JD396

I've never really been impressed with the 777 data for TOPCAT. I quit using the takeoff and landing calculations and started using TOPER for takeoffs and ballparking it on landings. The 737 and MD11 data seems pretty good to me but the 777 data is kind of garbage, IMO.

Is it just a specific gate? Does the next gate over have the same problem? EDIT: Never mind, you said it loads fine everywhere else in your first post.

I normally engage it when the SID gets boring to hand fly, and disengage it when the STAR gets interesting to hand fly.

I don't have P3D so I don't know what's changed in this regard, but in FSX I always have crashing disabled because of strange things like this that happen with scenery, particularly when loading up big things like the 777.

You raise a really good angle on this kind of issue, which goes way beyond aviation to pretty much any safety-related field. From a management perspective, if you want people to do their jobs right, you can't really come down on people for self-reporting mistakes that they recovered from. I'm a CDL trainer and one thing all of my trainees hear from me is that doing your job safely is not about being perfect, but rather about being able to quickly recognize and recover from mistakes when you make them - and you WILL make them. Avoiding problems is great, but it's not always possible. The safety gods don't care if you're on day 1 or year 40 - no matter who you are, if something happens you have to react properly.

Check out FS Kneeboard, I think I had that at one point. Charts and some checklists and stuff like that IIRC.

A watched pot never boils...

I think RSR made that post, and then the entire dev team went to Antigua for six weeks and they haven't worked on ANYTHING

Me too, and then I read them.... Hence why I didn't start another thread on the topic.

http://www.avsim.com/topic/490558-split-scimitar/ http://www.avsim.com/topic/486667-split-scimitar-winglets/ http://www.avsim.com/topic/484937-model-only-split-scimitar-winglets http://www.avsim.com/topic/413703-split-scimitar-winglet-modeling-on http://www.avsim.com/topic/445990-pmdg-737-ngx-split-scimitar- http://www.avsim.com/topic/443791-blended-winglets/ http://www.avsim.com/topic/441199-panc-alaska-737ng-with-sharklets/ http://www.avsim.com/topic/435622-737s-with-split-scimitar- http://www.avsim.com/topic/435771-split-scimitar-winglets/ http://www.avsim.com/topic/435770-split-scimitar-winglets/ http://www.avsim.com/topic/416798-split-scimitar-winglet/ http://www.avsim.com/topic/415262-split-scimitar-winglets/ http://www.avsim.com/topic/397286-new-winglets-for-the-737ng/

A day on the PMDG forums just wouldn't be complete without

Normally, I start with a panel state I made myself - started from cold and dark and ran the Electrical Power Up procedure (FCOM SP.6.1 for the NGX, SP.6.2 for the 777), then saved it. Then I can just load that start at the Preliminary Preflight Procedure and go from there. Especially with the NGX I like to string several flights together and so then I'll usually just save the state and shut the sim down at the point where the real-life pilots would get up and go find some crappy fast food in the terminal. Did you replace the painfully annoying beeping in the 777 with "Good morning, Kyle"?

Well, you can guesstimate it based on fuel rules and how airlines load up planes like the 77W for long haul flights. At any rate OP said to take a long haul flight and compare it to the PMDG 777 to see how mind-blowingly bad the wing flex was on landing. So I did! Wow! What an oversight on my part! I re-ran my simulation and turns out OP is right:

I was just out at LAX spotting last Friday and thought I'd re-create this pic I took in FSX. Leon, would you mind explaining to us how distractingly unrealistic the wing flex is again?

I dink around with liveries a lot so I'm going to keep an eye on the state.cfg's from now on. I might write up a little batch file or something to clean them up. I'm halfway shocked I haven't come across this problem before -- but then again, I probably did have it in the past and just didn't notice. I only caught it the first few times because of something blatantly obvious in the configuration (KGS/LBS or the side-by-side displays in the NGX). It's funny... you'd think after modding the bajeebers out of every version of MSFS from 5.1 onward, it would stop surprising me. MSFS never fails to amaze.

Yeah, I don't even remember hitting the button. I un-marked it. I think you just hit nailed it. This is where my mind was going when it got too late and I got sick of troubleshooting last night. I just didn't know where besides aircraft.cfg FSX stored tail numbers and that kind of information, but you found it. Sure enough, the state.cfg's are loaded with pretty much every livery I've flown, organized by fltsim.XX number... so when that changes in an aircraft.cfg, the number gets out of sync and it pulls the wrong ini file. Now I understand why I wasn't able to reliably reproduce the issue - I was loading the same aircraft that had generated the problems for me enough times that it updated the relevant state.cfg. Before I clear all my state.cfg's I think I might deliberately toy around with it and see if I can replicate it again. I guess it would eliminate the problem entirely if the OC could nuke the state.cfg's when deleting a livery out of the middle of the aircraft.cfg.

So I checked the "Details" page in FSX and it's loading seemingly random tail numbers (even from liveries I've deleted and hand-checked the aircraft.cfg for their absence) when I load a plane. So, if I type in the right tail number before actually loading it, it all works just fine. I don't know what's causing it but it's easy enough to work around.

