Beta Flight 1/12, my first one

[Charan Kumar]

Because of some problems I had with XPlane I hadn't ventured online, but decided to give it a go yesterday during the 5-9 time period. The reasons I hadn't been online were good, so good, that after the flight, I promptly re-installed XP9...oh well, all is good now after some testing.

The reason I wanted to try it is before I ventured anywhere close to the ATC side, I wanted to see how ppl transmitting on multiple frequencies heard the same controller and how the xmissions went in general. We had only 2 or 3 pilots in the leg that I was flying, the SBP-BFL at least at the time I started. First thing that hit me was the voice, boy was it clear, as clear as if the controller was in my room, I almost froze at the voice...crystal.


Read forth only if you have patience, or skip down to the last

Clearance, all good, got assigned a different route than filed, no worries, taxi out. All along I noticed I hadn't touched the throttle but the acft taxiied immediately after I released brakes. I thought I was loaded light, yeah right!! Called tower, take off clearance, lined up, push throttle to the stops, no response!! What??!!?? Quick re-calibration, pushed throttle no response...damn...reached for the throttle on the mouse, and pushed it, didn't engage it properly in the middle, and pushed the right throttle to full stop off went the acft to the fields next to SBP . Quickly called tower to cancel take off clearance, resolved the throttles again with callibration and came back to the rwy from the other side of the airport.

This is a decision point, to actually cancel the flight and taxi meekly back to the ramp or valiantly call for take off clearance and make a fool of myself. With conscience screaming at me to taxi back to the ramp, I decided to make a fool of myself. Took off from the rwy, 800-1200 fpm climb good, pulled the gear up. Up came the gear, but this is where everything else started going downhill. The acft took a dive and I tried recovering, too fast, push fwd, dive...no pull up pull up, dive...I was bobbing like a rubber ball fallen onto the water which was recently disturbed by ripples from a titanic sized oceanliner. Thank God for go-flight modules I reached for the A/P and hit it. *phew* aircraft steadied on a 300 fpm climb...woohoo. All along I hadn't called DEP cause I couldn't tell him what altitude I was passing and whether I was passing it on my way up or down. Switched frequencies and just I was about to call him, the acft took a downward dive.

At this point, two things became very clear. That it was a bad idea to not to have listened to my conscience and two, there was a good reason I hadn't flown online with XP before I fixed it. Oh, one more thing was becoming clear, the gnd below. Atleast I was able to save that part by yanking the Yoke up and she started to climb. Did I mention that the Yoke had a callibration problem that reared it's ugly head from time to time. Bless MSFS, it happily ignored all these problems and hence I hadn't found it. XP made no fuss in pointing out that I had a crappy Yoke which desperately was in need of re-calibration.

All in all, held on and called DEP, c/m 8k, came the reply, sure, read it back, but what I did was another thing. MIssed the turn on the DEP, he gave me other vectors. Still bobbing with the titanic effect, I was making my way, tuned the nav freq to MQO quick spin of the CRS knob and off I went, in the other direction . APP comes back, would direct EHF help? Would it, it would save me a ton, very understanding folks!! If you didn't fall off laughing, I am grateful to you. I accepted it, turned towards EHF and was desperately trying to slow down my climb when slowly APP came back again, N8107T, didn't I assign you 8000, I show you at 9.5K. Dive Dive Dive, you can hear the U571 crew yelling, acknowledged, apologized and went down. Then went off to CTR and somehow managed to arrest the bobbing within 500ft of 13000. When I fly the CONC, we usually get a block flight altitude between FL450-FL600 as the acft climbs and descends on its own to maintain best spd. It almost seemed like I was going to use that experience to call for a block altitude, only I needed 0-15000 and I knew that request would sound as silly as the bobbing I was already doing.

