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lgcharlot

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  1. I have solved this problem. It has to do with weight distribution and trim. The location of the wing fuel tanks was placed too far forward in the flight_model.cfg file. This parameter should be -5.382 (fore/aft), +/-10.256 (left/right), 4.041 (up/down), 110.000 (gallons), 0.000 (unusable), and somehow it was changed to -4.0, +/-10.256, 4.041, 110.000, 0.000. This error was making the aircraft nose-heavy, requiring 20% up-trim to maintain level flight: as soon as the autopilot was engaged, the elevator trim would go to 0, and the plane would go into a dive. I shifted the CG further aft, from 27% to 45%, to allow level flight at 0% elevator trim, and now the autopilot behaves properly. I don't know why the aircraft is requiring the CG to be moved aft this much; 45% is a couple feet aft of the trailing edge of the wing, so it's obviously wrong, but where the underlying cause is - probably in the model files somewhere - I can't suss out. Anyway, it's now flyable, except for the radios still having no visible numbers.
  2. I live just down the road from Placerville, in South Sacramento, so now I have a bespoke local airport to explore! Thanks, I'm d/l'ing it now!
  3. One of my favorite planes in FS2020 was the Grumman G21A Goose Redux II, by OzWookie and the OZx team. This project is an FSX import, but unlike many other such 3rd-party add-ons to FS2020, the OZx Goose was amazingly responsive and fun to fly - she felt "alive", in a way that most other FSX imports never did. The skin textures were obviously FSX: low resolution, rivets and screw heads were fuzzy and indistinct, as we all remember from FSX, and the instrument and switch labels were often hard to read. But the engine sound was amazing right from the moment you toggled the starter, until the moment your flight was over, the bird was parked, and you shut 'er down. The OZx team re-created the instrument graphics and liveries in high-def resolution, so you could actually read them without squinting, and everthing was configurable, right down to the load and CG balancing. Flying off land or water, she was gentle, forgiving of mistakes, with enough power to cruise at 148 knots and climb at 750 fpm. She had retractable wing floats, which were added to some existing airframes in the 1950's and 1960's, and this gives the OZz Goose about a 25 knot speed edge over the official Asobo/Microsoft G21 Goose. The OZx Goose is so much more fun to fly! She has an autopilot, which the Microsoft version of the plane lacks, and the sound files are a better rendition of the rumble of the R-985 Wasp Junior engines, than what comes with the Microsoft Goose. Sadly, I have to report that the OZx Goose Redux II has issues in FS2024. Two problems are so serious that they make the plane almost unflyable: The numeric displays on the Bendix radio stack, which are red LED's, are blank. This affects the Nav and Comm radios, the ADF, and the Autopilot (the DME never worked, even in FS2020). But the problem is more serious than no numbers on the radio stack: the autopilot has some bizarre fault: as soon as you press the AP power button, the plane noses down into a steep dive, and doesn't respond to any inputs on the VS Up/Down buttons or elevator trim commands. The only way to recover is to disable the autopilot and re-trim to level flight. And pray that you recovered before passing VNE speed, which is only about 190 knots. I've tried every suggestion to isolate the problem so that (maybe) a fix can be found, including removing all other files from the Community Folder, but this didn't help. There must be something in the plane's autopilot modeling that's incompatible with FS2024. It's a big disappointment, because I love this plane, but I've discovered several other compatibility problems with importing 3rd-party aircraft, these also worked fine in FS2020 but have issues with FS2024. Microsoft/Asobo's claim that "most FS2020 add-ons will work seamlessly in FS2024" seems to be not as reliable a claim as we all hoped. I never saw this behavior in FS2020 - everything worked perfectly except the Bendix DME - the OZx user manual stated that they were unable to make this work, but were hoping to bring it online in a future release. The autopilot always worked perfectly, exactly as it should; I made many ILS approaches in the OZx Goose and never encountered a glitch, except one time, in very bad weather, when apparently the gyro tumbled and I had to use the Increase/Decrease Drift Angle keybind to re-calibrate the gyrocompass. As far as I know, development on the Goode Redux II was discontinued 3 or 4 years ago, when the OZx team began work on a new project, a payware version of the G-21A Goose modelled on the US Navy JRF-6. This model is closer to the WWII Goose, with fixed wing floats, and flight dynamics more or less like the Asobo version.
