at high/cold altitudes and TKS at low warmer altitudes call for two totally different strategies. This lesson was learned the hard way- and i'm really not a fan of this learning style as it tends to add grey hair. M20 is a great ride and if that is what fits your lifestyle don't ever put the world "only" in front of it! Airplane is an airplane is an airplane. Some go further/faster/higher- but at the end of the day it takes more skill than driving a car- and we are all in this insane club together. 😋

Gents, Gentle reminder to sign your posts please, we require it... I'd hate to have to ban anyone during release weekend. (Well.. there are a few... 🤣)

Erik, I just tried it right now- and indeed the middle button does indeed work! So there you have it. Now we both know what we didn't know when, you know, you asked me if I know... 😎 You know?

Leo, Our beta team has been getting updates internally about every 48hrs for weeks... Dan is actually flying the RTM version we think.

David, A 1985 Cessna Citation S/II. Absolutely marvelous little airplane. Was the beginning of Cessna really trying to figure out how to increase speed and range from the original 500 series, which they did through changes in the wing, tail and a slight uptick in engine power. Carries more fuel, has greater MGTW. The down side is that it does require special certification to fly single-pilot, or you can operate with two pilots, and while some pilots shy away from the S/II because it uses TKS fluid for ice protection, they miss out. I have a friend who operates a regular Citation II and the S/II outclimbs, out cruises, out ranges and out carries his airplane in all categories. The other nice thing about the airplane is that the straight wing gives it great climb performance and forgiving handling. The down side is that the drag curve becomes basically vertical at around M0.65, so at FL410 you have to turn the TCAS from "ABV/BLW" to "BEHIND" 😎

Captains, During the weekend ahead, we are planning to release the PMDG 747-8 Expansion for our PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II product line. (Finally! woooooooot! 😋) [Disclaimer: Release is expected- but not guaranteed...stay tuned!] A few things we want you to know, **before** we get into the drama of the release weekend: Massive PMDG 747-400 Update: Our original plan (circa 2012, when the 747 project was launched) was that the PMDG 747-8 Queen of the Skies II would overlay the PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II with the same ease as the PMDG 777-300ER overlaid the PMDG 777-200LR. Oh how wrong we were... We were so, so wrong... From a technology, the 747-400 and 747-8 are entirely different machines. Most of this is related to the data and processing functions inherent to the 747-8, and this caused us to have to do a massive amount of reconstruction on the 747-400. What probably SHOULD have happened, is that we SHOULD have simply announced that the PMDG 747-8 was going to become a stand-alone product and called it a wrap. We wrestled with this, since we had already told you that the PMDG 747-8 was to be an expansion, so we stuck to that plan and probably absorbed an extra 7-9 months of development time on account of it. So we are going to publish a full new installer for the PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II and this will be a required installation if you wish to use the PMDG 747-8. The changes *could* be delivered by micro-updater, but in this instance prefer to draw a bold line to make certain all users wind up in the same version. What is included?: We are very much focusing our development on the top-end. Prepar3D v4 gives us the flexibility to include some great functionality that simply doesn't play well on other platforms- and for that reason we are adding PMDG RainMaker to the 747-8 (and soon the 747-400 as well) but we will not be adding RainMaker to Prepar3D v3, FSX or FSX-SE because we do not think those platforms adequately support it. Here is the matrix for what you can expect: Prepar3D v4.3+ Users PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II Product Update (estimating Build 3.00.9004) PMDG RainMaker Functionality (release for 747-400 expected approximately Nov, 1.) PMDG 747-8 Queen of the Skies II Expansion Package PMDG RainMaker Functionality PMDG Electronic Flight Bag w/computation features and Airport Mapping. Prepar3D v3, FSX, and FSX-Steam Edition Users: PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II Product Update (estimating Build 3.00.9004) PMDG 747-8 Queen of the Skies II Expansion Package PMDG Electronic Flight Bag w/computation features and Airport Mapping. As is the norm for PMDG products, FSX users may use their product license in either/both of FSX and FSX-SE, while Prepar3D customers may use their license in either/and/or Prepar3D v3 and Prepar3D v4. Moving between the two simulation platforms does require the purchase of a license for the desired platform. Speaking of Versions: Prepar3D Users BEWARE that we have some changes coming: With the advent of our support for the Prepar3D product line, we have tried very hard to support any possible version that you might wish to use. We shortly afterward dropped support for v1 and v2 of Prepar3D because it simply wasn't possible for us to maintain compatibility across the product platforms without limiting growth on the top end of the product line. Fortunately, we haven't run into this with Prepar3D v3 and v4 (yet), but we are starting to see problems across the Prepar3D v4 product line maintaining version between 4.0-4.3. For this reason, we are updating the product requirements on the PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II and PMDG 747-8 Queen of the Skies II to Prepar3D v4.3. This doesn't mean it won't run on earlier v4.x versions, but it does mean we won't be able to support you if you have trouble with the product not running in earlier versions and you choose not to be on the latest update of Prepar3D. Inevitably there will be users who want to remain with an outdated version of Prepar3D for personal reasons. If any of our versioning requirements cause you trouble, we apologize- but the vast majority of customers are focused on the newer capabilities of Prepar3D and in order to keep the product line growing and using the latest capabilities we need to keep moving forward as well. Pricing Expectations: As always, we will not be announcing pricing until release, but I can tell you that pricing will be higher than previous expansion products due in large part to the amount of work required to build the simulation of this truly stunning modern airliner. Additionally, effective with the release of the PMDG 747-8 Queen of the Skies II, there will be a small price adjustment to pricing on the base package of the PMDG 747-400 Queen of the Skies II for both FSX (appx. $10) and Prepar3D users (appx $5). Okay- to wrap up - I think I am going to update my "this is my favorite view of the 747-8" comment from last night. THIS image... This one right here, is my favorite. Mmmmmmmm....... Beautiful.

