Xpendable

Interesting... I tested again today with both the default C172 and the Carenado Skyhawk II 2.1 and it did work correctly on both this time. I do have a photo of my sim showing the needle way up with the Carenado. This is all with the 2.92 version of Panel Builder. I will keep an eye out for it when it happens again.

In X-Plane 10.30, with both the default Cessna 172 and the Carenado Skyhawk II (v2.1), the vacuum side of the vacuum/amp gauge does not appear to be working properly. The needle is showing full upwards deflection and not on the scale.

I like it! That's a good idea. Unfortunately I don't have any radio units to hack into, although I could hack the 2 GF45's I have. I could steal the encoders out of them maybe.

I'm posting this just for fun. I'm not selling or promoting anything. Just doing this for myself, time permitting. I was thinking the other day about buying the Saitek radio module (I do already own several other Saitek modules) which I think is actually a pretty good buy. It would match the other Saitek modules I already have (TPM, Cessna trim wheel, switch module). The problem is, I couldn't really justify dropping another $150 on something that I would then have to explain to my wife. I do have the original GoFlight GF45's which I don't use anymore. They are huge and take up too much space. Anyway, I was thinking about it for awhile and decided that I would use my Arduino and electronics experience to build my own radio module with an LCD. I'm using X-Plane's UDP protocol to interface to X-Plane. I wrote a small C# console program to connect to X-Plane's UDP protocol and sent the nav and com data sentences only and decoded them with the C# code. I then format them for the LCD display and transmit the text over the serial interface (via USB) on the Arduino. This is just a proof of concept right now to prove to me that it's possible. This is not the latest version, but is what I got accomplished after only a few hours last Friday. I have since tweaked the color (the LCD's backlight is RGB) to match the amber color in the Carenado 172. Anyway, here's what I have: I still need to get some rotary encoders and knobs and figure out an enclosure.

Welcome to the new Microsoft. What you are referring to was the old Microsoft.

@NismoRR : I like your video. The Skycatcher looks like a fun plane, unfortunately I think it's too small for me! I'm 6'5" 300 lbs.

What the above guys said. When you are flying straight and level, the wing is generating lift 100% upwards, or vertically. I call that the vertical component. When the wing is banked, that lift now also divided between a vertical component and a horizontal component. Maybe 90% of the lift is vertical and 10% of the lift is now horizontal. In fact, it is this horizontal component that allows your plane to turn. It is NOT the rudder that turns the plane in the air like many non-pilots believe. The rudder actually is actually used to correct for what is called "adverse yaw". It really is the the horizontal component of the lift from a banked wing that pulls the plane into a turn. I like to think of this as the wing being "sucked" into a turn, which isn't far from the truth at all. When a wing is developing lift, it is the low pressure created above the wing which actually "sucks" the wing up.When you are approaching to land with a crosswind and you are over the end of the runway, you want the upwind wing to be lowered. To keep the plane from turning, you use the rudder to keep the nose pointed straight forward. In fact, you will be using opposite rudder. When you do this, you are compensating for the wind that would blow your plane across the center line. Remember that a banked wing creates a horizontal component of lift. So if the wind is coming from my right, I want to dip the right wing. As an example, If the wind is a full 90 degree crosswing at 5 knots, I'll need to dip the right wing enough to generate a 5 knot horizontal component in the opposite direction to null out the wind drift. This will keep my plane from blowing off the centerline to the left. If I dip my wing too much, I'll have a horizontal component that is greater than the 5 knot wind and I'll start to see my plane drift to the right. That's my que that I need to lesson the dip of the right wing, which will allow me to be blown back to the left over towards the centerline. Once I get back to the centerline, I'll need to dip the right wing a tad more to again null out the drift from the wind. If I start drifting too much to the left, then the wind is greater than my horizontal component -- then that's my que that I need to dip the right wing more so that I can get back to the centerline. Keep in mind that this is all happening BEFORE the wheels touch down. Another thing that most non-pilots do not realize is that in a proper crosswind landing, you will actually touch down on the upwind main wheel FIRST, then you will touch down on the downwind wheel afterwards. You do not want to touch down on both mains at the same time.Here's a decent King Schools video to help you see what I am talking about: Also so info about forward slips and sideslips.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip_(aerodynamic)#Forward-slip_vs._SideslipIn the Cessna 172, I'll usually crab into the wind (forward slip) on approach but switch to a side slip (upwind wing down) somewhere around 15-25 feet AGL. Some pilots delay this until the last few feet, which is commonly referred to as "kicking out the crab". Usually this requires more experience.

