tunnelcat

Stan, here's the file name for the tutorial after I did some searching.pmdg747_advancedtutorial.zipKim

Hi Stan. Manually tuning the ILS NAV Radio within the FMC is in the manual that came with your disk, but it's a little hard to find in all that information. It took some really detailed reading to find it.As for tutorials, there is a really good one right here at the AVSIM library. Just search on 'Holger Seilz PMDG 747 Advanced Tutorial' within the library, but you need to register and log in to access it.Also, there are four nice tutorials at the PMDG website available for download.Kim

If the graphics is built onto the motherboard, forget about any changes, your stuck with what you bought. I do know that AMD bought ATI for the purpose of integrating the GPU onto the motherboard for speed, so this may be a what's on this laptop. Forget about any Intel integrated graphics for sure, Vista will choke it.The integrated sound has had some difficulties with sound acceleration and sometimes there is no fix, even after trying to adjust the sound acceleration in Direct X.It would be nice if someone has tried out this new ATI integrated motherboard combo to see how well it works. I haven't read any reviews about it yet. But price point is always a consideration if you can't afford more horsepower. If only you could try before you buy.Kim

I don't know Jordan. It's got integrated graphics and sound combined with Vista. Not a good combination, usually. You really want a laptop with independent graphics and sound cards for the best performance. At least the integrated graphics is an ATI Radeon chipset and not an Intel chipset (bad). The on-board sound card still is a negative.Everyone I've talked to has had trouble running games or simulations with the integrated graphics and sound setup, although I'm not sure about the on-board ATI Radeon setup. It might serve your needs. You know that even FS9 can be a system hog.Kim

I definitely agree that using FSUIPC is the best way to go for the calibration of your controllers. But if you don't have the full version of FSUIPC (you should buy it for at least this reason), you can't get access to the calibration function. Otherwise, you are stuck with the CH Products Control Manager and it's hairy and obtuse scripting functions.You can get some very good user maps for both the 737 and 747 from the CH Hanger Chat forum if you don't have the full version of FSUIPC.Kim

The Control Manager does work well to eliminate calibration problems with the throttle quad, but I agree it's difficult to understand. Try out this PDF and see if it helps you understand how to program your own maps.http://www.ch-hangar.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2017You can also go to the CH Products Hanger Chat forum (from the above link even) to find other user maps for download.Kim

Todd, if your are using the full version of FSUIPC, you can set the dead zone or null zone ranges for all your controllers, but ESPECIALLY the throttles, within this program. Just go into FSUIPC from the main FSX menu and set up all your axis and sensitivities there for all your controllers. Also make sure you have the latest version from Pete Dowson as well. http://www.schiratti.com/dowson.htmlIf you don't have the full version of FSUIPC, you'll have to use the internal FSX control setup menu. The dead zones should be under the 'sensitivities' option for your controller setup. You should see an option for setting the 'null zone' range for each controller. I haven't used FSX to look at the menu structure so I'm not sure how it looks. Start with a low setting and slowly increase the size to see if it works. Does Go flight have a control manager? That might help also.Since you already have the AFDS boxes unchecked, I don't know if this will solve the problem for you, but you can give it a try to see if any electrical input spikes are causing the behavior you are having with your 747.Kim

Hmmmmm. Are we starting to see the fruits of the outsourcing of airliner maintenance? Just today, 5/13/08, a NorthWorst airliner lost an upper wing panel in flight. Another aircraft from another airline lost an access panel last week. The airlines are really trying to save a buck by postponing maintenance and having less skilled, foreign, with low oversight, mechanics do the work nowadays. Scary.My brother-in-law is a pilot for American Airlines. I was talking to him about the next version of outsourcing the airlines are going to do and he thought I was crazy. What I told him was that PILOTS will be the next thing that will be outsourced and I think that it may already be happening now! Think about it. Get rid of the expensive union pilots with foreign ones that will work for less pay and no union rules to deal with. We'll see.:-eekKim