Picked up arrival ATIS, called APP with in on xfer, got assigned the ILS 30R, promptly pulled up the chart and tuned nav1 stby to the ILS freq and as soon as I got vectored off, set the crs to 301, final APP crs. Descended beautiful, turned on PTAC and lined up Perfectly on the needle. All along of course, there was also extreme yawing because of my uncalibrated Yoke or so I thought, I do think very highly of my sim flying skills , as I struggled to stay on crs, nav then hdg and so on and so forth.

APP says call twr over JATUX or whatever that fix was. It didn't matter. 7.4 miles from final, watched the DME, like a hawk, as numbers winded down. All along I was looking at the instruments only and I pressed the up button to look out and there was no field in front of me. Puzzled I thought to myself, man I think my scenery is not up-to-date, I should've downloaded Adam's recent release. Then switched to chase view, and sure enough the airport was there, only I was lined up for, oh you know, 30R a few parallel runways to the right side. 5 nm from the airport, no time to think, had the field in sight. Quickly called APP and requested a visual and he approved it with change to twr freq. Gear down swing her to the left, and line up and called twr. No response. TWR was having vox problems...and I was in a gentle glide (seriously, compared to all that bobbing, this definitely qualified as a glide). Realizing I was not going to be able to raise twr as I approached the threshold, quickly switched back to APP and told him the situation at which point I was almost over the numbers but the rwy was long enough. APP asked me if I had landed and I said no, so he came back, fly the missed as published. Of course, why not. If I could manage to put the acft into a gentle glide I could fly the missed approach. So I accepted it, I reached for the chart on the second monitor adjusting size to make sure I got it in the right place. This would turn out to be a bad idea soon.

And I also found the reason I was not lined up to the rwy in the meantime. It was because I never hit the stby button to switch the nav1 freq, so I was flying the 301 crs for the Shafter VOR. How many times have I done it before, only as many times as I have flown, ok maybe a few times less, the others were visual approaches. APP was setting me up on a d/w crs for revectoring and I requested a visual since I still had the field in sight on my roll out. He cleared me and switching to twr I entered a 45 deg app crs to the left d/w for 30R. Just as I did this, I decided to close the chart, as if some unexplicable good was going to come out of it. Only I clicked on the wrong "X" and my XPLane had just been X'ed. I need to find where the confirm "Yes" or "No" button is. It was gone quicker than you can say "Bob's your uncle" or even "Bob" for that matter. I apologize for quitting so abruptly but I was not about to fly again without re-installing.

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But, I had a great time in all that. The transmissions were so clear, and I got full ramp to ramp..er...d/w coverage and I got so many freq changes within the short span of 80nm on the trip. I like the concept of the Super Twr positions. Couldn't hear other pilots talking on other frequencies and tfc must've been a bit light so ctrlrs were happily dealing with them on their respective frequencies. Was SBP DEP and BFL APP dedicated yesterday? I didn't hear them calling themselves anything else. There were practically no repeats to any transmissions, you could've dropped a pin I could've heard it.

I certainly shall be back for more and soon on the other side of the scopes!!

[Keith Smith]

That was a nail-biter, Charan!! You should consider having it published

You're absolutely right that it's not much fun to fly online if your equipment isn't behaving in a predictable fashion. I only fly airplanes that I'm comfortable with, and I make sure "all is well" before each flight. A control check and run-up go a long way to helping on that front You're aware, I assume, that Xplane does 'run time' calibration? The ultra-short version of the story is that it's a great idea to move all the controls through their full range of movement before each flight. Otherwise, you might find it's ridiculously sensitive. If it's still stupidly sensitive, you can set up a non-linear response curve where it's less sensitive (ie, less control deflection) around the center of each axis. Lastly, consider a larger null-zone if your equipment doesn't center properly. I have a new, ultra-cheap joystick (my previous ultra-cheap but excellent joystick doesn't work with win7) and it requires a non-zero null-zone because it's a tiny bit sloppy around the center. If you're flying 600kias at 20ft, you notice that very quickly!

