zinfinion

Possibly this: www.sarangan.org/aviation/articles/vor-article.pdf - Fun fact: With some more stuff here: http://www.campbells...es/VOR/vor.html So it looks like I'm using it as intended. Go figure! :lol: Apparently everything I do is frowned upon by real world pilots and is odd and weird and dangerous.

Great post. I found Reverse Sensing? No Such Thing to be especially helpful in eliminating those last bits of uncertainty when trying to intercept a given radial. I x-ref all my 2 radial intersections as the radial (rather than the reciprocal) and just set the OBS to that and don't bother with following the needle, but instead just go to the heading it points to on the dial. It also helps a ton on backcourse approaches in the RV-6.

Uhhhh, it only has a tiny crater in real life. That really just looks like a dipped in side of the peak. And it is mainly just brown. No lava either. Unless you mean dried up flows, which again, mainly just brown. Link 1 Link 2 Link 3 Link 4 I think it's a bit presumptuous and naive to expect every remote part of Alaska to be fully detailed for $15.

I just grabbed the aerocache. Compared to what Google is showing it looked rather good in Flight. The data was definitely massaged, though there were still hints of the blockiness. Looked totally fine though. Not like Minecraft whatsoever. :lol:

Not wanting to derail this, but Flight is not the only one wrestling with the quality of DEM data: http://goo.gl/maps/fzkq

Was it overclocked out of the box? And have you tried lowering the clocks (GPU and RAM) in Precision X to see if that eliminates the effect? A lot of the Kepler cards have been flaky to say the least, especially the ones that came factory overclocked. Make sure to monitor the core frequency in-game through the OSD. GPU frequency above 1200MHz is where they start to experience graphic corruption or just crash to the desktop. My 670 is stable at 1267MHz in Heaven maxed out, but only 1215MHz in most games. This is pretty typical. If you still experience the graphics anomaly at 1100MHz or less, then it's probably not the card that is causing the issue.

Starts pulling forward, noses down to level attitude and once it gets past 30K IAS it starts to gain speed in a hurry. All with the parking brake still set. Interestingly this only works when light on fuel. Full tanks and it surges a bit but then stops. Weird either way. And just to increase the weirdness, the Maule with full tanks and normal take off roll gets off the strip faster at 1500 RPM than it does at 2700 RPM. Something is definitely strange in this neighborhood.

For a serious "what the..." moment, start on a strip with the Maule, set parking brake, mix and prop to full, then throttle to full, then pull back prop for an interesting ride.

Eh, $33 to have been playing for 4.5 months already is something I'm okay with. I'm totally stoked for Wings of Prey being only $5.

That is clearly a graphics anomaly and I'm rather certain it's the video card and not the game causing it. Could you let us know the video card and drivers you are using?

I'll stick with Deakin, thanks. I prefer science over tradition.

A choice quote from the artice I linked above:

Just because the POH is the authority, that doesn't make it right. Looking through a number of them, their recommendations haven't changed in 30+ years, ignoring advances in engine technology. At the time they were first printed you'd be crazy to run lean of peak due to single probe EGT/CHT readouts and injectors that hadn't been tuned. Now with GAMIjectors and multi-cylinder engine monitors, LoP is a viable way to fly that both saves fuel and runs the engine cooler. I can't see a downside to that. John Deakin, pretty much the go to guy for LoP, basically says to ignore the POH rules for throttle/prop/mix, except when getting certified. After that, run it the way science has shown to be best, LoP. Some more reference material: The Great Leaning War

I think the fact that people are missing here is that Flight is single threaded and already pegs that CPU core at 100% most of the time. To expect more detail or features to be added without the Flight team doing an entire engine overhaul is pretty much wishful thinking at this point. You just have to look at all the "Alaska ruined my performance" threads to realize the engine doesn't scale all that well to additional detail.

I find it utterly preposterous how low-fi reality is compared to how I imagine it to be!

Phase 1: What even is wrong with this ICON?! Grumblings about not performing like a fighter jet and constantly being at the edge of the envelope. Phase 2: Buy Hawaii pack in hopes that RV-6 is better. OMG this is amazing!! Phase 3: What are all these cool dials and stuffs? Wiki VORs and the like. Get totally confused by To/From and reverse sensing. Figured all that out though. Reverse sensing is cool! Phase 4: You mean there are rules to flying? Download AF/D, TPPs, sectionals, books from FAA. Phase 5: Spend more time learning than flying. :P I basically started off super casual (though using HOTAS, but still no real clue about GA) and did a bunch of missions, a few jobs, and grabbed the majority of the easy and daily Aerocaches. I took a bit of a hiatus and soaked up some knowledge and it made the game much better. Then did it again. I foresee that happening for a few more cycles. Just an example. Two months ago I had no idea if I would ever make it to my destination and have fuel left in the tanks. As of about two weeks ago I know my rough fuel flow rate as well as how to achieve consistent speeds, which comes in great for heavy cargos as well as for timing legs when VFR. It's much easier to pick the right mountain pass when you've got the timing down.

LOL. It's pretty surreal posting this sort of stuff when I've never even touched the real deal.

