Bonanza Autopilot - occasional issues
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On some flights the autopilot in the Bonanza works fine for me, but on other flights it gives me a lot of grief, and I’m wondering if I’m doing something wrong. There are two issues I’ve seen repeatedly:
Item #1 is a situation where, when the autopilot has been deactivated at some point in the flight with the autopilot disconnect button on my Alpha yoke, afterwards the autopilot doesn’t want to activate again. I’ll press the AP button on the unit in the cockpit with my mouse, and it won’t even light up. It seems like I have to do a bunch of autopilot disconnects from the yoke as well as turn every mode light off on the autopilot with mouse clicks, and only then can I get pressing the AP button to light that button and allow the autopilot to work again.
Item #2 often seems to happen in conjunction with the above problem, but I’m not sure they are related or that it is wrong behavior. Specifically, sometimes when I’m using HDG mode and then want to switch to NAV mode, I press the NAV button and both of the modes end up lit, but with neither mode actually working, as the plane just starts rolling toward the side with more fuel in the tank. As above, it seems like I have to brute force everything related to the autopilot to turn off before I can get either of these modes to work again.
I’m using the PMS50 GTN 750 in WTT mode, in case it matters, and I’m quite certain I have the latest versions and all of the hot fixes from WT and PMS installed.
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Thank you for the detailed description. It's often hard to diagnose these things, but when someone provides every detail, it makes things so much easier!
That is a classic GPS incompatibility issue. We have seen this many times with many users, and it's always fixable. The issue that somewhere you have an GPS addon that needs updating, a "fix" that is no longer needed, or a mod that incorrectly overwrote files that are needed for the GPS units to operate.
Just Flight's tech support is far better than me at sorting out these issues, and even have a list of some common freeware addons that were poorly implemented, and create issues like this. They can walk you through the process quickly and get you a fully functioning aircraft. In the meantime, you can also troubleshoot with me here, if you like. You should start by simply updating the GTN, and temporarily removing everything from your community folder besides the Bonanza and the GTN. If that doesn't work, you can let us know, and we'll go from there.
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For what it is worth, I have no freeware mods (outside of WorkingTitle) at all ... I don't trust them, for the same reason you described. All I have in my Community folder are the BlackSquare planes and taxiways, one other plane (MV310, from the Marketplace), Navigraph, PMS GTN 750 premium, and the latest WTT downloads from PMS for the BlackSquare and Milviz aircraft.
The one other thing I do also have from PMS50 is the WT GNS530 compatibility fix (link below), as at the time I believed it was needed by the Milviz plane. I'm now wondering if this is not needed by Black Square planes and in fact might be causing problems for me? (I wish I knew if the MV310 still needed it.)
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I just did a Bonanza flight with a whole bunch of autopilot testing, after deleting the WT GNS 530 compatibility mod. It appears the mod isn’t required by the Bonanza at least, but it didn’t alter the main problem with the autopilot (item #1 above).
However, my testing has apparently nailed down the specific issue I’m having. It’s all about the Toggle Autopilot Disengage command (which I think may have been bound by default to the big red Autopilot Disconnect button on my Alpha yoke) in conjunction with the autopilot. Namely, after the first press of the button, the autopilot disconnects with the modes and flight director still operating, and that is as expected. But pressing the AP button on the autopilot in the cockpit at that point is ignored, even if I then manually click the buttons to turn off the FD and modes so that all annunciators are off. What I have to do is click the Toggle Autopilot Disengage command a second time, and then I can deactivate the autopilot from the cockpit button. But if I instead do a third press of the Toggle Autopilot Disengage button, then it locks out activating the autopilot again. In short, it requires an even number of clicks of that button to end up in a toggled state that allows access to the autopilot afterwards. (I think I had previously been clicking the button once, noticing the autopilot problem, then clicking it several more times until I happened to land on an even number of clicks thereof.)
After seeing this, I tried rebinding the Autopilot Disconnect button on the yoke to the Set Autopilot Disengage (0, 1) command instead. After that change, the main problem seems to be fixed. Now I’m noticing that a second press of the Autopilot Disconnect button doesn’t turn off the flight director as I’d expected, but I think that wasn’t working before either. That’s not a problem, since I can just hit the FD button on the autopilot itself, but it does seem at variance with what I read in the Bonanza manual.
I hope this info on what might just have been a yoke binding error on my part will be of help to others.
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Thanks again for being so thorough. Sometimes I get one line bug reports, so I live for the thorough ones. I'm glad to hear that it sounds like you fixed everything. Is that correct? I'm not really surprised that the default Honeycomb bindings were the issue. We have a surprising number of issues caused by the factory settings for the Honeycomb. Some of the switches will just "spam" their command 10 times per second, which tends to break things. It sounds like something similar was happening with the autopilot disconnect.
I'm glad you found that TBM thread. As you found there, I try to override the default simulator events sparingly, because we have found situations where they do not work as intended, for whatever reason. In this case, I would rather have some people wondering why the flight director won't disengage, than some people pressing the autopilot disengage button on final and nothing happens. Hopefully you understand. The comments in the manual only speak to the virtual buttons inside the cockpit, not to physical hardware controls.
I will either see if I can get a sufficiently wide variety of hardware peripherals and hardware binding tools among our beta testers to make the correct change to the default behavior with confidence, or I will add a note about this in the FAQ for my future updates.
Thanks again for describing your problem so thoroughly!
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@Black-Square said in Bonanza Autopilot - occasional issues:
Some of the switches will just "spam" their command 10 times per second, which tends to break things. It sounds like something similar was happening with the autopilot disconnect.
That certainly is the one and only thing I don’t care for about the otherwise excellent Honeycomb controllers. Perhaps at some point I’ll look into SPAD or FSUIPC to make my own filtering for those controls, but I’m not of a mind to tackle that task just yet.
The comments in the manual only speak to the virtual buttons inside the cockpit, not to physical hardware controls.
Oh! That’s a thought which had not occurred to me - I always assumed the manual was referring to sim control bindings, and hence hardware controllers. Now I’ll reread the manuals with a fresh insight.
Thanks again for describing your problem so thoroughly!
No problem at all! My biggest problem is usually going into too much detail, rather than the inverse. And thanks again for your help.
