Flight Director not working correctly
-
Scenario: AP on. HDG mode active. HDG bug about 40 degrees to the left of present heading.
Observed behavior: Flight director remains level with the horizon. Aircraft deviates from the flight director and does a half-bank (about 15 degrees) turn to the left.
Expected behavior: Flight director commands a full-bank (30 degree) turn to the left and the aircraft follows the flight director.
Please explain to me why I'm seeing this.
Microsoft Flight Simulator Screenshot 2024.08.24 - 15.08.09.05 -
The only time I have seen behavior like this is when something about GPS hot-swapping did not occur correctly on startup. If you change the avionics selection to something else and then return to the GNS 530, does the flight director behave correctly?
-
@Black-Square I tried this again with a full restart of everything (PC included) as well as hot swapping to something else and back again to the GNS 530. Same result. If the GNS 530 is active as the primary avionics, I reliably see the disfunctional autopilot that I described above. KX 155B and the GTN 750 (PMS50) work just fine as expected.
Is this somehow related to the previous issues this plane had with the Working Title GNS530 that are described in this thread?:
https://community.justflight.com/topic/5743/autopilot-after-sim-update-14/36?_=1707608555852&lang=en-USAre we still supposed to be running the modified files decribed in your post there? I thought WT updated/fixed this. According to the "Date Modified" field on my local WT530B.js and WT430B.js files, these were updated on 5/23 of this year.
-
All issues with the GNS should have been fixed in the last Sim Update, so no additional files should be required. The modifications you made should have been overwritten when the simulator last updated. If you still have any community mods related to the GNS, they should be removed. I haven't seen this issue myself, and nobody else has reported it yet, so I suspect that it's the result of some local GPS compatibility issue.
I would recommend temporarily emptying your community folder, and making sure the PMS50 GTN is up to date (GPS addons can affect the operation of other GPS units). If neither of those work, please let me know and I will see if I can think of anything else to try in the meantime. If this is a common GPS compatibility issue, the Just Flight support team has seen almost every issue imaginable, and have a database of information that they might be able to use to help you track down the problem.
-
@Black-Square Updating the PMS50 GTN fixed everything. Thanks for the help!
-
@Black-Square Well after further investigation, the GNS still has issues. Latest version of the PMS50 GTN is installed.
If I start a flight with the GNS as the primary avionics and don't do any radio swapping, the autopilot behaves strangly (won't go in HDG mode at all, among other things). If I switch to the PMS50 GTN and then back to the GNS, the autopilot behaves perfectly normal.
I then uninstalled the PMS50 GTN, restarted the simulator, and started a flight with the GNS already active as the primary avionics (no radio swapping). The autopilot behaved completely normal.
It seems like the PMS50 GTN has separation issues. It requires a hot-swap to the GNS before it will let go of whatever it's initially holding on to before the autopilot can function correctly. This is a shame, as it requires the PMS50 (which I like) to be unintalled or the user must remember to do a hot-swap at the begninning of EVERY flight (not an acceptable work-around for a payware plane) in order to get the autopilot to function correctly.
Please fix this. I'd like to have the PMS50 installed (for use on other planes), but right now I have to go without it just to get the GNS to work with this plane (without requiring a hot-swap before every flight).
-
Thanks for that detailed information. That's actually quite a lot to get me started hunting this down. You don't happen to own either of the Black Square Dukes, do you? I would be interested to know if you experience the same issue with them, as that would help me identify if this is something across all my aircraft, TBM specific issue, or something specific to your system. I would guess it's one of the latter two, though, as I have not heard about exactly this behavior before.
Actually... I'll give you something you can try right now, if you like. If you can locate the following file...
...\Community\bksq-aircraft-tbm850\SimObjects\Airplanes\bksq-aircraft-tbm850\model\AnalogTBM.xmlReplace the following line...
0 (>L:GTN750_INT_HIDDEN,bool) 0 (>L:XMLVAR_GPS_DISABLED_GTN750_1, bool) 1 (>L:AS530_1_HIDDEN,bool) 1 (>L:KX155B_1_HIDDEN,bool)With these lines:
1 (>L:TDSGTNXI_INACTIVEVAR, bool) 1 (>L:XMLVAR_GPS_DISABLED_GTN750_1, bool) 1 (>L:XMLVAR_GPS_DISABLED_WTT, bool) 1 (>L:XMLVAR_GPS_DISABLED_AS530_1, bool) 1 (>L:XMLVAR_GPS_DISABLED_AS530_2, bool) 0 (>L:KNS_WriteGpsSimvars, bool)That's just a shot in the dark based on what you described, but it's definitely worth trying!
-
@Black-Square Thanks for the info! I'll give it a shot when I get home.
-
@Black-Square This fixed it. With the PMS50 installed, GNS can be be the active on statup and the autopilot functions properly (no hot-swap required).
However... This produced a strange side-effect where the GNS doesn't go through the usual start up process. I have dual GNS 530s selected as the active avionics upon starting a flight. When the radio master comes on, they just turn on and are ready to go. I don't have to click ENT/OK to get through the initial start up screens and I don't have to wait for a GPS signal. They're just ready to go. Other than this, they function as expected. Not a big deal, but probably something you'd want to figure out before introducing this fix into the next patch.
Anyway, thanks for the attention and help on this!
-
Thank you so much for letting me know! That's an important one for me to remember as I bring the tablet into my other aircraft, so that was very helpful to hear! I too have noticed that the GNS will sometimes go through the startup sequence when the aircraft is loaded on the runway, and sometimes not. I haven't approached that like a bug, since it doesn't seem to have any related impacts on the user experience, but I have also not noticed any particular logic to when it does it and when it does not. I hope everything is working well for you now! Thanks again for helping me find this one!