  4. I just experimented with this too. Started a flight in northern Canada at the Great Bear Lake airport. Setting the environment to -50°F, and the maximum snow depth of 29". The lake certainly looked like snow covered ice, but put a plane on it, and it behaved like liquid water. I tried the Cub Crafter XCub with skis. Rolled as slowly as possible off the lake shore into the lake, the skis immediately sank into the "snow" and a few seconds later the sim generated a crash. Next I tried the XCub with floats, at same location, same environment, The plane rolled down into the lake and floated on the "snow" exactly like it does on water. Made a couple of takeoffs and landings on the "frozen lake", and the Cub's floats and water rudder behaved exactly as they would on a sunny summer day with the lake at 75°F without so much as a single snowflake or ice cube in sight anywhere. I then experimented with the Cub on tundra tires on 29" deep "snow" on the airport runway. In real life, the landing gear would have sunk completely out of sight, but in the sim, the plane was perfectly happy to take off and land on the "snow" as if it was a dry grass landing strip. Oh, there was a big plume of show being blown back by the prop wash, but no other effect on the plane's actual handling or performance. The obvious conclusion is that "snow" in FS2024 is just a surface visual effect with no actual depth. Water doesn't freeze into ice no matter how cold you set the environment, except that your pitot tubes and carburetor will clog up in icing conditions if you don't have pitot and carb heat on, the windshield will frost over, and you might completely lose control of the aircraft if the wings and control surfaces ice up too much. Don't fly through thick clouds in cold weather: that will generate ice on your place, but water sitting on the ground doesn't freeze no matter how clod you set the weather to.
  5. For all of you who loved flying the SA-16/HU-16 in FSX, and have been eagerly looking forward to flying the new version in FS2024, I have a real-world story to tell about this airplane. Back in the 1990's, I was working for CalTrans Office of Structure Design as a drafting tech, and had a co-worker who had been in the USAF from 1950 to 1972, retiring as a Major. After basic basic pilot training, he got an opportunity to train in the SA-16A as a SAR (Search and Rescue) pilot. This training was in Florida, and the students flew the aircraft out of a base near Lake Okeechobee, using that base to train in landing and taking off from water (the lake was great for training because it was almost always calm, and being a freshwater lake, the aircraft were not exposed to as much saltwater corrosion). After graduation, he was posted to a SAR squadron in southern Greenland, at Narsarsuaq AB; this base had been built in 1942 and was first called "Bluie West 1". The specific mission for this squadron was to respond to emergency ditchings of USAF or US Navy aircraft flying between St. John's or Gander in Newfoundland, and Kevlavik or Reykjavik in Iceland. Fighter jets being deployed to England or Germany, or returning to the States from Europe for factory repairs or modifications, would be loaded up with ferry tanks, and make these flights on their own - my friend told me that land-based Air Force fighters were not designed or equipped to be transported as deck cargo on a ship, although that seemed to me to be a safer and less risky way to move a fighter between North America and Europe. It was risky for the pilots, as there was always the possibility of a catastrophic mechanical failure that might make the aircraft unflyable, in which case the pilot would have to ditch, or bail out and parachute into the water. But this was the height of the Cold War, and military aircraft needed to get wherever they were needed as quickly as possible. So pilots were tasked to fly the planes across the North Atlantic as long as the weather wasn't unacceptably bad. An emergency ditching never actually happened during the 2 years that my friend was in that squadron at Narsarsuaq (1953-1954), but they trained several times every month, whenever ferry flights were passing by southern Greenland, to fly the 100 mile long fjord between the coast and the air base, in every kind of weather including zero-visibility dense fog, knowing that there were 3,600 foot mountains on both sides of the fjord waiting to claw them out of the sky if the flight crew made a navigation error. They would then patrol along the route of the ferry flights, just in case. In theory, the SA-16 could land and take off again in waves up to 10 feet high, but my friend told me that the roughest sea conditions he ever actually landed in were 5 foot high, long period swells, and the plane was barely able to get back in the air without being battered to pieces. In the North Atlantic, the weather and sea conditions are hardly ever less than "very rough", and my friend told me that the chances of actually being able to get to and rescue a downed fighter pilot before he died of exposure or drowned in that freezing cold water were slim, but the effort had to be made. So any time you fly the HU-16 in FS24, maybe you'll remember this little story, and it will add something to your appreciation of the effort Asobo's developers put into creating this sim model.