With throttle wide open and mixture between full rich and peak EGT. Page 3-6 of the IO-540 manual (and practically every other engine manual, page number aside). With regards to the highlighted bit. That is not percent engine power. That is percent of percent engine power. So if you have manifold and RPM set to 75% power, if you set mix to RoP as shown in the Max Power Range, you will get 100% of 75% power. If you set mix to LoP in the Best Economy Range you will get 93% of 75% engine power for an actual 69.75% engine power. You can also see the Fuel Consumption drops tremendously from full rich to Best Economy (hence the name). With modern tuned injection engines there is really no benefit to running RoP unless you absolutely need 100% of a given power percentage. If you want to check out full rich never being max power, not even at sea level, start at Honolulu, follow the same steps as my Bradshaw experiment and you will see RPM rise from 2628 at 100% mix to around 2649 at 75% mix, after which it drops again (obviously indicating full power at 75% mix). The mix levers are set to provide excess fuel at 100% mix for engine cooling during climb (100% power at sea level when at max RPM, declining as altitude is gained), so 100% mix will never be max power. At sea level you would NEVER lean to max RPM as cooling from the excess fuel is far more important. As well, ram air + windmilling (new one, learned that from the article you just linked) will quickly make up the 72 RPM short of 2700. At Bradshaw however the engine is already far below 100% power due to altitude and the air is cooler, so excess fuel is not needed as much. That said, at high altitude you lean to max RPM and then stop pulling on the lean knob. The max RPM lean range actually goes quite a bit lower, down to around 40% mix if I recall correctly. That would not be wise to takeoff at. And I got way more long winded than I intended to but hopefully all this helps.

My main benefit from all this is I can reliably hit 75% power (lower if above 8000') through adjusting throttle and RPM (which also gets me to a consistent IAS, weather aside [also great for timing legs flying VFR in mountain passes]), and then when I set the mix for that combination of power and altitude I know roughly what my fuel flow will be allowing me to be very precise in the amount of fuel I take on overloaded cargo runs. Obviously it's up to everyone just how deep they want to go with all this. I find for me that it helps me "click" better with the planes and gives me more mastery over them, and reduces a number of things that were previously complete unknowns. One of these days I will sit down and read all of his articles. I swear I spend more time learning than flying. :lol:

@RoboRay: My initial post was indeed slightly misleading when I said: What I should have said was: At lower cruise altitudes the WOT no longer applies unless power can be reduced to <75% through RPM alone. If this can be done through RPM alone, the throttle can be left wide open. But if power is still above 75% after reducing to cruise RPM, then throttle will need reduced as well. (Obviously above 8000', since an engine can never make more than 75% power, any combination of throttle, prop, and mix can be used without worrying about harming the engine.) Given that sea level MP is 29.6" and it drops roughly an inch every 1000', if you cruise at 2000 RPM in the Maule you can run WOT/LoP pretty much from 1000' on up. @scotchegg: I'm no expert on warbirds but that sounds like an overspeed situation perhaps. Constant speed props use the governor to prevent both underspeed and overspeed from occurring.

Other than being possible to run well while leaned too much (30% mix at 2000' for example) I'm quite impressed with how it's been modeled in Flight. Though apparently you can run fuel injected engines quite lean and just get a loss of power rather than the roughness you would experience with a carbureted engine. I'm no pilot either, but all the real world things I've read line up rather well with what's in game.

To see high altitude leaning in action at takeoff, load up the RV-6 at Bradshaw. Set the parking brake, then go 100% throttle/prop/mix. The RPM will tap out at 2593. Pull back the mix 5% at a time. The numbers will increase each 5% until it redlines at 70% mix. Now shove the mix back to 100% and listen to the effect it has on the engine. If you proceed to take off at 100% mix and 2593 RPM the RPM will climb as you proceed down the strip due to the ram air effect, but your total take off distance will be longer than if you had mixed to max RPM before releasing the brakes. Even if you do a normal takeoff (brakes off, start at 0% throttle, move to 100% throttle) you will gain RPM more quickly with the mix leaned to 70%. Obviously this specific percentage only applies to Bradshaw and airports of similar elevation. Higher lean more, lower enrich more. Until below 3000' where it's full mix. As far as POH's, pretty much every one I've looked at has high altitude instructions that explicitly say to lean to max RPM when above 3000'. Flight even mentions this in the checklists.

I updated the IO-320 link with a much cleaner manual. Same quality as the IO-540.

If you want to go seriously in depth past mixture and get into engine power percents (since they are all tied together in a loose knot sort of way, mostly when it comes to fuel consumption) here are the manuals for the Maule and RV-6 engines respectively: Lycoming IO-540-V Lycoming AEIO-320 (unsure if it's the 150 or 160HP model, they're near enough as makes no difference) The others aren't all that interesting. The ICON's ROTAX 912 ULS has automixture, The Cub is always cruised at max 44.4% power. <_< And I haven't a clue what engine the Stearman uses. So that one could be interesting. Edit: Continental R-670-5. That was easy. Time to hunt down the manual.

I actually ran across all of John Deakin's articles on this about a week ago. Really fascinating stuff. I actually even mentioned it with regards to one of my screenshots since my prop and mix were not where the POH says to put them. :lol: That's the temp probe. Which does seem stuck on CHT.