Erik, You know... I don't know. I have one. I'll try it and report back.

Spencer, We get by by with a TON of inventiveness and ingenuity because we have been at this a long time and we know what we are looking for, and how to create interpolated data to fill in gaps. Some stuff, like runway analysis, is quite a bit harder to obtain and is closely controlled by the companies that provide it. Most people don't realize that even if you go and win the lottery and buy yourself a 747, you are probably going to spend in the neighborhood of $120,000-$240,000/month on data. Maintenance data, parts tracking data, navigation data, performance data, planning data, runway analysis... The costs are sky-high. I have an existing relationship with an analysis firm that provides the runway analysis for my flying operation and even for a snotty little 30 year old light jet, the data costs alone are more than the monthly payments on a nice car. So- we can do wonders with interpolation- but when it comes to something as location specific as runway analysis- it just isn't worth the effort at this juncture- especially given that most folks would never touch it anyway.

Mark, Okay- we'll take that 1/200th... but I underquoted (yes, I actually have a quote for the data here!) so i adjusted my reply above... I'm gonna need another deposit from you. Just use the same credit card? 🤣

Mark, Cost for that data is about $400,000 PER YEAR for use, and does not include the performance gradient information that is actually what is needed to do the entire computation. THAT data falls under Runway Analysis, and will cost you about $1.25M per fleet type. So rather than sitting there throwing barbs to insinuate that we are not giving you something you desperately feel you deserve- how about you just pony up and send the check for your part of it, and I'll be happy to place the order and provide it in your personal version. 😎 Simmers sometimes forget that stuff costs money in the real world. You seem to have fallen into that trap. 🙄

Lars, We don't have any official cooperation with the developer for that product line, so I don't know what they do or how they do it. Perhaps one of our beta testers can chime in here, as many of them use a wide range of products in their testing process. Personally I do not use any products that include the COUATL/BGLMANX.