  6. I've test flown both in the last couple of days. The only differences I've been able to spot: 1. The basic airframe and powerplant are the same for both. One is in the livery of a Coast Guard HU-16E, serial number 7399. However, this livery is incomplete: there should be a banner: "COAST GUARD" painted in large black letters both sides of the fuselage, and it isn't on either side. There are some other oddities about the livery than I can't put my finger on, but there is a real HU-16E in Santa Rosa, California at the Pacific Coast Air Museum, #7245 "San Francisco", and there are several elements of the paint job on that aircraft that are missing from the livery of #7399 in the sim. On the interior, the seats are old-style, with low backs, steel tube frames, very Grumman 1950's looking. The flight deck is mostly steam gauges and toggle switches. Both aircraft have Curtis electric propeller hubs, so the pitch control is by a pair of two-way toggle switches, instead of the big pitch control levers I was expecting to see, like you get on the G21 Goose. 2. The first thing you notice about the G111 variant is the lack of the dual 295 gallon drop tanks, This loss of 590 gallons of fuel capacity puts a serious dent in the maximum range of the G111, but on the interior, you get a glass-cockpit flight deck. The livery is ambiguous - I assume this aircraft's livery was modelled after a G111 in private ownership somewhere; it doesn't seem like a Military livery. The interior passenger cabins of both of these aircraft, behind the flight deck, are the same: nicely textured and accurately modelled; mostly empty space, but you can really see that the Albatross is way bigger than the G21 Goose. They are both fun to fly, and easy to operate off land or water. Very good visibility out of the pilot's seat, but be sure to use the noise-cancelling Headphone Simulation option; those two R-1820's just a few feet away are deafeningly loud. There is a switch on the panel labelled "Anchor Light", and the real Albatross did in fact carry an anchor, as did it's smaller nestmate the G21 Goose, but as far as I could tell, there's no actual anchor in the sim model. This could be significant if you land on the water, in a lake or river for example, and there's some wind blowing; the aircraft will drift downwind if you've shut it down to go exploring "on foot" - a passtime that actually means something in FS2024 with it's stunning ground and vegtation texturing.
  7. I run 3 monitors. A 28" 4K monitor in the center, flanked by a pair of older 26" 2K monitors. This setup wasn't originally intended for flight simming, although it's good for that purpose; I started running dual monitors nearly 30 years ago, at CalTrans, with Bentley MicroStation CADD back in the late '90's. Every civil engineer or draftsman I know long ago gave up on single monitors, as soon as graphics workstations became available with the ability to run dual (or more) monitors. When you are trying to juggle a plan view, profile view, orthometric views, and maybe a half-dozen detail cuts into some complex structure like a highway bridge, having to do this on a single monitor is like putting yourself into a straight jacket and trying to play golf. Once you've done any kind of technical work on a PC with 2 or more monitors, you would rather shoot yourself in the foot than go back to a single-monitor PC. Even my partner, a retired accountant, felt that her productivity using Excel and the FisCal Accounting software was improved on dual monitors.
  8. Your profile says you live in Yukon. That made me think, someone should make a set of Buffalo Airlines liveries for the DC3, CL-415, Lockheed L-88, and the C-46, if there actually is a C-46 available for MSFS, with Avatars of Joe and Mikey to go with them! Humor aside, my experience with FS20 was the same as yours: it was more than a year before I could get through an 8 hour flight in the 747-8i without a CTD, although landings in San Francisco in any of the big aircraft with approach and touchdown speeds around 140 knots were still dicey for another year after that, if you pushed the sim to the limit by having it be raining, too.