The "Fixed Config" entry in the CDU menus is blank and that's the only place I know of to force the same hours and ini files. Is there somewhere else to check? At any rate, I never did that deliberately. The aircraft.cfg's are clean now, as of right now the only liveries installed are the house liveries and a couple downloaded thru the OC, and I've never jacked around with the cfg's directly. It also pulled a -900 ini when loading an -800 so they're separate cfg's.

So, the past few days my sim has been loading the wrong aircraft-specific settings INI files for the NGX and 77X. It'll load one from a different aircraft - in the PMDG setup page on the CDU, it'll have all the right settings from the wrong file loaded. I haven't been able to consistently reproduce the issue but it's happened several times now. What exactly happened this morning: I finished one flight, shut the sim down and did other stuff, then fired the sim up again with another aircraft... and it loaded the INI from the previous plane (the AS 739 and UA 738 direct from the OC). It's not always the previously-loaded INI that it loads, though... it randomly pulled one I don't know I that I ever even flew the other day. I did have like forty bazillion liveries installed, but I uninstalled all of them except the house liveries and have just been installing them as I've felt like flying them and the problem still occurs. I could have sworn I saw a thread about this once a while back when I wasn't having the problem and didn't care, but I couldn't find anything pertinent in the forum. Anyone seen this one before?

Great thread, people... thanks. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I'd extrapolate that idea out and say that a good tutorial is worth a thousand pages of a manual... those of us who aren't around aviation in the real world often have trouble knowing what to do with the raw information that's out there. Some of it is great, some of it is garbage, and a lot of it is accurate but too technical for laypeople to understand without help. In the real world I'm a trainer and get to sift through the text of state and federal law, the interpretation of said law as it varies between two separate wings of the state's department of public safety and Lord knows how many federal agencies, our company policies as dictated by management which may or may not conflict with state and federal law... and boil it down into 12-15 hours of new hire training, turn it into workshop presentations that have to meet certain competencies for the state but also need to be interesting enough to engage my co-workers for two hours, using that information to make our annual one-on-one evaluations as meaningful as possible, etc. All of the information is freely available on or offline, but... if it didn't matter how information was compiled and presented, they wouldn't need me. The tutorials that come with our PMDG products are top-quality and that goes beyond just flight sim stuff - usually you get a manual and that's it, it's up to you to 1) already know how to use it or 2) read through the manual like it's crossword puzzle clues trying to figure it out what they mean. The tutorials we get with PMDG products are approachable for laypeople like me, and present the information without getting too caught up in details OR just skipping over stuff or dumbing it down (again, as a trainer, I appreciate how difficult that can be) Heck, I used the NGX Innsbruck tutorial with a totally different addon aircraft because the information on how to get everything set up and wind through a tough approach like that is kind of universal.

I wish the other places I posted around the internet had the name rule...

Usually I'm way too giddy after installing a new airplane to read manuals or tutorials so as quick as I can, I load up any newly acquired addon at KLAX, enter in a simple route to KSLC, and get it in the air. It's short enough of a route to get through quickly but long enough to get anything up to cruising altitude for a little while so I can sit there panning around looking at the plane until ToD.

A Brief History of the PMDG Support Forum Indefinite past - 03AUG11: "OMG you guys are so slow hurry up and release the NGX already!" 04AUG11: "OMG the NGX is the best airplane ever!" 05AUG11 - 03SEP13: "OMG you guys are so slow hurry up and release the 77X already!" 04SEP13: "OMG the 77X is the best airplane ever!" 05SEP13 - Present: "OMG you guys are so slow hurry up and release the 747v3 already!"

I'm not really ready for the X-Plane switch yet but the day this thing drops for FSX I'm going to be on it. I spend most of my time in modern airliners and have a blast doing so, and I'm looking forward to the 747v3 as much as anyone, but sometimes it's nice to break away from hitting VNAV and auto-step-climb before bed, turning off the center fuel pumps in the morning, and landing after work. I'm looking forward to futzing around with those radial engines, and trying to find Guam in crappy weather in the middle of the night without using the GPS.

Doing things halfway isn't really PMDG's MO so they're not just going to ship out the first version of the 747v3 that seems to run fine on P3D, you'll get one that's explicitly engineered to run on P3D. At any rate, most people are still running FSX and so that's going to be the audience targeted in the initial release. You've found the reason why I haven't gone P3D yet. I'm still running FSX Boxed that I bought off the shelf at Best Buy probably within a couple weeks of its release in 2006. I've read just about everything I can on P3D vs. FSX, and while I understand it's better, I also understand it's not so far and away better that I can't live without it. At the end of the day, it's still the same basic engine with some of the same limitations that were around long before FSX came around. At this point, I'm just not paying for P3D, and then paying to re-buy my addons, or hope that ones that bill themselves as either-or actually work correctly, and aren't sloppily shoehorned into P3D. I'll almost certainly upgrade to P3D when I finally start building my new computer but until then it's just not worth the added expense.