I wonder if it will be an external-only model?

I think you need a #4. real life pilots who don't like flight. There are more than just a few.

I can't agree with you there. Some real world pilots have praise for it, and some do not. I don't know where you came up with "unanimously", but I would to know what data you have to back that up.

Oh yeah, one more thing to keep in mind also... Outside air temperature as well as how rapidly the temperature decreases with altitude (called "lapse rate")c an have a big impact. 30F degrees at 4000 feet is much denser air than 70F degrees at 4000 feet. The "standard lapse rate" is considered to be a drop of 2 degrees Celsius with each 1000' gain in altitude. If the temperature drops faster than 2 degrees per 1000 foot, then you have air that is considered denser and more stable. (We see this in the midwest with winter flying and the air is usually very smooth). On a hot, humid day, the temperature decrease with altitude might be less than 2 degrees C with each 1000' gain. This results in less stable air -- more prone to turbulence and other kinds of fun weather.

Not necessarily true... At least in the C172's that I have flown for real, if you are climbing past 4000 feet and don't start leaning out the mixture, your engine will eventually start running rough the higher you climb. Remember that the air density decreases with gain in altitude and the mixture should be adjusted to compensate. If you know you are going to be climbing for awhile, it's a good idea to periodically adjust your mixture. It's technically part of both the "climb" and "cruise" checklists. Also, if you don't lean your engine properly (and there is more than 1 accepted way of doing this, something that pilots have argued about for years), you can increase your fuel burn and decrease your range. Also, flying too rich for a long time can increase the risk of lead build up in the engine and can increase the chances of spark plug fouling. You don't want that! Of course that doesn't matter in a simulator so much -- but I like to try to keep things as real as I can. ;)

Unfortunately, these are all the things that I HATE about developing for iOS. I am a software developer and have built a corporate application for iOS, so I have some experience in this area. Fortunately my company pays the $99 a year developer's license and provided me with one of those Mac cubes to do development work on. I hated every minute of it. Their development tools suck. I'm primarily a C#/.NET developer, and doing Objective C programming for iOS was just so backward and inefficient compared to most of the other programming languages I've done coding in (and I've used a LOT of programming languages in my time, including ASM90 (mainframe Assembler), 8088 assembler, C, C++, VB, VB.NET, C#, Java, Perl, Fortran, Cobol, AMOS, javascript, pixi, and a number of others that aren't even around anymore. Apple has become very closed and authoritative in the past 5 years and Microsoft is now following suit with Windows 8 (and of course Flight). It makes me want to format my drive and go to Linux more every day.

Personally, I think Flying Magazine's review is spot on. As a fellow pilot and a very experienced flight simmer, I believe he really is spot on.

Then again, the chicken cargo challenge has you breaking FAA rules for being well over gross weight and also without having the minimum FAA required 30 minutes of extra fuel.

That's probably because you don't actually know how to correctly do crosswind takeoffs and landings. I'm not bashing you, I'm just suggesting that you are inexperienced. You probably don't know the difference between a forward slip and side slip. You probably aren't aware of the proper aileron technique for crosswinds. In your video you mentioned crosswind takeoffs would be so much easier with toe brakes. That's wrong. You don't use toe brakes on takeoff. Ever. You need FULL rudder at the start and proper full aileron in the correct direction depending on the wind at takeoff roll. If wind is coming from the left, you turn the yoke to the left. If wind is coming from the right, you turn the yoke to the right. As you gain speed you ease out some of the aileron control and rudder. You would also never take off with a 19knot tailwind. I believe Flight was indicating the correct runway, and you were using the WRONG runway. Remember that every pavement is actually 2 runways. RWY 36 and RWY 18 use the same concrete, but they are considered opposite runways, for example. You also landed with a 19knot tailwind. Again, this is a no-no. You always land with the runway that is closest to a headwind, and never a tailwind or quartering tailwind. This is basic flying 101.

