Back into the Virtual Cockpit

Back into Flight Simulation

It has been a very long time since I have done a proper flight with my FSX. In great part because keeping up with software development skills takes up most of my time, then personal stuff (family). And then also a bit over a year ago my Saitek Throttle Quadrant became unstable.

The Saitek Throttle Quadrant

The relevant part for the purpose of this post are the three levers or axis because they are the ones that are most likely to become the culprit of any problem.

My TQ is configured so that the leftmost two levers are configured as Engine Throttle (#1 and #2) with their inner detents configured as Propeller Decrease Quickly respectively and Engine Throttle Decrease Quickly. So if I fly a single propeller plane I can use the detent on the 1st lever. If on the other hand I fly a multiengine aircraft  such as a turboprop or a jet, then it is likely that during landing I would do some sort of reverse thrust (if supported) so when both go through the detents both the Propeller and Engine decrease quickly actions are triggered thus accomplishing the desired result regardless of whethre I fly single prop or multiengine jet.

The problem with it is that over time dust tends to get in through into the TQ and even worse, the constant friction caused in the potentiometers where the levers are connected to translate movement into an analog signal that can be digitized, will cause microdust to build up inside the potentiometers.
 The microdust will create electrical paths and as a result you will notice that even when you leave the levers alone, in the SIM you will notice they bounce up and down by themselves! That is a nightmare because your engine power will fluctuate as well.

So, I dove in and cleaned them. They are now as good as new and I wanted to test them in a proper flight.

The Flight

 I took my Carenado Piper Seneca II with Lord of Wings livery for a ride out of Marcos A. Gelabert airport (MPMG) in Albrook, Panama city, Panama. I was all setup on the runway, applied full power and off I went! well, so I thought!

Holding position before entring MPMG rwy36

After passing 3/4 of the runway I had enough manifold pressure, enough RPM on both engines and enough airspeed for take off but pulling on my yoke caused just a minor lift but not enough to get airborne. I aborted take off and repositioned the a/c at the other end where I ended up after the abort.

I performed the same maneuver but unfortunately yet again take off was not possible when normally it would do so in a much shorter distance! But I wanted to fly so I slewed into the air at 1,500 feet and somehow airborne there was no problem controlling the plane.

Flying around Taboga Island VOR

Then I flew to Taboga Island because I had setup NAV1 with TBG VOR prior to departure. That was nice, a photoscenery I was developing and then someone on FSDeveloper.com stole it and published it as his own, not very ethical!

Since I had also to reinstall my OS and FSX many months ago, my whole setup was unconfigured. Imagine that just a couple of days ago I managed to get some spare time to setup all the Panama scenery I had developed over the years!

 simulation.

My Carenado Piper Seneca II | Lord of Wings livery

I must say despite the problems taking off it has been of much pleasure to get back into flight simulation.

I took the opportunity of this test flight to fly around the city and test the throttle quadrant now that I had fixed the axis bounce problems.

Before that it was just terrible, both engine throttles would bounce up and down and would not go their full range. The third lever I used for flaps and it would just activate and deactivate by itself. Luckily during this test flight I could attest that the bounce issue was now totally gone, I did a good job at that but it took me hours to complete.

From Taboga VOR to MPPA

It was enough flying around Taboga Island. I wanted to see if the aircraft could develop enough power for take off.

I headed off to the Panama Pacífico (MPPA, formerly Howard MPHO) for a touch and go. On the photo on the right you can see a bit of Taboga and at the distance in the background MPPA.

During approach engine throttles behaved really well and so did the flaps. The landing was soft and uneventful, I did not do a full stop and just bothered for mid-speed and then take off. At least from that mid-speed the aircraft managed to develop enough power to take off from MPPA.

After take off I did a sharp tight right turn over the Pacific entrance of the Panama Canal as if heading towards TBG VOR again but then another sharp left turn for a perfect landing at my departure airport Marcos A. Gelabert (MPMG).

Again at MPMG I did another touch and go. From there I headed to Taboga again playing with the aircraft and configuring my NAV radio for an ILS approach to Tocumen International (MPTO). I wanted to do an ILS but this time I tried another feature, the FSX Glideslope (Flight Path) option. It basically shows you a series of rectangles down the glide slop and you swoop your aircraft through them right until the runway threshold. Sorry, no photo...

Heading to the gate at MPTO. Approach chart shown.

I made a perfect ILS landing at MPTO runway 03R (INAT 110.70 on NAV 1, course 029 degrees).

While at it I also tried my two-monitor setup with an old  monitor. This time only showing my navigation charts on the smaller monitor. It worked well, better than my previous setup that was glitchy on multi-monitor.