WOW! This problem sounds just like the one I had with my 747-400 in FS9 and I went through all sorts of troubleshooting and hair pulling before I finally stumbled upon the cause. I'm not sure if the problem translates to the 747X in FSX though.The problem concerns electrical noise from your controllers and an option in the PMDG menu. The solution was to either set a larger 'dead zone' for your controllers or 'uncheck' both boxes in the AFDS section of the PMDG options menu concerning both the 'controls and throttle overrides' options, which is what I finally resorted to in the end. My 747-400 now behaves as it should.Kim

The best thing I ever did to increase FS9's performance was to get a second hard drive and install FS9 on the outer rim of the new drive, then buy a third party defragger program and defrag FS9 by file name. Fastest load times and texture fill times ever!Kim

OK everybody, the show is on again Thursday May 8, 2008 at 2PM in the western U.S. time zone on the Hi Def National Geographic Channel. The correct show title is 'Break it Down: Plane', sorry for the earlier posting error. This is a hard show to find! There is no permanent link referencing it at nationalgeographic.com either. Every search on their site and Google leads to pages that don't mention it.It is interesting to watch and see the myriad of parts and where they are located on the plane. One fact I didn't know about was the use of depleted uranium ingots in the tail to get the center of gravity correct. It had to be specially handled in the scrapping of the plane. I still found it hard to watch them tear apart such a grand old 747.Kim

Nice! Almost like being there.Just saw on the network news some old 1960's space walks that NASA had on 35mm film. They've recently transfered all of them into the high-definition video format and now you can see, in almost perfect clarity, the original space walks. They have a bunch of other hi-def videos as well. Check them out here.http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/index.htmlKim

You may have the old 'noisy controller' input problems. If you have 'controls override' checked in the PMDG options, AFDS section, you will get weird behavior with both the A/T and A/P. My 747 was doing PARTIAL, no alarm (silent) disconnects of both the A/P and A/T during the takeoff phases. One of these glitches showed up as an engine going to idle during takeoff. Real exciting to say the least. It occurred with either engine 2 or 3 (or both) mostly in my case.You can either uncheck both of those boxes in the PMDG AFDS menu or set a larger dead zone for your controllers to filter out any input spikes.Kim

I watched an interesting show on National Geographic Channel the other night. It was about how they went about scrapping a 747. Kind of sad but fascinating. You guys might want to check it out if you have cable and are interested. The show is called 'Man Made-Deconstructing a 747'. A lot goes into tearing apart something that big and heavy and saving as much as possible for reuse.Kim

36. Telluride Exclude here at Avsim. Necessary for KTEX lovers that don't want to hit the ILS shack at the end of the runway.Kim

The Sig Sauer has a separate 'decock lever' to put the hammer down, but not an actual safety lever that disables the gun when safe is engaged. I thought that was a little weird when I bought the gun years ago, but it is 'safe' when the hammer is fully down, but only for a drop. It's just unsafe in the fact you CAN still fire it if you pull the trigger when a round is chambered. Not a good idea for gun noobs.Was the pilot actually handling the gun or did it just fall out of the holster? If he was handling it, that means he was not paying attention to flying! EEEEEEEK! Maybe that's why he dropped it. Perhaps something more pressing, like LANDING THE AIRCRAFT, distracted him!Kim

I own a Sig Sauer 9mm pistol and it does NOT have a dedicated 'safety lever'. It is in 'safe mode' when either the hammer is all the way down or no rounds are chambered. If you chamber a round by pulling the slide back and then releasing it, the hammer will then be 'cocked' which Sig calls single pull mode. Very easy to discharge the weapon at this point, very little trigger pressure required to fire it, even dropping it could cause a discharge. You have to 'decock' the hammer to it's full resting position for a 'safe' carry (double pull mode), which requires far more trigger pressure to fire and it is safe if accidentally dropped at this point.I don't know what type of gun this pilot was carrying, but he obviously didn't know how to or he was too distracted by (landing procedures maybe) keep track of his gun's settings. Scary! He shouldn't have even had it out of storage! But cocking a gun can take precious seconds if you are being assaulted, so it does make sense to keep a round chambered if you're a pilot trying to defend an aircraft. Lets hope that more handgun training is forthcoming here for everybody's safety.Kim

