beachdog2001

Here is FlightDeck2Sim’s take on the most recent Zibo version.

In my system, I will get a freeze of exactly 8 min 15 seconds somewhat randomly during flight isuslly starting about 2 hours into the flight. I spent a lot of time trying to track this down and the thing I noticed is that this never happens with any aicraft, including PMDG 777 and 737NG if ASN is NOT running. When ASN is running, most of my payware aircraft have this issue. I tried all kinds of suggestions in the ActiveSky forums and the best fix for me was to run unlimited frame rate and turn down the cloud draw and visibility distances in ASN. I have a pretty good i7 system and never saw this prior to installing ASN recently. This is for sure not purely a PMDG issue in my opinion. Maybe ASN + Payware aircraft overloads the system or something like that, not really sure, but I see this really bad with the LDS 767 and ASN together and not at all with LDS 767 and no ASN. Well, for what it is worth anyways. Bill Barrette

I myself have flown many hours now with the PMDG NGX and only occasionally see wind shifts like what you are talking about Tabs, and that is with all smoothing off including FSUIPC, which previously was absolutely required to fly the PMDG 747 in any kind of proper way. There are times when the wind aloft data is very different between say FL350 and 390, the levels for which we have data, and I am flying along at FL 370 or 360. So what are the winds supposed to be? There must be some kind of interpolation going on by the FSX weather rendering engine, right?. Sometimes during this kind of condition I will see jumps beween one wind level and the other for just a few minutes. This is when I will see wind shifts like what you are describing. In this case I either reload the weather or tick on FSUIPC for a bit and this goes away mostly. Actually, most of the time I just ride it out. You can see this when you do a step climb and you approach closer to say FL390 than 350 and the winds will stabilize. Not once has the AP disconnected or the now famous S turn behavior started. In fact, there has hardly been any disruption at all, some speed up and down a little , but that is about it. I am not a programmer and I have no idea how all this works in game, but I hate wind shifts like we used to have and in the more than 100 hours of testing with no smoothing at all, I no longer have to hold my breath that I am going to fall out of the sky at any moment. This didn't used to be the case, especially before FSUIPC came along and changed everything. Regarding model versus radiosonde data, this now is what I have seen with REX. Previously when flying from say KSFO to Hong Kong, the upper level winds well southeast of Alaska were supposed to be from the south and around 20 kts rotating around to easterly winds further north near or over Alaska, which work out to be tailwinds shortly out of SFO up to the time you get Anchorage and beyond. What we got in game was 320/94 kts for much of the way, slowly rotating over time in a "zonal" fashion and it was difficult to end up with enough fuel to get to VHHH. Now, we actually get southerly winds of around 20 kts in game and the other day I actually had tailwinds of 15 kts south of Alaska. Why? well there often are low pressure systems coming in to the west coast around Oregon or so and this is the kind of wind pattern you get in real life as a result. I know this is correct because I often fly to China in real life on this route and keep a note of what the winds are from the GPS map, and bewildering at the time, there are frequently15 kt tailwinds in this Anchorage area. This is why these aircraft are up there, day after day on the routes that they are on. This was not simulated properly before in REX and it is now, or so appears to be. Another example that I find very interesting is flying around the Equator. Before, the winds north of South America would be from the northwest right across the Equator and strong. The other day on a flight from Dulles to Rio, I had winds of 3-6 kts with a variable direction just a bit north of the Equator, that then picked up to around 20 kts a few hours later! I haven't seen 3kts of wind at FL350 in I don't know how long. A quick look at the weather charts show that this is what we should expect near the Equator generally. To me, as a longhaul flyer, this represents a huge leap forward in realism as far as winds aloft go, the problem over oceans as discussed earlier not withstanding. Regarding oceans, by the way, on my last flight, a flight from KSFO to EDDF last week, the winds over the Atlantic (~58-62N) were generally from the WSW, W, then WNW and varied between 30-60kts. They also were not the same the whole way. Regarding fuel planning, I am not flying in the real world, but in the simulated world, and what I care about while simming is the winds that I think and expect I am going to see based on what my weather program is giving me, actually showing up in game, not what show up on the real flight. And this REX does pretty well with the margin of error I expect a program lke this to realistically be able to do. I have input the winds from REX into the FMCs of various aircraft, naturally PMDG mostly, and the expected fuel burn has been pretty close to what was forecast. Sure it is not pefect, but I have not run out of fuel or even come close. The winds that I thought I would see, I have mostly seen. I am even able to to do pretty reasonable VNAV descents now, when before that was impossible due to wild swings in wind on descent. I did a VNAV descent into EDDF from FL 390 on the ROLIS arrival the other day that was absolutely magnificent and the weather presentation was wonderful. All of this without the use of any smoothing at all. What else can I expect from programs like these? Perfect simulation of reality over the whole globe up to 40,000', 24 hours a day, all year around? As a pretty serious sim hobbyist, I have to say that both REX and AS have come a long way dealing with this mind boggling FSX wind smoothing issue that have been around since the days when FSX first came out. The same thing goes for providing us with overall pretty realistic winds aloft and a beautiful environment. I happen to be an REX guy. I haven't used AS since I flew with FS9. A lot of you are AS people, and some of you are both, fair enough. I am for competition as much as the next guy, trust me, and for discussing their relative pros and cons, details and nuances, but at the end of the day I think we need to stand back and be very thankful that there are now two very good weather sim products available that seem to get better and better every year that have greatly enhanced our enjoyment of this hobby, along with the apprearance of very highly and realistically simulated aircraft. I would not be flying FSX if it were not for these talented developers and their great products and I am grateful they are doing what they do for us all.

