Flying and Navigation
Other stuff...
How do I shut off the never-ending ATIS broadcasts?
Tune your COM receiver to some
frequency other than the ATIS frequencies of nearby airports.
Where's
the Glasair??
The manual describes a practice flight
from San Bernardino to Riverside and tells me to load up the Glasair. I
can't find it!
Unfortunately the Glasair is long gone. (The reference in the manual
never got fixed.) X-Plane aircraft come and go as the sim evolves;
those
that stay version to version require periodic updating. In the case,
the
Glasair appeared because Austin was building a real one. He never had
time to finish and finally sold the partially completed kit, and
probably lost interest in the X-Plane model.
Both the Cessna 172 and the Piper Malibu (in the General Aviation
folder) have a GPS and will serve just fine for the practice flight.
Every
time I try to set the throttle it slowly moves back to idle.
You have probably engaged auto-throttle
(airspeed hold) mode in the autopilot. The AP allows you to change the
throttle setting, but as soon as you let go it will progressively
return
the throttle setting to where it thinks it should be. If you
accidentally engaged it, then your airspeed setting is probably zero,
which explains why the throttle setting returns to idle. Remember that
auto-throttle can be engaged by a keystroke ("d" key) even if you don't
have the auto-throttle engage button on the panel of your plane.
I'm on
short final to an airport and X-Plane freezes for 30 seconds or so.
X-Plane is doing a terrain load.
Unfortunately, this happens at certain airports that are near the
boundary where X-Plane wants to load new terrain. KSEA 18
(Seattle-Tacoma, southbound approach) is a commonly encountered
example.
The airport is just south of 47.5 degrees north latitude; as you cross
47.5 X-Plane decides it's time to load new terrain and you're left
hanging in the sky. For more details, see the
scenery
page.
Recent (8.20+) versions of X-Plane have changed the threshold at which
scenery gets loaded so this is less of a problem. As long as you fly a
traditional pattern (downwind near the airport, base, and then final),
your downwind leg will assure that the scenery for the area around the
airport is loaded and you won't be stalled by a scenery load while
you're on short final.
How do I set up X-Plane
so that it starts me off in front of the terminal instead of on the
runway?
As of 6.40 you can. From the menu bar, select
Location->Ramp and then select the desired airport and ramp
location.
Not all airports have ramp locations defined; you may need to set one
up
in WorldMaker.
Before version 6.40, X-Plane can't save a location at an arbitrary
point on the ground at an airport (or even on a taxiway). It can only
save a runway location. The commonly accepted workaround is to create
in
WorldMaker a helipad at the place where you want to start. You can then
place yourself on the helipad, and your location can be saved there.
I click to close the Low
Enroute map and all of a sudden I'm somewhere else!
The problem is there's a small delay between when you
release the mouse button and when X-Plane reads the cursor location. If
you accidentally drag the cursor onto the map area right after clicking
the close box, it may be interpreted as a "click on the map to place
the
plane". This can be really irritating when you have a lot of time
invested in a flight.
Solution: Use the <return> key to close the map instead. This is
not a problem in 8.x versions and later, since clicking on the map no
longer exits the map.
After flying at high
altitude for a few minutes the screen slowly goes black.
You're suffering from hypoxia - oxygen starvation. This
will occur in a plane that has pressurization controls and you forgot
to
set them, or it has an incomplete set and you can't. If the plane has
no
pressurization controls at all X-Plane assumes the system is fully
automatic and functioning.
A full set of pressurization controls consists of
- bleed air on/off and source switch
- pressure test button
- cabin altitude setting
- cabin VVI (pressure change rate) setting
- cabin altimeter
- cabin VVI indicator
The gauges and test button are useful but not critical.
I have pressurization controls
and I still black out!
Check the "Aircraft Altitude" reading
on the cabin altitude setting control (once you've descended to where
you can see again). There are two types, and the "Set Aircraft
Altitude" control allows you to turn pressurization off by setting a
low altitude. (In fact, its initial setting is zero!) Make sure the
"Aircraft Altitude" reading is higher than the altitude you plan to fly
at.
Why is there
rain or hail when I'm flying in clear air?
When I set the Cloud levels first of
the two hi cirrus may be to about 26000, second Cloud level with broken
or scattered cloud may be 7000 feet my problem is when I fly though or
under the scattered or broken cloud white speckles appear all over the
screen (might represent rain, hail) and the sound of this hitting the
fuselage or the aircraft. I have the other weather settings,
precipitation, thunderstorms etc turned off. This did not happen in
previous versions . This only happens in scattered or broken cloud
settings. This is actually a common report these days... people think
there is something wrong when they find rain when no rain is requested,
or hail when it is above freezing.