Just so you know, using VOR's is very much a part of VFR flying.

Because it is hilarious.

Also make sure you have mouse mode turned off. The spacebar will toggle mouse mode on & off.

Wow, there's an achievement for transporting 1,000,000 tons of cargo. Really? Did anybody do the math on that? Let's assume you have the Maule, which is the aircraft available with the most cargo capability at the moment I think. The Maule has a useful load of 1,100 lbs without fuel. Full fuel takes up just over 500 lbs. Let's assume 200 lbs for the pilot. That leaves 400 lbs for cargo. 1 ton = 2000 lbs. 1,000,000 tons of cargo means you would actually have to fly 5,000,000 flights. Wow. Let's say that each flight took 30 minutes. That's 150,000,000 flight minutes. Or 2,500,000 flight hours. That's TWO MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND hours. There isn't a pilot alive that has logged that many hours. How do I know? Even if you flew 24 hours a day, it would take you 104,166.7 days to fly that many hours. Which is... wait for it... 285 years -- if you flew every minute of every day, 24 hours a day. Sooo... what *idiot* designed that achievement? :LMAO: I can only assume that MS plans a DLC aircraft in the future that will have some serious cargo hold capability. Maybe a DC-3 or something bigger? Oh, and just so you know... there is also a 2,000,000 ton achievement. Seriously.