There were several AI aircraft on the gates, a couple of Global Airlines Boeings and an McDonnel Douglass. During the test flight I saw two Boeings some 6nm to my right, heading and leaving MPTO while I circled around Taboga VOR.

Unfortunately once I was at the gate a baggage car crashed into my nice Piper Seneca II because the driver was very distracted chatting through WhatsApp on his smartphone. 

Single Engine

Still troubled by the engine power I decided to try a single engine that did not require much runway for take off. I loaded my Cessna 172 for take off from Rambala Aeronaval base in Bocas del Toro. I must say it did take off. But then I noticed that while my throttle levers where running smoothly, my FSX configuration had gotten all screwed up. Even though my throttle levers moved from 0 to 100% the percentage given in FSX was between 29% to 71% so it was not properly going to idle and it was not giving full power either!

In this new flight I setup my radio stack and the GPS on the secondary monitor just to see how FSX performed. It appears my motherboard videocard performs better with FSX using two monitors than when I had my old nVidia  GTX video card.

Go Flight! 

I also spent a bit of time doing a Boeing 737 approach somewhere in Eastern Europe. I have not flown those bigger aircraft on FSX for a long time so I am much out of practice and not to mention the stock Boeing is really lame, you cannot even operate the Speed Brake rotary button using the virtual cockpit! you have to switch to 2D cockpit in order to do it.

But I used this B737 test flight just to test my Go Flight MCP Pro with the latest driver and yes, it still works after all these years! I use this Boeing MCP (Autopilot) to operate the autopilots of all the aircraft I have in my hangar. It is not like the one in their virtual cockpit but accomplishes most of the basic functions.

The Veredict

The serviced Saitek Throttle Quadrant is performing well, even the calibration utility shows it is responding to all buttons and full range on all three levers, therefore the electrical contact cleaning was successful.

However, my FSX configuration appears to be all screwed up. I acknowledge I did not have time for a proper FSX backup because my Windows 7 got totally screwed up when I tried to upgrade to Windows 10 a few years ago, I had to reinstall Windows 7 and all my software from scratch and my FSX configuration suffered greatly.

Basically I am now reconfiguring sensitivity and dead zone values on the axis used for control surfaces. I am beginning to doubt that FSX properly saves those setups well.

But enough for now. I enjoyed 0.80 hours of Visual Flight on two highly enjoyable aircrafts: The Piper Seneca II from Carenado and the default Cessna 172.

Night Flight: Chame to Panama city

Today I performed two flights on the Cessna 172 in the livery of MAG Flight Training. This 2nd flight was an IFR practice under night conditions.

My flight plan is shown on the left map. The departure airport was Chame airfield in the town of Chame, province of Panama. Departure time was 18:38 (UTC-5) with just enough light to see the runway. Our runway is at 141 ft of altitude but there are a few mountains in the vicinity.

From Chame I would fly heading 028 degrees towards DABEL intersection (direct) climbing to 3,500 feet. There are some mountains in the area of Lidice near DABEL so we have to make sure to have reached cruise altitude. Do note however, this is flight simulation so the terrain mesh may not be accurate!.

In the darkness I climbed to cruise altitude with the lights of the towns and the Panamerican highway below. Prior to departure I had set the Heading bug to my initial course 028 after performing a turn because I took off from Chame runway 18. Our first leg to DABEL would be around 11 nm.

I had also tuned the NAV1 and NAV2 radios to the Taboga VOR and COM1 to Panama Approach. The OBS1 I set to R-083 in preparation to that turn and OBS2 to 007 degrees. Having flown a straight line heading 028 I would have reached the DABEL intersection when the DME showed 15nm west of Taboga and also because my CDI on VOR1 would indicate I was about to intercept the TBG R-083. At that point I turned right and went straight to Taboga VOR heading into the sea and total darkness. Our next queue would be the VOR1 To/From indicator as well as the DME as this leg would be 15nm.

A few nautical miles from Taboga I initiated a descent o 2,500 feet always keeping an eye on the artificial horizon as to not to disorient myself. Obviously looking outside as well .

Just before reaching Taboga I turned left to fly the Taboga outbound radial 007 towards Marcos A. Gelabert. The initial approach fix being about 5nm from the airport This picture here shows the little dot of the airport approach lights and on our left the Bridge of the Americas. Well, not much can be seen, it was dark.

On our approach further descent was required in order to safely arrive to the airport. The Panama Pacifico (Howard airport) was on the left but on this snapshot you could see the Bridge of The Americas as our virtual Cessna made the approach in between Ancon Hill on the right an the other hill on the left.