Captains, Another new PMDG 747-8 Knowledge Base item you probably want to digest NOW, so you don't hold up departures on Day 1 by fighting with the Electronic Checklist: Here is an area in the PMDG 747-8 that is going to trip some users up, and so we wanted to put together a special, single topic item here for you to read. Our hope is that this will prevent confusion when it comes to the Electronic Check List (ECL) system in the 747-8. HOW TO KNOW YOU SHOULD COME BACK AND RE-READ THIS LATER: If you find yourself in a scenario where you think the ECL has “frozen” or “is stuck” or “isn’t responding to mouse clicks” come back here and read this again. When the 777 first debuted back in the mid 90s, it was innovative in that it had a touch pad installed for each pilot in order to control the ECL. The touch pad functioned much like the touch pad on a laptop computer, allowing the crew to slew a cursor around on the ECL screen, with push buttons to make selections by clicking. When we designed the PMDG 777, we emulated this functionality by creating a custom process that allowed you to use your mouse to move the cursor around over the top of the ECL display and click on desired items. This very effectively emulated the function of the onboard touch-pad from the pilot’s perspective, and also worked very much like a standard Windows interface, so it was really quite handy! The 747-8 is DIFFERENT: Okay so this should be an obvious fact, but it still needs to be pointed out: The PMDG 777 and the PMDG 747-8 are different from each other. Yes, they are both stunningly beautiful airplanes to look at, and yes they both are detailed in grand fashion within our simulations, but the issue we are focused on here is that the 747-8 airplane also has an ECL but you will interact with it a manner that is completely different than what you became accustomed to in the 777. It is important to understand how this will change your interaction with the PMDG 747-8 ECL system. If you look to the side of the throttles, you will see that the analog trim gauge from the 747-400 has been replaced with a selector knob. This knob rotates, and also has a push-to-select function that allows a crew member to push vertically downward on the knob to make selections. If you look at the ECL screen, and rotate the knob, you will notice that the magenta selection box moves progressively through each of the clickable items displayed on the screen. If you rotate the knob by left/right clicking on it, or by rolling your mouse-wheel, the magenta selection box moves in the desired direction. For purpose of this explanation, it is helpful to think of knob rotation as performing the same function as the tab key on your keyboard when moving a selection between options within the Windows operating system. Once you have the desired item highlighted, simply push down on the knob to click. The ECL will respond appropriately, and move to the next logical place on your checklist, or to the menu you have selected, as the case may be. You will find that this function is quite nicely compatible with your mouse scroll wheel, with the scroll wheel serving as the rotating knob, and then clicking to simulate pushing down on the selector knob. (NOTE: Your mouse must be over the ECL screen for this to operate, but it is important to note that the location of your click is the magenta highlighted area and NOT the location of your mouse cursor! <<=== THIS IS IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER.) To describe this another way: You can't simply move your mouse to a different item on the display and click. This will not work! The "click" will be applied to whatever is highlighted in magenta, not to the location of your mouse. NOW: We had a vigorous debate internally within PMDG as to whether we should allow users to select between the correct 747-8 selector method and the older 777 method. This debate was eventually settled along the lines of “more options are a good thing for users” and we have included both functions. If you find that the new roller knob functionality confuses you, or doesn’t work for you because you use your mouse wheel for something else more important, you can easily activate the old 777 style of ECL manipulation by going into the OPTIONS menu within the FMS, go to SIMULATION and on Page 5, change the selection from WHEEL to CURSOR. You can play with this in flight by switching back and forth to see which one you like more, it won’t hurt anything. GOTCHAS: We mentioned in the beginning that you are inevitably going to hit a moment in your flying in which you think, “hey, the ECL is frozen and not responding.” When this happens, stop and take a look at your ECL screen closely. Chances are, the checklist has reached a “sensed switch” that requires input from the crew in the FMS to match a handle/selector position, or simply requires a knob/switch to be in a specific position before the item can be checked off the list. When this happens, you simply need to use the roller knob to move the magenta box to whatever other desired item you need to select, because the location of your click is the magenta highlighted area and NOT the location of your mouse cursor. (Remember we said this was important?) Now, if you fall into this trap, don’t panic. Just use the roller knob or your mouse wheel and you will find everything is working just great. (And don’t feel badly because 1/3 of the PMDG team stumbled into this late in beta testing and thought it was broken, too... See? Even we have bad days.) Remember: When in doubt, roll the knob to move the magenta selection box. You can find this article, and others that we are creating for your use in the PMDG Knowledge Base. https://support.precisionmanuals.com/kb/a127/using-the-electronic-checklist-ecl-controller-it-isnt-stuck.aspx