Buttons840

I just set the mean time between failures to 1 hour (a ridiculously low value) and it became very obvious after a few minutes that the TBM 900 does have random failures controlled by the default X-Plane settings. If you don't believe me try to complete any flight with a 1 hour mean time between failures. In my case, I had multiple sensor failures and then the engine caught fire before I had even started the engine. This is a good thing though. It's an added feature. Those who don't want random failures can simply turn them off.

Yeah, Alt+T does weird things since it only speeds up part of the simulation. I've done a little more testing and I haven't found any problems with Ctrl+T time warping with the TBM 900. Very happy about that.

According to [1] the limit for NG % is 104.1 in a real-life TBM 900. This simulation seems to match, as you can run the engine at NG % around 102 and everything seems fine, the ITT is good, etc. So this question isn't specific to the simulation, but I was wondering: Why is the limit 104.1? That seems like an odd number to have as a limit. [1] http://www.tbm.aero/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/PIM__900_AN__E0R2.pdf

Hmm. The flags are most definitely not individually removed in my user interface. If I click one pitot tube, the flags are toggled for both pitot tubes. Likewise for chocks, I cannot have chocks installed on just one tire. That's why mentioned above that the user interface would not allow me to have only one pitot tube covered, either both are uncovered or both are covered, I literally wouldn't know how to cover one but not the other, the user interface will not allow it. If this is unexpected I can make some videos of it.

It was a new airframe. I had deleted the TBM 900 state folder right before starting the flight. I didn't notice any values in the red; I know torque was never in the red (or yellow).

I was flying at FL310 and smoke appeared. At first I thought it might be the somewhat lame and harmless smoke that is in the default XPlane 11, maybe a bug, but then a warning instructed me to put on my oxygen mask. Cool. In my opinion half the fun of flight simulators is learning how to handle emergencies. Now that I was actually in an emergency, it was time to start studying how to handle it. So I opened the emergency checklist and found the checklist for smoke. I followed it as best I could, but couldn't get the smoke stopped. It was hard to follow because the entire time my vision was obscured by the smoke, and my vision was distorting and dimming gradually. Eventually sounds started to fade too. I thought it was a very well done hypoxia effect. I completely blacked out and crashed soon after. This was a fun and exciting gaming experience. 10 / 10 Now I'm wondering why the smoke happened in the first place. Does the TBM 900 have random failures? Does it use the random failure settings (such as mean time to failure) from the default XPlane? If so, that's great, because then we have the option to turn them on or off. Or maybe the smoke was caused by something I was doing wrong, like flying on high throttle for a long time (~30 minutes)?

Yeah, I thought of that too. But I'm pretty sure they were removed, and I couldn't see them in the exterior view. Also, I don't think the user interface would allow you to have a cover on one pitot tube but not the other, right?

Here I am on an approach, and you can see that the upper instrument was indicating a speed of 98 kts, and the lower panel indicates a speed of 0 kts. I'm pretty sure I was going faster than 0 kts. This was a problem I had throughout the flight. The two instruments never agreed, but they were close at higher speeds. The autopilot never complained, perhaps because the autopilot ignores the speed completely and trusts the pilot to manage the throttle? I doubt this is a bug, but I'm not sure what could have cause this. Any ideas?

I'm sure it's difficult sorting out code problems from the intentionally simulated aircraft problems. In retrospec, the only code bug I'm sure I saw was the crash to desktop, which I'm sure you've heard plenty about already. (Thanks for working to fix it.) Other than that, I suspect there may be a problem where the "virtual aircraft" is "damaged", but the maintenance tab does not show the damage. But I can't be sure. It may have been due to simulated power or hydraulic issues as you say. Thanks for the reply and for acknowledging my problem. Your TBM 900 has given me quite a few big smiles.

Well, I pulled the trigger on the TBM 900 and it's been pretty good so far. From what I've seen the plane handles time warping well. (Also, let me say thanks for the Linux support.)

I was abusing the TBM 900 on my first simulated flight, and everything was going well until I tried to land. I ended up crash landing, but upon inspecting the damage to my aircraft I didn't find much damage. (All the following happened during the same landing attempt.) I put the landing gear down too early, and a warning appeared telling me so. A warning also mentioned a popped tire. Only two of the three landing gears came down. Then my engine stopped for some reason, so I tried to restart it (probably improperly) and it caught fire. So I cut the fuel with the throttle and it went out. Then I crash landed in a field. Everything was fine up to this point in my opinion, everything that happened could have been because of my own dumb mistakes. After the crash landing I went to the maintenance manager. I looked at the engine and a few parts had to be replaced, seems about right. Then I checked the landing gear. The plane magically when up on lifts, but only the two working landing gear were down. The report indicated that everything was fine with the landing gear, everything was green. Then I tried to get out of the landing gear maintenance screen but couldn't, because my landing gear wasn't down (the one broken landing gear wouldn't go down). I couldn't get the maintenance screen to go away. I worked around it and put the gear up and down a few times, but the one broken landing gear wouldn't come down. I tried to start a new flight hoping that would get rid of the stuck maintenance report, and it did -- I crashed to desktop. I restarted the game, and got the plane loaded on a runway, and again inspected the maintenance report. The only damage to all of the aircraft was those couple of (expensive) parts in the engine. The popped tire mentioned in an early warning was fixed through no action of my own. There was no airframe damage. There was no landing gear damage at all, leaving me to wonder why it was stuck previously.

I'm wondering how the TBM 900 handle time warping (a.k.a. "time compression"). First, note that XPlane 11 has 2 different ways to speed up a flight. Time warping can be activated by pressing CTRL+T, and is usually limited to about 2x to 4x normal speed, depending on your hardware. Time warping speeds up everything in the simulation, or at least that's the intention and how it works with default aircraft. There is also a "speed multiplier" activated by pressing ALT+T which simply multiplies your horizontal speed by up to 16x and is much easier on the CPU. However, since addons are arbitrary code, I think they can do things like use the actual clock rather than the simulated clock for their simulation, and thus behave weirdly when using "time warp". I've seen some addons handle this very well, and other addons do not. The default aircraft all handle it quite well. How does the TBM 900 handle time warping? Do the clocks tick at an accelerated rate while time warping? (Good.) Do the wings rip off because it thinks the plane is going too fast? (Bad.) I know the default G1000 handles time warping well, so that gives me some hope. I feel like I'm in the minority among flight simmers, but I just cannot justify sitting for many hours staring at an uneventful autopilot screen. I would rather speed up time, and then if something interesting happens I can return to normal speed.