Here's the answer from the author:
Forgetting about SIMS, though, and thinking about the REAL WORLD, we
realize that clouds will produce rain a mere half a mile from a weather
reporting station which might not report this rain, and hail very
frequently occurrs on 85 degree South Carolina summer days.
Why?
Because rain comes from clouds, and clouds are not smoothly distributed
over the whole world... they are clumpy, and will emit precip even a
mile away from some area that is not under a cloud, and is therefore
bone-dry. You can fly across the south-east USA during the summer (as I
often do) going from clear blue sky scattered with puffy white cumulus
to rain spattering up the windshield as you fly through the occasional
puffs.. even though not a single airport will report rain!!!!!!!!!!!!
Why? These little summer showers are too isolated to be picker up by a
surface report at the arbitrary location of an airport.
And what about hail when it's 80 degrees? This happens all the time in
the real world, because the hail forms up higher, where it's cooler.
Both of the effects above occurr commonly in nature, AND ARE CURRRENTLY
SIMULATED BY X-PLANE 7.50 AND ABOVE. So in fact when people say they
encounter rain in the sim when no rain was requested, or hail on a warm
day, as if those are bugs, they are in fact NOT bugs, but intentional
modelling of the vagaries of real weather systems.
Bottom line: We are moving into an area of simulation where the simple
0/1 thinking everyone is used to is starting to become obsolete, and
this is especially true of the weather in X-Plane... and will become
more so in the future as we abandon the over-simplified constructs
of"cloud layers", which in fact are ridiculous ideas when you try and
apply them to much weather that you find in the real world.
I'm flying along and all
of a sudden the xxxx subsystem fails.
I set up everything in the Instrument Reliability and
Equipment Reliability menus to "Always Working". What's wrong?
There's one more setting you need to hit: Settings -> Realistic
Reliability. This menu sets the overall failure rate of all subsystems
on the plance. If you don't want to deal with failures, click and hold
over the leftmost digit until the whole thing reads 99999.
Help! I can not launch
or
fly the Space Shuttle!
The "Space Shuttle" in X-Plane is in fact only the part of
the Shuttle which is called the Orbiter. The Orbiter itself does not
carry any significant amount of fuel. The little it has is used for
small orbital manuevres.
The rest of the Space Shuttle consists of the main fuel tank that
drives the main rockets and two secondary boosters rockets. This is not
simulated in X-Plane. Nor is positioning an aircraft vertically for
takeoff.
Flight with the Shuttle Orbiter in X-Plane is thus limited to
re-entry only when the Orbiter is flown as unpowered back to Earth for
landing.
Does X-Plane support flight
plans?
X-Plane supports filing a flight plan between two
airports,
but without waypoints. It is up to you to use the real V and J routes,
or a real flight plan, to get there. ATC Centre in X-Plane will only
make sure that you stay at your filed altitude and will not vector you
along the way (as is mostly the case with real ATC centres).
For a real flight planner, see the Goodway
product. Not only does it have comprehensive planning features, but the
plans it generates can be loaded up into the X-Plane FMS.
Is there a
better GPS available than the ones built into X-Plane?
X-Plane's GPS is pretty rudimentary;
even the Garmin GPS instrument only implements a small subset of the
real one's capabilities. There's a plugin available called XN02 that
interfaces X-Plane to a complete Garmin GNS530 training simulator.
Unfortunately this product is PC only.
How can I control what other
aircraft are in the sky?
As of V8.60, use the Settings->Other
Aircraft and Situations menu.
I shut off
the autopilot and can't turn it back on
I disconnected the autopilot (with the
"!" key) and now the autopilot is disabled. None of the AP functions
will engage. (This behavior was discovered in V8.11 but may apply to
earlier versions as well. It no longer exists in V8.32.)
Problem is the "!" key disconnects the autopilot by switching off the
flight director. There is a separate flight director switch with 3
positions:
- OFF - means just that. The autopilot is disabled and will not
engage.
- ON - the autopilot is on and can be engaged. Autopilot outputs
are displayed as a cue in the artificial horizon. You are still flying
the plane - follow the cues to fly the plane as the autopilot directs.
- AUTO - the autopilot is on and can be engaged. The autopilot is
flying the plane and you are hands off (in terms of the axes being
controlled by the autopilot).
So... if you've disconnected the autopilot with "!", to use it again
you need to turn the flight director switch back to AUTO. If your plane
doesn't have a flight director switch you're screwed, since there's no
keystroke to turn in back on. Consider opening the plane with
PlaneMaker and adding one.
Back to the main page
Aircraft Dynamics
Using
the Autopilot - V8.60