Smoke, hypoxia, crash. Does the TBM 900 have random failures?

[Buttons840]

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)?

[ChefRob]

22 hours ago, Buttons840 said:

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.

Did you remember to turn on the pilots O2 doing your after start checklist?

 

22 hours ago, Buttons840 said:

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?

Now you have me wondering the same thing.

22 hours ago, Buttons840 said:

Or maybe the smoke was caused by something I was doing wrong, like flying on high throttle for a long time (~30 minutes)?

This would of course what you mean by "flying on high throttle for a long time (~30 minutes)?"... Did you have any of your %'s in the yellow or red? At FL310 depending on the OAT you would be looking for a cruise torque setting of 80% to 85%. Higher than that you see your NG% gong into the yellow... Followed shortly but your ITT. 

You should use this site to help plan and do your flights... It's numbers are nearly spot on in XP. 

Edited April 10, 2019 by ChefRob

[Goran_M]

It's by no means a random failure.  Always check your maintenance manager before taking off.  Check your oil, Engine components, fluids, pressure vessel.  Make sure everything is in good working order.  This aircraft addon takes into account hours flown, and wear and tear is a very real factor in it's maintenance and reliability.

[Buttons840]

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).

[Buttons840]

On 4/10/2019 at 12:22 AM, Goran_M said:

It's by no means a random failure.

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.

[Goran_M]

What I meant was, If you have all failures in the X-Plane menu off, the TBM will eventually have component failure due to wear and tear.