  9. That's what I keep telling myself. One good experience I had is that in several hours of testing yesterday and today, the sim never threw a CTD at me - the #1 issue that plagued FS20 for more than a year, and that might have caused me to stick with FSX, except that I had already dropped US$750 for an AMD Radeon 6800 XT GPU, which is totally overkill for FSX. A couple of other observations: When you are out of your plane and walking around an unpaved area, the grass and wildflowers are amazingly detailed, and the plants sway gently if there's any breeze blowing, but the colors are wrong - fuzzy and muted somehow. In the mountains, if there are Ponderosa or Lodgepole pines in the area you are walking your avatar, they look amazingly detailed right out to the tips of the branches, and exactly like pine trees. The green color of the needles and the reddish brown of the branches and trunks is pretty close to the real thing. And from the middle of a clearing surrounded by pine forest, you can see that there's lots of variation in the trees, just like there should be. It all looks great, if not a bit "too" perfect. "Is it Live, or is it Asobo?" to steal an old Memorex cassette tape TV advertisement from about 40 years ago. I need to jump around more, explore more of the virtual world in this sim at different seasons, before settling on a final opinion, but in the area of the central Rocky Mountains where I've been flying, the ground colors aren't quite right from altitude. The valley bottoms along river courses should be more green and less gray, even in early winter, as it is now, and the mountainsides should be more varied in color - everything from gray granite, to orange sandstone. And I can't understand why the air looks so smoky and hazy when there is no wind blowing, and the condition setting is "Clear Air". Mountain air in Colorado is crystal clear, with unrestricted visibility of up to 50 miles as long as there aren't any forest fires burning. Maybe this sim actually models fire smoke? BTW, I got to visit Wellington once - we spent most of the day at Te Papa - a truly awesome museum, and I was amazed and gratified to see the care your curators put in to the collection of land survey gear - most of my fellow Americans that aren't Civil Engineers or Land Surveyors would walk right past that display with hardly a glance. That's what I did the last 7 years of my career, albeit with modern electronic theodolites (Total Stations) and GPS gear. I also walked up to the top of Mt. Manganui when we were in Tauranga, and saw the big Geological Survey Control Monument at the summit. We have similar installations in the States, but much smaller: they are generally a heavy steel pipe concreted several meters deep into the ground, with a full time GPS receiver and Geodetic grade antenna bolted to the top of the pipe under a plastic weather dome, and powered by an adjacent solar panel and batteries.
  10. It took me about 24 hours to break through the first-day installation logjam, but I finally got in the air, for a test flight in my two favorite FS20 planes, the Cub Crafters NX Cub (the one with tricycle gear), and the Beach G36 Bonanza. But right away, I ran into problems - not unexpected in a new release, but these problems left me wondering if Asobo even tested all of the planes before shipping the product. The worst problem with the NX Cub you won't notice in the daytime, but at night it makes the Cub unflyable: the light output from that huge Garmin MFD screen is so intense by the time full darkness arrives, that the pilot is totally blinded, and I couldn't find any way to tone it down. The only way I could land the plane was to scrunch my eyepoint way up at the ceiling as far forward as the cockpit bounding box would allow. There's also a bug in the electrical system config file somewhere, that even with the Master Battery Switch and Avionics switch turned on, and the plane actually flying, the sim is certain that the electrical system is turned off, and it won't let you call ATC (shaking my head here). This plane works perfectly in FS20; what the hell did Asobo do to the plane's model and config files to bollix it up? You can fly it, (but not at night), and only if you don't get a weird feeling just taking off or landing somewhere without making a radio call to anyone. I've never been a "real" pilot, but even I know better then that. One other problem I noticed is that some of the electrical switches that do work in FS20 are "inoperable" in FS24 - including the landing light and pulse/steady switch. There's one other inop switch, the IGN battery power switch, but since the plane flys okay, it must not be essential. Now on to the Beech Bonanza G36. The problem here isn't with the plane itself, it's with Asobo's