My First Impressions

[pilotgod]

First off, the installer is straight forward and gave absolutely no issues. I'm always a bit wary of .exe files since I tend to keep my registry in pretty close check, but the minimum invasion and the easy unistallers are much appreciated. The program is very professional looking and simple enough to get set up on your aircraft. The only part that took me any moment of thought was configuring the aircraft which I didn't do until I got the "What are you doing?" voice from the FO when I got to high. Apparently, it doesn't automatically recognize the Connie as being pressurized. Anyways, a quick click of a box in the FCOM Administrator and that was all sorted out. Overall I am impressed with the program and like what it does. I really like the fact that the FCOM is there if I want it, but totally gone from sight if I just want to take the plane out for the fun of it. Usually with programs of this sort you get some button or guage that is ever present and clutters up your panel. I did however notice a couple of things I thought I'd point out.

1. In the FCOM Installer, when you add the guage, the window says that it will be called up in the thingypit with "Shift+F#" (where number is whatever you've selected), but in the sim it reacts like all sub-panels and comes up with "Shift+#" across the top of the keyboard. I figured it out with no problem, but I can see this being an issue for newcomers not used to messing with panels and their locations.

2. For my first flight I loaded the Connie up at KPDX and did the checkride. I noticed that while the Zulu time was right, the date wasn't. It was dawn on Sept. 16, 2009 at approx. 1430Z yet the FCOM told me it was Sept. 17, 2009 at 1430Z. Knowing that FS likes to base the date off of present location, yet advance Zulu times I double checked the sim date to be correct, which it was.

Again, this is a great program and hopefully, all the wrinkles are easy fixes.


Also, a Beta test of the forum reveals that the area in the front of the aircraft where the pilot sits is called a "thingypit". I'll try to remember to call it the Flight Deck from now on, but seriously, is cockpit so offensive?

[Dutch Owen]

Hi Pilotgod! Thanks for the positive feedback!

Here's how to fix up your unpressurized Connie issue. (I realize you fixed it yourself but this reply may help some others.)

Unfortunately FS9 doesn't actually have an attribute to indicate whether an A/C is pressurized or not (FSX does). FSCaptain takes care of that and many other "missing" attributes with its aircraft override system.

When you first power up the FCOM and press F1 to login, the top line over the stats will say something like "B734 N734W @ KSEA" indicating you're in a B734 (Boeing 737-400) registration N734W at KSEA. The important thing for the overrides is the B734. The Connie will have something different here -- maybe L1049G or something like that. It depends on what the designer put into the aircraft.cfg.

Bring up the administrator, and click on the "aircraft characteristics" tab. Then click on the "Select Airplane" button and you'll see a list of the predefined airplanes. Amazingly, you'll see your Connie's type in there -- because when the FCOM sees an unknown type it makes some educated guesses about the characteristics and writes out an override file.

Click on the type and then "Open" and the page will populate with the characteristics of the airplane. You can update these however you wish and press "Ok" or "Apply" to save your changes.

The "pressurized" characteristic is in the middle column about halfway down. You'll probably need to update some other stuff in there too - my "guess" code probably needs some refinement!

The override files are stored in the "Aircraft" folder under the FSCaptain folder. They are text files. Looks like the Connie overrides aren't right. I'll post a fix in another thread!

Looking into the date thing and I'll take the F off the thingypit message forthwith -- thanks for spotting that.

Hope this helps,
Dutch

[pilotgod]

Thanks, Dutch. I'm testing this almost exclusively in FS9 as about 90% of all my fun aircraft work better in FS9 than FSX. Also, my PC is on the lower end of what is required to run FSX. Thanks for the reply and the post in the correct forum, sorry missed that this morning.

I figured with the pressurization, cruise altitudes, fuel flow, etc. the program was making a best guess based on the .cfg and going from there. With the many, many, many aircraft that are available it is obviously improbable to have all the aircraft taken care of. Depending on the difficulties involved, it might be beneficial to hit the major aircraft (POSKY, PMDG, Dreamfleet, Flight One, MAAM, Just Flight, etc.) that people use to add to the "friendliness" of install. As it is, the FCOM Administrator is very intuitive and with a few seconds I'm able to manually enter the values. Now, finding those values takes some work (like decent fuel burn in PPH.), but isn't too much of a problem.
Again, thanks for the quick reply.

[Dutch Owen]

Yeah I definitely want to build a library of correct overrides...but like you say figuring them out can be a chore sometimes.

When you want a registration code to fly all over the world, let me know.

Dutch