I've now played around with Flight for a few hours and tried most of the different features (such as Flight, Missions, Challenges) and have played with the weather settings and time settings. Here are my thoughts: This feels like an Xbox 360 game. I know that many of you will disagree with me, but that's what it feels like to me after playing with it for 2 days. Just take a look at all of the Xbox-like achievements you can earn. You actually get an achievement for crashing a plane 5 times. And there's another achievement for crashing your plane 100 times. I couldn't find any way to turn these achievements off, which can even be earned while you are doing free flight. Say what you will, but that is too arcady for me. Graphics were pretty decent and the framerate was impressively smooth. I don't have the best computer, although it is relatively decent: QX6700 quad-core extreme overclocked to 3.2Ghz, 4 GB ram, Vista 64-bit, (2x) Geforce 8800 GTX cards in SLI. I ran my graphics settings all at "High". I tried setting things to Maximum and frame rate dropped to < 10 frames a second. Fortunately things look pretty nice at the High settings. I will say that Flight does have nice visuals. I was impressed with how much autogen there was, and the trees did look pretty good. I was not that impressed with the clouds. I noticed a glitch where the same cloud puffs were repeated in a line pattern over and over again as they went further and further out. This happening only in one direction of the sky. It looked like what you would see if you held up 2 mirrors facing each other and the image is duplicated out to infinity. Anybody else notice this? I consider this a minor issue that I can look past, and I'm sure it's something they (MS) can fix in the future. I noticed at night that the some of the lit windows in the resort complexes turn on and off every few seconds. Unfortunately, it's not a single window at a time. instead, about 10% of the windows that are on switch off and 10% of the windows that were off switch on, and this happens all at the same time. Again, not a big deal. I initially had a huge problem with the Games For Windows Live Client being unable to download my profile, which means I was unable to initially access the Stearman or have the ability to purchase and use DLC. I got 2 error messages over and over again and no amount of research on Google or Microsoft's support websites were of any help. I finally figured out what the problem is after trying things for 4 hours. Apparently you can not have Cisco's VPN software installed -- The GFWLClient.exe simply will not function properly if you have that VPN software installed, regardless of whether the VPN is active or not (it was not). I have to use this software for work. Unfortunately, I had to uninstall it to get the Games for Windows Live Client to connect and download my profile. Good thing that I usually use a WinXP Virtual Machine to do my VPN stuff, so that really doesn't end up being an issue. I have turned off all of the assists to get the most realistic flight model. Unfortunately, the throttle does not seem to be working properly with my X52 in this game. Pulling the throttle all the way back on the Stearman still yields like 60% engine power. What??? That's not right. For now I'm assuming it's a glitch. This means that I currently have to pull mixture to idle cutoff in order to land. The plane just won't land with the throttle at idle (and I even played tried maximum RPM and minimum RPM on the prop). I double-check the throttle in the Game Controllers control panel and I am getting full range of motion on the throttle. Very odd. I'll setup my Saitek TPM later instead of using the X52's throttle to see if I get anything different. I was not able to spin the Stearman despite stalling the aircraft with fully cross-controlled rudder and ailerons and full power. I never even got so much as a wing dip. This was with all assists turned off. That is not realistic at all. A real Stearman WILL spin. I'm not too impressed with the Icon A5. I'm not faulting the flight model here, I just think the A5 doesn't have much power. That's probably true in real life since it's a sport category plane. I'm surprised the A5 doesn't even have a compass. Really? Wow. Don't get lost in that plane! I guess you can always turn the map on. I was impressed with the shadowing on the Stearman at dusk. That looked really good. I was not impressed with the shadowing on the Icon A5. The instruments were smooth like they are in XPlane-10. Much, much, much better than FSX. I tried a few of the challenges and a few of the missions. They all had an Xbox 360 feel to them. I was surprised that there were no rotating airport beacons. You know, the green and white beacons that help you identify that there is an airport 15 nm away. Those are oddly absent. The flashing strobes at the end of some of the bigger runways is unrealistic from a distance. They just don't light up the sky that much in real life on a clear day with good visbility. That's something they should tweak. My bottom line is this:I just can't get past the feeling of this being a game. There are those that will argue that this is not a game and that this is a full-fledged simulator under the covers. While there is a flight simulator engine under there, it is fairly well hidden behind all the "gaming" elements. I'm sure this will be fun for some, but I'm already getting bored fast. Wow, there's an achievement for transporting 1,000,000 tons of cargo. Really? Did anybody do the math on that? The Maule has a useful load of 1,100 lbs without fuel. Full fuel takes up just over 500 lbs. Let's assume 200 lbs for the pilot. That leaves 400 lbs for cargo. 1 ton = 2000 lbs. 1,000,000 tons of cargo means you would actually have to fly 5,000,000 flights. Wow. Let's say that each flight took 30 minutes. That's 150,000,000 flight minutes. Or 2,500,000 flight hours. That's TWO MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND hours. There isn't a pilot alive that has logged that many hours. How do I know? Even if you flew 24 hours a day, it would take you 104,166.7 days to fly that many hours. Which is... wait for it... 285 years -- if you flew every minute of every day, 24 hours a day. Sooo... what *idiot* designed that achievement? :LMAO: I can only assume that MS plans a DLC aircraft in the future that will have some serious cargo hold capability. Maybe a DC-3? Oh, and just so you know... there is also a 2,000,000 ton achievement. Seriously.

I had an initial problem with my X52 that was solved by unplugging my X52 and plugging it back in again and restarting Flight. Doesn't sound like that is your problem though because your AXIS's are apparently working. I did not have any issue assigning buttons.

Could another process have kicked on in the background, such as a virus scan?

Regardless of what flight simulator you use, I would recommend buying either a flight stick or a flight yoke and also picking up some rudder pedals. It will most definitely add to the immersion. If you can't afford the rudder pedals now, get a stick or a yoke now and buy the pedals later.I also believe that you will learn bad habits from any and all simulators, but that's okay. You will unlearn those habits quickly enough if you do decide to take up real flight training, and then the simulators become a powerful tool. You will actually get better at the simulators with real world training. It's almost kind of funny how that works out.

I installed Flight last night. I was really turned off by the 2 "lessons" as well, especially since I am an FAA licensed pilot. Fortunately you are not forced to complete the next 2 lessons. After you do the first 2 lessons, you can break out of the 3rd one and go to FREE Fllight. I was only able to try to Icon A5 though... Windows Live for Games simply does not function properly on my computer, ever. I am one of the few unlucky Microsoft "customers" stuck with an "unable to update profile" error that has plagued by system since the DiRT2 days. Microsoft was never able to figure out my problem. Guess I will not be allowed to fly the Stearman and I will forever be prevented for purchasing any DLC for this thing since all of those things require you to login to Live.