Saitek controls becoming increasinlgy unresponsive

[Mutley Eugenius]

I have purchased the C172 this afternoon and installed in into FSX Steam. I'm an old pilot but a new simmer and I have been spending quite a lot and several months trying to find a sim environment that is satisfying, and an aircraft model that is close to realistic. Very tough search so far.

The A2A C172 has been causing me some grief in the last 3 hours with constant control problems. No other simulator application or any previous plane model in FSX has ever demonstrated phenomena like this:

First flight was ok but short. Next the axes of the rudder and the yoke swapped spontaneously and I had to reassign and calibrate everything. Then the brake axes disappeared from use and I had to re-calibrate again. Now the plane flies OK for about a minute or two and then the control surfaces start to lock up, if I look at the plane from an external view while I move the yoke and rudder I can see the control surfaces jump to new positions every few seconds, it's random, like one second or 5 seconds between, sometimes 20 or 30 or more before new control input samples are applied to the plane but the sim is basically totally useless at this point because the only way to restore normality is to reset the flight. Very frustrating.

Anyone have any clue as to what might be gong on?

Is this purchase refundable?

[Mutley Eugenius]

I suppose I should add that I'm using a Saitek Yoke with throttle quadrant, and a Thrustmaster pedal set.

[ilya1502]

Don't be too hasty to ask for a refund. Are you confident with your hardware controls? It sounds like you have a problem with them, not with the A2A model. I had similar problems when I connected my Saitek yoke via a USB-hub. Switching to a direct connection to one of the ports on the MB solved this.

[Mutley Eugenius]

Thanks for that, I am pretty confident. I have them plugged direct, not through a hub. I bought these controls several months ago and have used them for a great many hours since, and never have had any issue anything like this.

Acting on a hunch, because I'm somewhat of a coder, I went into Aircraft.cfg and put comment "//"s in front of all the lines of code in the "force feedback " section, which is the only part of the cfg file that has to do with the controls at all, and I then reset the flight and went for 20 minute flight with many pauses and have had no issues. I think that might have been the part causing issues.

However, the elevator trim... OMG!. This needs SERIOUS work. Still think I might want a divorce.

[Nick - A2A]

Hello and welcome to the A2A forums.

Sorry to hear you're having some problems, but what you're describing sounds a lot like a controller conflict. When you plug devices with hardware axes into your PC, FSX will tend to assign them all to aileron, elevator and rudder axes by default, so you can end up with multiple devices controlling one set of control surfaces. Because of this, it's probably worth systematically checking the control assignments for each device. If you add external software into the mix too (for example Saitek software or FSUIPC), then there's even more potential for conflict.

If you don't have force feedback controls, editing this part of the cfg file won't have any effect unless there's something odd going on with your system! Please also bear in mind that editing cfg files can make it more difficult to get to the bottom of any issues.

What issue are you finding with elevator trim and do you use an axis or buttons for this? If it's the latter, unfortunately FSX includes a rather odd 'trim acceleration' feature whereby trim inputs start very slowly and then speed up suddenly after a couple of seconds. To avoid this behaviour, you can use the "yoke trim up" and "yoke trim down" functions in the aircraft configurator which is available under "A2A Simulations" in the Windows Start Menu. Using these functions, the trim rate in the sim should be a very good match for the rate of the manual electric trim in the real aircraft.

Finally, if you haven't already done so, please can you download and run the latest Accu-Sim update available from here.

Best regards,
Nick