Finally! I found the elusive chicken! It's an FS9 autogen object and there are several others as well, including a fish and a cow head, which are probably supposed to be restaurant icons. The only way I found them was when I reinstalled FS9 and accidentally turned the autogen slider ALL the way to maximum. It's a frame rate hit, but these icons now show up all over the place. You can even find them mixed in the area buildings just north of KSEA, although this chicken was sighted in Juneau, Alaska.Here's a screenshot of the chicken:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/187336.jpgKim

Clayton,Sorry, I didn't know about the flaps not showing during replay bug. If you really want to see if you're greasing your landings, try this aircraft.cfg alteration (if you dare) to the aircraft's contact points for a more realistic setting of the g-force crash tolerances upon landing. You might find it frustrating to land at or less than 300 FPM and stay at VREF.http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...mode=full#33623Kim

Clayton,This may be a silly observation, but I don't see any flaps deployed on your 747 in the screenshot.Kim

I had a ATI Radeon 9800 XT AGP card that I replaced with a Nvidia 7950GT AGP card. It's about four times faster than the old one and I'm pleased with the performance. However, since it is an Nvidia card, it comes with the Nvidia driver issues with FSAA in FS9, that I have been able to work around. If I could have found an ATI card with the same specs, I would have gotten it instead of the Nvidia card, but AGP selections are very limited and I wanted to get at least 4X more speed for my money. One bonus I got was that the Nvidia card supports Pixel Shader 3.0 while my old ATI card supported only 2.0.You also have to worry about power connections to your motherboard and if your power supply has power to spare. Check out this web site for comparing video cards.http://www.playtool.com/pages/home/index.htmlThis site has AGP cards listed as to power requirements, connectors and a whole host of information for comparing video cards. There's even sections showing what the power connectors look like for the many types out there if you are not a computer expert. Enjoy.Kim

This quirk seems to be an Nvidia Driver issue with the AIRAC load window position, a location that places it on top of the FS9 menu window while in full screen mode. This problem doesn't show up on ATI cards that I've heard of. It also works OK when in FSAA is set higher than 4X. 4X FSAA seems to be the worst offender. It also doesn't occur in 'windowed mode'.Other than getting Nhancer, my workaround has been to use 8X FSAA, always start FS9 in 'windowed mode' (this also solves the black aircraft preview screen bug) and then right before I hit the 'fly now' button, I switch to 'full screen mode'. Occasionally I get missing elements in the menu when switching modes, but I just make sure that the curser is not located over any menu area or just switch back and forth between modes again.I wonder if there is a way to reposition the AIRAC load window OUTSIDE of the FS9 menu window permanently to solve this problem?Kim

OK boys. Want a challenge? Try flying a 747 through the Moffet Field hangers in the San Francisco Bay area in Palo Alto. It can be done, barely!Kim

Somebody gave out the 100 mph crosswind figure because Brian Williams on the NBC News said the same stupid thing. Definitely must be a bogus number. But it looked pretty hairy! A lot of people on board wet their pants on this one. They even reported that Lufthansa was giving psychological counseling to anybody from the plane that wanted it. Kim

Too bad that you aren't going to be in Oregon. You could go to McMinnville and visit the Evergreen Aviation Museum and see the Spruce Goose and all the other wonderful aircraft they have on display.My husband got THE grand floor tour of the Everett Boeing Facility years ago while working for Hewlett Packard since they were making test instruments for Boeing Development at the time. I was jealous they didn't allow spouses. I would've enjoyed it.Kim