Well, I happen to have a set of those Saitek ruder pedals so am glad you are trying to figure this out. Take your time with this one.

Try deleting all FSX assignments under the Slew heading. I believe this is a well known problem. I had this issue and deleting everything but the number keys needed for actually slewing did the trick.

Well, the Saitek controller doesn't do anything except activate Shift E when you press the button; the NGX does the rest. In your example you would go into the NGX menu and assign Shift E to the fuel switch command for one of the engines. There are two engines so you are going to need a second command for the second engine As an example I set up the left and right "idle" commands to be Cntrl Shift D and F, respectively. At 18% N2 I press these and the engines start (one at a time of course). Fuel cutoff is Cntrl D and F. Now you would assign the Shift E key command to a button on your setup with your Saitek software, or I use the FSINN key mapper in the stoplight thingy. It doesn't matter whether FSX has those key commands or not, the NGX bypasses that, apparently. It really is quite simple. Of course, whatever you had Shift E set to before won't work anymore while using the NGX as it will be overwritten and you get a warning about this before you finish setting it. .I use the FSINN key mapper for the PMDG 747 as well for the TOGA button, AP and autothrottle disconnects. The other axes like flaps, throttle, rudder etc. are normal FSX axes..The same thing can be done with FSUIPC although I personally don't mess with that.

What I wish for a turn radius option of more than 90 degrees. This seems to be the maximum allowed in the menu. It would be nice if say 120 degrees or more would be allowed. Some addon aircraft have this ability so I know it is possible in FSX.

Contrary to popular belief, the winds are not always blistering at high altitudes. As an example, on my last real world flight to Shanghai from Los Angeles in a 777, the winds flying west were 15 mph tailwind, probably why the were using that route. We were flying across the northern Pacific quite a ways south of Alaska. I have been on many flights like this on this route flying even as far north as just south of Mt. McKinley. Probably why the real world flight arrives as much as one hour or more earlier than when flown on the exact same route at the exact same time in the sim.

This is the problem with this freeze. I also had a situation where I could reproduce the freeze every time, like 6-10 times in a row. I call my buddy and ask him to try it and he tries and has no problem at all. But he has the same kind of reproducible freeze but at a different airport and different conditions, again, every time, reproducible as the sun coming up every day. At my airport, under my reproducible condition, no problem whatsoever. Support staff also has no problem at all with my scenario. Very frustrating for the support people I am sure.

Also need the choice of "no addon airports installed", or "no freezes at addon airports" or maybe even "other addon aoirport not listed"

Hmmm, for me with this issue, it would appear that the hotfix3 (8/16) enabled failures, whereas prior to hotfix3 Ihad them disabled and after checking, sure enough, found that I had a brake failure. Cleared this and all would seem to be OK. Also, disabled failures. Thanks for the tip Ross, ...or whatever your name is

VATSIM for me whenever possible, which is every flight this days.

I have also seen this twice now, very far from TOD, optimum was FL 386 and I was at FL360 and got the Step Unable message.

I think all you need to do is install the next hotfix, not reinstall the entire aircraft.

Some charts will even specify different TL's depending on the existing barometric pressure. Pretty helpful actually.