Scott - A2A wrote:
Rosario,
Great to see you managed to capture this on video. Accu-Sim GA airplanes are filled with these kinds of unexpected, realistic experiences just like their real world counterparts. The goal has always been to give that same impact you would have in the real world, as this is a true test of a pilot's (person's) ability to think clearly in this kind of situation.
There is always a period of denial when something like this happens, and how long that period is comes down to training and thinking clearly under pressure. Once you, as the pilot have determined the issue, you can then compensate and hopefully have a successful result. An aileron failure, fortunately, is one of the more gentle kinds of emergencies to experience, however there are several kinds of aileron failures - a jam, a break, or total failure. You experienced not the worst (a jam in the turn), but not the easiest either (a single break), but a jam that allows for level flight.
To analyze your response, first, you landed safely (and made a rather nice landing at that), which is commendable. It's hard to be critical, but if you were to nit pick, it would have been ideal to extend down your base more but this is really not a criticism and speaks to the first part I mentioned, and that is your quickness of thinking, which was quite quick. Sometimes failures trigger panic too, which the results can be tragic. However, you were unable to square off your base leg due to the failure, and at some point, you made a choice to go for the runway. This was a good choice, however, it would have been worse if you misjudged your distance and over-shot the runway, but as the video shows, you didn't.
If you were in the Comanche, you probably would have overshot due to the more slippery airframe and flaps, but as a Skylane pilot, perhaps you were aware of the higher drag and steeper approach you could have made, as you did so.
A great video and a commendable job as pilot in command.
NOTE: I'm going to global post this for a bit to show that while both real and Accu-Sim airplanes are mostly reliable, you captured a small taste of what potentially awaits every GA Accu-Sim pilot. So don't take a properly running airplane for granted.
Also, to note, failures like this are persistent, so, it's possible that you made previous flights with this condition that could have been caught with the preflight exam before any of those flights. This may have been a failure just waiting to happen.
Scott.
I really like the levels of detail and immersion that this brings up, specifically that this could have been caught on the preflight! What I wonder though, is what action would we take on the preflight to repair the issue if we happen to spot it?
Will it be obvious how we repair it if we do spot it?
I can understand that for reasons of maintaining the realism of the sim, you wouldn't want to give away spoilers, but I would like some confirmation that we can actually DO something about a problem if we spot it. One reason why I have doubts to this on the preflight procedure is that there appear to be buttons that don't do anything. For instance, I have a button that shows the engine cylinders when viewing the front of the engine, but I click and it does nothing. I would think it would zoom in and show the fins of the cylinders to inspect for clogs? Another example is the static port - same thing. Click the button - no action. Is this normal behavior or a bug in my installation? My Comanche, Cherokee and C172 (all P3Dv2 do this) do this.
In case it's not making sense what I'm getting at, here's a scenario: I am doing preflight in the sim and see that an aileron counterweight fell off. How would I "repair" this in my simulator?
Thanks guys, and awesome product!
TA
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