Don't Give Me No Static!

[Jeff_S]

I've been using X-Plane simulator and an M20J to practice the flows and prepare for the day I finally get to fly one home. I'm getting better at it, but still find myself behind at times...to be expected. But X-Plane must be giving me credit for the hundreds of hours I have flying the Warrior because in the Mooney it keeps throwing problems at me. It's quite entertaining.

I've dealt with runaway trim, autopilots that have a mind of their own, and other fun things. Today I was flying from Rome GA home to KPDK (yes, the plane must have been to Cole's for some maintenance on that A/P!). Just like the weather outside, sunny and cold, 18°.  All was well until I got to 3000' and then the altimeter froze and the VSI went to 0.

"Ah, pitot heat!" I said and applied it...to no effect.  So I flew it home as best I could, using ATC's constant reminders about getting to my assigned altitude to help keep it there, and GPS ground speed as a proxy for the obviously erroneous ASI, until I established a visual down the ILS pipe and landed.  "Hmm...I missed something somewhere" I said to myself.

Back to my old PPL manual and the long-forgotten chapter on pitot-static system problems. As you are all ahead of my story, of course I realized that this was a blocked static system, the fix of which was to reach down and flip on the alternate static which does actually exist in my simu-bird.

A nice reminder in these cold temps, and better to learn in the comfort of my desk chair.

[Carl S]

What kind of set up are you using?  I had put X-Plane 8 on a Sony Vaio and am really not getting much in the way of graphics or scenery (Which I paid extra for.)  It could be the age of my machine but it has a 2.8 GHz Pentium® 4 Processor with 2 MB DDR and a  nVIDIA® GeForce™ FX5200 128MB on board.

Maybe I need more graphics horsepower?

 

Carl

[Jeff_S]

I use an iMac, the first model that came with the intel Core Duo processor. So it's a dual-core 2Ghz processor with the max of 2Gbytes of RAM.  I don't have the graphics turned up on super-high, but I leave it set at 4x and still get good frame rates of 30-50 fps which provides plenty of realism for my needs.

Oh, and this is X-Plane 9, which may be part of the reason I keep getting so many airplane malfunctions because the only M20J simu-bird I've been able to find was last updated to X-Plane 8.6. I'm sure there are some differences in the logic model that are creating some bugs. Which may be why yesterday I had a mysterious outage of the horizontal stab, which all of a sudden decided to stop moving up from neutral but moved down just fine.  I had to use max trim up just to keep from auguring in...but I made it!