JRBarrett

Yes, on an ILS approach, always prioritize the green needles over the flight director.

Your maintenance staff was probably topping off the oil on a regular basis during post flight inspections. That’s what we do at our operation. The engine does not actually “burn” the oil. The seven main engine bearings each sit in a chamber known as a “sump” which are pressurized by 7th stage bleed air. Each sump has rotating air/oil seals, but they do allow a little oil to bypass when the engine is running. It will come out of the drain mast located on the lower part of the jet pipe. Just a characteristic of the GE CF34 engine. Our company also operates 3 Dassault Falcon 900s with Honeywell TFE731-60 engine. That engine model barely consumes any oil at all. We change the oil filters every 150 hours, and it is not unusual to not need to top off the oil at all between scheduled filter changes.

My experience on r/w CRJ-200s, which use the same engine as the CL650, is that each engine will consume about 1 quart of oil for every 8 flight hours. If you have been flying the Challenger a lot and never serviced the oil before, you might find it will take quite a bit to fill it the first time you do it.

Sorry for the late response. I am a mechanic and avionics technician on r/w CRJ-200s which have very similar systems to the CL650, although the CRJ uses the older Collins Proline 4. rather than the newer Proline 21 on the 650. But, the operating principles are the same. The flight director shows steering commands coming from the autopilot. However, when the aircraft is flying an ILS approach in “green needles” the steering commands for both the pitch and roll servos are not coming from the autopilot’s command logic. Instead, the aircraft (when the autopilot is engaged in approach mode) is being steered directly by localizer and glideslope deviation outputs of the VIR-432 Nav radio. In this mode, the autopilot flight director is only in a passive “monitoring” state. The Nav radio itself is “doing the driving”. The Nav radio responds much more quickly to any deviation from the localizer or glideslope than the flight director - especially in the latter stages of the approach. In fact, on some Boeing airliners, the SOP is to turn the flight director completely off once established on an ILS, as the flight director command bars can be distracting in this scenario because of their slower response to any deviation from the localizer or glideslope.

I’ll try creating a custom camera view outside, but I didn’t realize I could also “Superman” my way right through the fuselage! Thanks for the info.

I have several custom cockpit camera views assigned to various keys on the numeric keypad. I completed a flight, shutdown and secured the aircraft, walked down the stairs then shut and locked the main entrance door. Then I accidentally hit one of the numeric keypad keys, which instantly teleported me back into the cockpit. The only thing I could think to do was to reopen the door from the inside, walk back down the steps and once again close and lock to door, so that I could walk back into the FBO with the W key. Is there any custom command that can be bound to a key or joystick button to place the pilot outside of the aircraft on the ramp? I looked through the long list of custom CL650 commands and couldn’t find anything - but I may have been overlooking something obvious. Thanks!

The NOAA servers were down for scheduled maintenance. I believe they are back now.

I found it. Thanks very much - it worked well!

I use XEnviro for weather, and it is configured to be “on” when X-Plane starts up, before loading the C650. I have noted that on the first load of XP (in career mode) the wings are often iced up, even if the air temperature is above freezing and skies are clear. (No rain or snow). When this happens, I exit the sim completely and re-start it. It usually loads the second time with the wings clear of any ice.

Once the ADG is deployed, it can only be re-stowed on the ground by maintenance personnel, with the aircraft completely powered down. It takes two persons to do it, and requires tools. I assume the ADG re-stow option on the ground services menu emulates this.

You can, but doing so could potentially be dangerous. If the toggle switch were to be moved to the “closed” position at some point after the aircraft is powered down, the nose gear doors would immediately close the next time the 3A hydraulic pump is turned on. If somebody was working in the nose wheel well at the time, they could be seriously injured. On the real airplane, it is actually possible (though not easy) to remove or insert the pin with the door closed. There is enough of a gap between the back of the door and the gear strut. But, one has to have a skinny arm, and a lot of flexibility in the elbow joint!

On the winds aloft datalink page of the FMS, I can manually enter individual waypoint names from my flight plan and successfully retrieve the forecast winds aloft (at several altitudes) for each entered waypoint. Is there any way to automatically import and apply winds aloft data for all waypoints shown on the LEGS page? I know that some r/w ACARS systems have that capability, but perhaps that feature is not emulated in the 650?

This was the subject of an FAA Airworthiness Directive (2020-10-05), affecting all Rockwell-Collins Proline 4 and Proline 21 systems installed in any make/model of aircraft. The corrective action is to change the CSU strapping to disable temperature compensation completely. Once this has been done, there will not even be a temperature compensation option in the FMS menus. AFAIK, EASA did not issue a matching AD for Europe, so this only affects US-registered aircraft. Of course in the sim, we are not bound by FAA regulations!

That is exactly right. The lock is internal inside the actuator, and the pin prevents it from moving to the unlocked position.

Synthetic visibility mode in the real aircraft does not show a “RW” image - for that you would need a nose-mounted camera. The word synthetic means just what it says. The image is artificially constructed from a terrain database. SV mode in the sim works exactly as it does in the real aircraft. There are some aircraft that have an option for a nose-mounted infrared camera that will overlay an image of the “real” world on the PFD, but that option is not available on the Challenger.