Traffic was pretty light. The staffing was this: ZLA_GND, ZLA_TWR, BFL_APP, LAX_CTR. So, when you went from SBP_TWR (ZLA_TWR) to SBA_DEP (LAX_CTR) and then got a handoff to LAX_A_CTR, you ultimately kept talking to the same controller (LAX_CTR). As you were approaching BFL, the dedicated BFL_APP controller signed on, so you heard another voice when you swapped to that freq.

You're right, we were having pilots go to SBA_APP on takeoff from SBP, no straight to center, even though it was the same controller. That is the default position that we take, and we only get pilots onto a single frequency, as a policy, if it's really necessary. So far, it hasn't happened, that I know of.

If two pilots call at the same time on different freqs, their voices are generally different enough, and the transmissions are clear enough, that you can pick them out and deal with them one at a time. I once had 3 pilots call at same time on 3 freqs, and based on the context, was able to work out what they were saying. It works pretty well.

To answer your question, SBA_DEP was not dedicated, but later in the evening, BFL_APP was dedicated. The mandatory staffing order of LAX_CTR, ZLA_TWR, ZLA_GND, with discretionary staffing after that, is working incredibly well.

I'm adding a few things to the site (first flight tutorial, things to do/see, etc), then we'll be going full throttle on getting the word out to the xplane community. Austin has offered to help. That could bring quite a few people.

See ya soon, thanks for posting!

Keith

[Charan Kumar]

Ha ha, thanks Keith. I actually did not notice the similarity in voice switching between DEP/CTR, probably because I was too busy trying to stop the bobbing. I wasn't aware of XP continuously calibrating during the flight, but I did do my checks on the grnd, calibrated the h/w before the flight, before taxi and holding short of the rwy, but that was just the yoke, not the throttle. I had installed XP yeons ago and since then moved, technically 6 times to, well, the same machine but 5 times XP reinstallation and 1 time 7-64 bit...somewhere it must've crapped out.

I reinstalled from scratch yesterday and all is well and Beech-Bob-Craft King Air met BeechCraft KingAir yesterday and resolved their differences in the latter's favor. I have to setup the Go-Flight modules soon, but that will be after enuf testing is done, of course offline. I also have to see if I can hunt down my other Joystick atleast for online flying in XP.

[Daddy O]

Because of the number of USB controls I have for my sim, I have taken to running a full calibration at the hold-short line in place of where I would be doing a control check in R/W flight. Xplanes usually does a good job without it, but every now n again strange things happen like when I get to altitude and go to lean the mixture and Xplane cuts out the gas entirely.

What kind of yoke are you using Charan?

[Charan Kumar]

I use the CH Yoke, for prop and mix I use the ones on the yoke itself, but throttles are two pairs of saitek throttles, and a few GF panels for nav/com/AP etc. It has lost it's center, no amount of re-calibration seems to save it, always a little bit to the left, so left alone the acft will bank left.

My problem on that day was the A/P unable to hold altitude, which seemed wierd. I have flown a full CTP on XPlane and I know it behaves extremely well or atleast use to.

I did the same thing, do a full calibration every time, and actually 3 times that day, especially a full one all levers at h/s before I called tower. Surprisingly after re-install it is behaving very well. Only difference is instead of throttle 1, 2,3,4 I just have throttle assigned to the first lever. No chance to run it yesterday, but most probably later tonight.

I dug-out my X52 which I will also connect to see if that saves anything.

[Daddy O]

You can choose between assigning each lever or just having one throttle. Sometimes I have to do that on craft with too many engines for the levers I have. (I am going to order a 2nd Saitek throttle quadrant when my wife isn't looking)

I have the X52 hooked up as well, I use it for fighters and helicopters. Too bad Xplane does not let you set both at the same time. You can either have the yoke or the sidestick, but not both active for roll/pitch at the same time. Bummer.

The Saitek yoke isn;t bad, but I'd love to try the simpits yoke.