Saving / resuming a flight in career mode?

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Stearmandriver
Senior Airman
Posts: 174
Joined: 12 Mar 2017, 22:33

Saving / resuming a flight in career mode?

Post by Stearmandriver »

Hello,

After a few short hops for aircraft familiarity, I decided to try my first longer haul flight in the constellation in career mode. Because I'm a nerd who likes traditional navigation, I decided to make it a five-hour hop from Johnston atoll to Christmas island in the Pacific. 3 hours in, all was going well: my last sextant shots showed ground speed just a little faster than planned, fuel consumption right on, and about 10 miles left of course. I just applied a correction for that, and decided it was a good time to go to bed. So, I saved the flight, and shut down FSX.

Today, even though I don't have time to fly, I decided to test restoring my flight. It restores with a few issues, and I'm hoping someone has some advice for these. First of all, all four engines are shut down: but I think that maybe because I have Auto cold and dark start turned on. That's not actually a big problem, I just reset all for mixtures and the engines fire back up and all is well. Except... My fuel tanks are completely full, when I didn't even take off that way, never mind a 3 hour burn. AND, I have no passengers on board anymore.

These two issues stand to affect aircraft weight and therefore aircraft performance, and therefore my dead reckoning calculations... And I'm sure they also stand to affect career mode. I assume that this will no longer be logged as a career mode flight when I land with no passengers.

So... Does anyone have any suggestions on how to rescue this situation, or at least preven it in the future? I'm willing and able to tweak values in a saved file somewhere, if that should be an option.

Thanks!

rahoward144
Airman
Posts: 16
Joined: 15 Feb 2017, 10:11

Re: Saving / resuming a flight in career mode?

Post by rahoward144 »

There's an A2A log file associated with the Connie that is updated continuously during flight. You'll want to back it up just before or just after saving to keep the flight and the airplane status in sync. In my case, the Connie files are stored in "D:\Documents\A2A\FSX\L049". Notice it has "FSX" even though I am using P3D. I'm not sure where yours will be but the path to them is probably not much different.

There are 2 files:

L049.dat (the pilot log)
L049log.dat (the airplane data log)

You'll want to backup the L049log.dat file because it has all of your current in-flight data. You'll want to make sure "Auto C&D" is disabled, but even if you forget you can get the engines going quickly with "Auto Start" once you load back into the flight. I've had to do that a few times and it doesn't hurt the flight or the final results.

Not everything will be as you left it, but that's not a big problem. I've restored several flights now and not lost any accrued flight time. In fact, I regularly save and backup the file during long flights just in case.

Stearmandriver
Senior Airman
Posts: 174
Joined: 12 Mar 2017, 22:33

Re: Saving / resuming a flight in career mode?

Post by Stearmandriver »

rahoward144 wrote:There's an A2A log file associated with the Connie that is updated continuously during flight. You'll want to back it up just before or just after saving to keep the flight and the airplane status in sync. In my case, the Connie files are stored in "D:\Documents\A2A\FSX\L049". Notice it has "FSX" even though I am using P3D. I'm not sure where yours will be but the path to them is probably not much different.

There are 2 files:

L049.dat (the pilot log)
L049log.dat (the airplane data log)

You'll want to backup the L049log.dat file because it has all of your current in-flight data. You'll want to make sure "Auto C&D" is disabled, but even if you forget you can get the engines going quickly with "Auto Start" once you load back into the flight. I've had to do that a few times and it doesn't hurt the flight or the final results.

Not everything will be as you left it, but that's not a big problem. I've restored several flights now and not lost any accrued flight time. In fact, I regularly save and backup the file during long flights just in case.
Ah hah, thank you! I've found the file, thought maybe i could edit it in a hex editor but no... but that looks to be ok because there are already backups in that folder, from the time i need. I tried to restore a couple with varying degrees of success; i think where i went wrong was switching on the flight engineer too quickly; he thought we were on the ground she shut everything down. I tried again but waited a bit for things to settle down and he seemed to work.

Just to clarify - you're restoring your .dat file, then loading the saved flight in FSX, right? Or is there another workflow?

Thanks for the help!

rahoward144
Airman
Posts: 16
Joined: 15 Feb 2017, 10:11

Re: Saving / resuming a flight in career mode?

Post by rahoward144 »

Just to clarify - you're restoring your .dat file, then loading the saved flight in FSX, right? Or is there another workflow?
You're correct, always first restore the .dat file, then resume the flight. I haven't had any problems since I started doing it that way.

And you're welcome, glad to help!

Bax
Airman
Posts: 10
Joined: 07 Apr 2017, 17:17

Re: Saving / resuming a flight in career mode?

Post by Bax »

Surely you should not need to do anything. It is A2A's job to make sure any saved data is reloaded when returning to a flight. How many of us can sit through a complete flight when we have jobs a family and sleep to fit in. It takes away a lot of enjoyment out of the realism of the simulation.

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