In this final approach I maintained about 70 knots approach speed with flaps. Landing was done softly on Marcos A. Gelabert runway 36 with scenery from Victor Brumley who has done an excellent job (work in progress). Then I taxied to the ramp and ended the flight.

This small picture shows the flight analysis done by FSX, the blue line in the middle represents the Taboga (TBG) VOR. It was fun though not much scenery could be appreciated, nothing like practicing some IFR skills even though I am not a (real life) pilot . As always fly safe in the virtual skies and above all do not use this information for real flight planning!.

C208 – Santiago to Chitré, Panamá

I was redoing a saved flight, in fact just the final approach to Santiago, Veraguas, Panamá. In other words the Ruben Cantú airport (ICAO: MPSA) for which I had made an add-on scenery. It was a final approach at dusk to runway 35 and after a successful landing I stayed at the apron for a while watching the sunset and as you can see it was already dark. Departure time 18:32 local, 23:32 UTC.
It looked beautiful and I noticed I had already a preloaded flight plan MPSA-PX06. A flight to the Alonso Valderrama airport in Chitré, Herrera, Panama (ICAO: MPCE, FSX: PX06).  These are the two most important airfields in the central provinces to this date. It looked so nice that I thought it would be a good IFR challenge (no big mountains though) to navigate this by instrument with low visibility (night conditions), so I turned on my laptop for the communications and IvAp client. No charts for any of these two in Panama, so basically you have to grab your aeronautical map and cook your own combination of beacons and radials to do your own navigation.
Flight Briefing & Off we go!
But I digress… while at the apron near the hangar a couple of businessmen looking for cattle in Santiago had a bad turn in their negotiation and decided to head to Chitré as soon as possible so your virtual servant was hired to transport them to Chitré. Luckily both Santiago (MPSA) and Chitré (MPCE) airports have night lighting (Note: both FSX airports are outdated and without lights).
For this I filed an IFR flight plan. This would be short 30 minute flight at 5000’. The flight plan was direct to DEXAN intersection right on Chitré airport (FSX: PX06). From Santiago’s STG VOR to Chitré’s DEXAN intersection we go over victor airway V13 heading 103 degrees.
We will depart from Santiago’s runway 17 and turn left to intercept R-103 outbound STG VOR (114.50) and it would be some 32 nm to reach DEXAN which is right at the airport. When we are nearby we should see the salt-mining lots of Boca de Parita (see screenshot on the left) on our left side. Then we will continue on this heading for our crosswind leg for about 3nm.
Later we will turn left again heading 012 degrees for our downwind leg (about 5-8nm). In this leg we will have our senses heightened as we are heading into the sea, the Parita Bay to be more precise. You don’t want to accompany the sharks due to night disorientation (remember Kennedy!).
OK, by now we are on our downwind leg and the two businessmen are excited now that they see the airport vaguely on our left. However, they do become nervous when they notice we are going to be flying over water. By the way, the virtual pilot cannot swim.
As you can see my virtual cockpit was fully setup from the beginning. Although the altitude here is showing 2500 ft. for our downwind leg. I had the STG VOR (114.50) on NAV1 with OBS1 set to R-103 (outbound STG). I had also as reference TBG VOR/DME (110.0) set on NAV2 with OBS2 set to R-286. Basically, assuming we kept our set outbound course off STG VOR, we had the drawback that STG has no DME (yeah, flying in Panama is compared to bush flying for what I hear). So, I figured with TBG tuned in and on that radial I should see around 71 nm on the DME (TBG) when I was right over DEXAN. (I didn’t want to use the GPS).
I had also set the Chitre NDB (CHE 440.00) on the ADF, that would point us to the airport in the dark. Out in the lonely see and before it got even more scary, we turned left again for our base leg. Make sure you don’t lose altitude or get disoriented, watch the artificial horizon and in particular the ADF needle, it points right at the airport!.
At the right moment depending on your speed, you would turn left again for the final leg into runway 19 (heading 190). Perhaps if you zoom into the picture on the left you would notice the Chitré airport night lighting right above the airspeed indicator. Look well because the lights are not very intense! The approach has to be done carefully because if you descend too much you will ditch on the sea, if not you should fly over El Agallito beach, over the high vegetation and then land. I was very pleased to have done a good landing at night on this Cessna 208 Grand Caravan (ICAO: C208) in night conditions and watching my instruments rather than visually  and relying on the GPS only to verify I was at the right place. Unfortunately there was a problem with my IvAp connection and I was not able to report the flight online with my virtual airline (Virtual Pilots Association).