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Hi All, Let me start by saying how much I love the Majestic Dash 8. The combination of fidelity, performance and the challenging short-haul sectors flown by the real thing makes it the best airliner sim for FSX in my book. My thanks go to all those involved in its development. There's one area of the flight dynamics which does trouble me though, as I posted in the thread: 'Help with Q400'. However, I think this subject is a bit off-topic for that thread, hence the new one. I've now had the opportunity to do some more testing: this time with a fully-loaded Q400. I've posted a series of screenshots below showing what I experienced. I'd like to emphasize now that I'm in no way a real-world pilot (let alone a Q400 driver) so I'd appreciate the input of other Q400 users on this issue. Here's the weight and balance sheet for the test flight. Close to max take-off mass with a 29000kg aircraft (including 4000kg of fuel). Here's confirmation of the aircraft weight and fuel quantity in the sim prior to engine start. Following take-off from EGTE I set the condition levers to 900rpm (MCL) and climbed at 200 kts using the IAS AFCS mode. Needless-to-say vertical speed and deck angles were pretty extreme during the first part of the climb. Lucky this was a test flight! Here we are just over 15 mins after take-off passing FL250. By this point V/S has decayed to +600fpm so you could be forgiven for thinking she hasn't got much climb left in her. However, after this shot was taken, I reduced the commanded IAS to 180kts which allowed the rate of climb to increase to +800fpm. 12 minutes later we're climbing through FL300: still at 180kts and +800fpm. A further 10 minutes into the flight sees us still climbing at +800fpm at 180kts: now we're passing through FL460! However, a few minutes later V/S does start to drop rather suddenly. An hour into the flight, we're passing through FL522, and V/S has dropped to 'only' +300fpm but we're still climbing steadily. I've also reduced the IAS to 158kts (Vclmb for out T/O weight) where it'll stay for the rest of the climb. You may notice the engine rpm starting to creep away from the FADEC commanded setting of 900rpm at this point. After another hour in the air*, we've finally reached what seem to be the absolute ceiling for the aircraft at this weight: FL636! (We've also burned about half of the fuel on board by now.) I could have traded a bit of airspeed for more altitude as I did in the previous test when I flew right up to stick-shaker activation. RPM is clearly over-speeding at this point. Wonder what would happen in the forthcoming pro version which I think has failures? (*I'll own up to using time compression for this bit, although I hadn't previously in the flight.) Here's the final portion of the flight see through the FSX 'flight analysis tool'. In posting this, I just wanted to provoke a bit of discussion about what's causing this odd ability to reach excessive altitudes in a flight model which otherwise seems so accurate. Any input from the developers would be very welcome, although I realise the Majestic forum is probably the best place to get this... (I know - I should register there!) All the best, Nick

Hello All, I'm a little confused as to the best flaps setting for landing this bird. The sample flight tutorial says to land with flaps 15, and this in my opinion is the most stable flaps setting for landing. When I try landing with flaps 35 she becomes very difficult to control, particularly with the speed. In real operations, do pilots land with flaps 15 or 35? Thanks very much, James