assurances to us that "most" 3rd party add-ons in the FS20 Community Folder would transfer directly over to the FS24 Community Folder. Umm, no, they don't. I very specifically made sure that my G36 Turbo add-on got copied over. This add on boosts manifold pressure to around 36" at altitudes up to about 7,500 feet, and boosts the service ceiling to about 24,000 feet. Not realistic I know, unless you want to pretend that you've got an O2 system installed, but for flying in and out of high mountain airports in the Colorado Rockies, or exploring steep canyons, it's nice to have the extra power. Anyway, it's obvious that the FS24 game engine is ignoring at least some of the add ons in the Community folder. On a climb out of KRIL (Rifle-Garfield County Airport, elev. 5503', I could only get 20" of manifold pressure, and the plane could barely get out of it's own way after I hit 12,000 feet. A couple of other observations, before I close up: The key bindings that come with the game for my joystick and keyboard are completely at variance with what I've been used to since FS 2004. I'm going to have to re-program all of them - and so will you if you got used to FSX keybindings and carried them over to FS20. It's crazy: There are dozens of keys that Asobo has bound, 3, 4, even 5 different functions to: you might be trying to lower flaps, click on Joystick Button #4 (for example) and sudden have the engine flame out, because there's also a Cut Throttle keybinding on that button (what were they thinking of?!). This drove me crazy until I saw posts on the Microsoft MSFS Forums where a bunch of other people had crashed on their first FS24 flights before discovering these multiple keybindings.
  11. I have managed to capture a video clip of my new CL-415 making a water drop, from a custom camera located below and aft of the plane. With no known keybind to open the drop doors, this wasn't easy to do, but I managed to catch all but about the first 1/2 second of the drop. It's a pretty good visual effect, considering that the CL-415 isn't a native MSFS-2020 plane. I can't wait to get MSFS2024 next month, but my enthusiasm is also somewhat dimmed by memories of 4 years ago, when we all struggled for months on end with the seemingly never-ending memory faults and Crash-To-Desktop bugs that plagued the initial release of MSFS2020. Being an early adopter of almost any software nowadays seems to mean that you are an unpaid beta tester for at least the first few months. Anyway, this CL-415 is a fun airplane to fly, about as fast as the Grumman Goose, and it's easier to land because it's got tricycle gear and thus won't ground-loop like the Goose does on occasion. The surface textures are stunningly detailed, both inside and out.
  12. The plane arrived in my Content Manager this morning! I test flew it for about an hour, out of Comox, BC (CYQQ), including a water pickup and drop. First impressions: 1. The CL-415 is pretty easy to fly. Takeoff and approach/landing no more difficult than in the Grumman Goose or Cessna 208 Caravan. It has plenty of power, and taking off with full fuel and water tanks is no strain, just use 10% flaps and about 10~15% up trim. 2. There's no autopilot, so all flying is manual. If you are simming a long ferry flight, it can be tiring. The CL-415 is not as unstable as a P-51, but not as stable as a Cessna 172 either. You can fiddle with the power and trim controls and get the plane to settle into level flight, but it won't stay there very long. Any little wind gust will tip it into a shallow turn, and it won't level out on it's own, you have to be actively controlling it all the time. Think "helicopter", but not nearly that unstable. 3. All of the exterior and interior is modeled in unbelievable detail: every rivet from the nose to the tail is there, both inside and out. Most of the things that are moveable in a real plane aren't operational (cabin doors don't actually open and close), but maybe this will be upgraded in the future. There's even a boat hook and boarding ladders clipped against the port side of the cabin in back! 4. To execute a water drop, you first have to extend the scoops - there's a switch for that - land on the water and let the tanks fill, take off again, retract the scoops, then Arm the drop doors with another switch. To open the doors and make the drop, there's a button on the yoke clearly labelled "water drop". If there are keybindings to do this from the keyboard hotkeys, I couldn't find them. I wanted to watch the water drop from External or Showcase view, but couldn't figure out a way to be in Exterior view, and push the drop button on the yoke at the same time. Maybe by opening an auxiliary view window it could be accomplished; I'll try it tomorrow. 