It's enough to make you........

[ZKIWI]

There i was, about an hour into Link 8018 from Woodbourne to Auckland flying the Majestic Q300. I had earlier flown AA - WB in the same beast and it's wee anomoly with the autopilot occurred about NP at FL240. I managed to sort it out and the rest of the flight went uneventfully and the landing was not a bad one, if i do say so myself. I thought about going back to the PSS Q300 but it really doesn't do it for me so after a couple of circuits to confirm i still didn't like it, i strapped on the Majestic model and set out for Auckland.

Everything went well and just short of Ohura i called Ray at CHCH Control for clearance into controlled airspace, which i got and a routing to POKOM and then radar vectors for the ILS. Overhead Pokom, Ray was on the ball and gave me a heading change towards finals for the ILS 23 at Auckland.

Being lazy i flicked over from FMS Nav to Heading with the appropriate heading dialled in. And then...... NOTHING.... NADA a big fat zero. That damn Q300 kept going straight ahead. No matter how i tried to turn it, it just wouldn't turn. I tried a little rudder action but it really didn't want to play the game. It just kept on it's heading like the Autopilot had stayed on. OK, time to kill all power, gens off, battery off, changed inverters, changed hydaulic packs even tried shutting the noise makers down and going for an air restart. Still nothing.


A quick jump outside and it looked like there was no aileron movement.... Weird.

With nothing else for it, i fire handled it and pointed the thing at the ground.

The Q300 is going to drive me nuts!!!

[Adamski]

I've had problems with the Majestic autopilot as well. Shame, as it's one of my favourite add-on planes.

Every now and then - and not in particularly turbulent weather - it just oscillates left/right from the track (pretty violently). I have to disengage the nav a/p, fly in "HDG" mode for a while, then re-engage. It seems to happen roughly half way through a (long-ish) flight. I'm usually flying a VANZ route, so never use time warp/acceleration (or slew), so it's not that.

Googling around a/p problems with FS9/FSX throws up hundreds of items, so it's obviously a common problem. I haven't seen any fixes (other than disengaging/re-engaging, which doesn't always work).

[ZKIWI]

QUOTE (Adamski @ May 26 2009, 11:46 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I've had problems with the Majestic autopilot as well. Shame, as it's one of my favourite add-on planes.

Every now and then - and not in particularly turbulent weather - it just oscillates left/right from the track (pretty violently). I have to disengage the nav a/p, fly in "HDG" mode for a while, then re-engage. It seems to happen roughly half way through a (long-ish) flight. I'm usually flying a VANZ route, so never use time warp/acceleration (or slew), so it's not that.

Googling around a/p problems with FS9/FSX throws up hundreds of items, so it's obviously a common problem. I haven't seen any fixes (other than disengaging/re-engaging, which doesn't always work).

Cheers for that, and Yes i have googled the problem and sent emails to the support site also. My issue appears to be with the elevator however. I get small yaw oscillations but the pitch ones are by far the worst. And then this frozen control thing. I did notice that at one stage the VC yoke went to hard right wing low and stayed like that.

Oh well just another challenge to clocking up the hours in the Q300 for Virtual Air NZ.

Despite the problems this aircraft is growing on me and when it is working is a pleasure to fly due to it's realistic model.

[creator2003]

Try a product called FSXpilot you can find it here http://www.fsxpilot.com/

I use this alot with choppers on long haul

[ZKIWI]

I placed a message on the Majestic support forums last night and this morning there was an answer.

I have just reflown the WB - AA flight and it was a dream even though the weather conditions were slightly worse than yesterday. No sign of any oscillations, AP rock steady and even improved performance when hand flying the old girl.

And the fix...... turn traget frame rates on FSX down to 30. As simple as that. Apparently the model struggles with high spec computers and causes these issues.

An easy fix so lets hope it continues to work. My enjoyment level of flying the Q300 has just been re-established.

[ardypilot]

I was going to suggest control surface icing- but I've never heard of that being modeled in FS before!

Glad you got it sorted anyhow ZKIWI, feel free to post some screenshots from your flights here

[Timmo]

QUOTE

apparently the model struggles with high spec computers and causes these issues[/quote]

haha damned if you do, damned if you don't it seems! Im not sure i've ever seen a problem with a computer being too fast! (although one time I did try and play an very old game on a modern PC in moment of retrospective fondness....the game seemed to be linked to the actual clock cycles of the computer so everything went waaaaaaay to fast'

[HardCorePawn]

Yeah... for a lot of the 'old stuff'... you need to get something like DOSBox, that lets you 'clock down' your PC...

And one of the guys at PCF had an issue with FS2004 and the MAAM DC-3 not so long ago... for some reason, having your framerate set any higher than 30, could prevent you from starting the aircraft up?!?!!

As he had just invested in a nice new PC, and was enjoying flying around the countryside at 50+ fps, he really didnt want to lock the framerate at 30... thankfully we found a solution on the MAAM forum, where a small adjustment to the aircraft.cfg file (changing a power setting from 0.87 to 0.91 or something equally obscure like that) had the same effect...

computers... don't you just love 'em??