5. The CL-415 has very forgiving stall characteristics for such a large twin. A power-on stall sounds the horn and the plane mushes down, but doesn't fall off on either wing into a spin unless you do something really stupid like deliberately mash the rudder full over. Just push the yoke forward; the node drops and she goes back to level flight with no fuss. Power-off stalls are more dangerous; one or the other wing may lose lift suddenly and the plane will start to spin, but recovery is fairly easy. 6. Visibility out of the cockpit is remarkably good. 7. Ground handling is very smooth, controlling the plane while taxiing is easy. The landing gear has a quite wide stance considering that it's similar to a Grumman Albatross or Goose (folds up into the fuselage instead of into the wing or engine nacelles). Turning sharply at any speed faster than about 10 mph will tip the Goose over and you'll bang a wing into the ground - this isn't a problem with the CL-415. It takes corners on the ground with considerably less drama than the Goose or the JRM Mars, if anyone reading this ever flew the Hawaii Mars in FSX. 8. Power management is easy. There's a digital bar-graph display for torque, ITT, and propeller rpm that's clearly marked with red. yellow, and green zones. Just set your propeller pitch to keep in the center of the green zone, and use your throttles to get the power you want. 9. To shut down at the end of a flight: Pull the prop pitch levers all the way back - this cuts off the fuel, then on the overhead panel, find the battery and external power switches and turn them all off. You should get the end-of-flight dialog box as long as you are on an actual runway. As with other seaplanes in this sim, taking off and landing from water or ground other than official runways may not give you credit for a takeoff/landing.
  13. Thanks! I just checked the Content Manager; the plane isn't there yet, but now that I know where and how it's supposed to be delivered to me, I'll check for it again over the weekend and it it's still not there by Monday, I'll send the ticket to Zendesk. s
  14. I just "released the parking brake" and did the pre-order for MSFS-2024, premium deluxe edition. According to the website: "Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 — available for pre-order today on the Microsoft Store — will launch in a variety of editions on November 19, 2024, and the Standard Edition will be available day one with Game Pass. All pre-orders will receive the De Havilland Canada CL-415 firefighting aircraft to use instantly in Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020)...." Does anyone here know what else I might need to do to actually receive this pre-order bonus? I did the transaction yesterday, 24 hours ago, but have not yet received the aircraft. When I logged into the sim a few minutes ago, it downloaded a sizeable update, 2 gB more or less, with several patches to the Pilatus PC-6 and a couple of the other planes, but nothing new. Is this CL-415 going to come as an add-on, that I have to manually drop the files to the Community folder? Has anyone done a pre-order and actually received this bonus, and if so, in what form? Thanks!
  15. My hardware is barely good enough to run MSFS 2020 at "high" graphics quality and still maintain 30 fps; "Ultra-High" drops me below 16 fps, and that's at only 2K resolution. I don't understand how anyone is running this sim in 4K, although I've seen videos on YouTube of MSFS-2020 flights that were recorded in 4K. I can see by the performance graphs in Windows Task Manager, that my Ryzen 5-3600 CPU has more than enough processing capability, and I have 64gB of DRAM, so the bottleneck is in the GPU. It's a Radeon RX 6800 XT. It was one step below the top-of-the-line when I bought it in 2022, and cost me $750, more than half the total cost of the system hardware, so I can't just dump it and drop another $900 on an RX 7900 XTX card. And looking at the specs on that card, it's got only about 20% more compute units, so it's not a huge improvement over what I've already got. If, as I suspect, MSFS-2024 is going to require a top-of-the-line GPU, then I won't be interested in purchasing it until I am ready to build a new system, and that won't be for at least 3 or 4 more years, unless my current GPU fails for some reason. The one thing that might tempt me: If Asobo were to implement multi-view windows like FSX had, and the ability to easily build custom instrument panels, like FSX had. I wasreally disappointed when MSFS came out, that there so many features that FSX had that were dropped in MSFS. Not to mention that some of my favorite planes - the Grumman HU-16 Albatross, Cessna C-182RG, and Martin JRM Mars - have never been ported to MSFS.
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