Thinking of buying - some questions please

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JonP01
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Thinking of buying - some questions please

Post by JonP01 »

Hi,

I recently purchased the A2A Warrior and am very impressed. I had always wanted to get another plane that was a stark contrast to small GA and obviously the A2A Constellation would fit that bill. I just have some questions though - especially directed to anyone who has both the Connie and the Warrior.

Firstly, system performance. The Warrior performs fine on my 9-year old system, however when I purchased the Warrior I had done a lot of research and it was clear that it was a very good performing add-on in terms of system performance (FPS). Given that my machine is so old and I am not in a position to upgrade it, however, I have some reservations in getting such a large aircraft. What is the system performance like compared to the Warrior, for example, since that is really the only reference point I currently have?

Secondly, I am wondering what sort of control options are available to the pilot (me) in terms of throttle control, etc. It would seem that this aircraft is sufficiently complex to have to handover some tasks to a flight engineer. But I would certainly want to maintain throttle and prop pitch control at the very least. Am I able to control those two things and then leave the rest to the engineer?

And on the subject of controlling throttles, does this aircraft work like the stock multi-engine aircraft in FSX - in as much as I can simultaneously move all four throttles the same amount simply by deploying a single throttle axis? Whilst I could do any asymmetrical throttle adjustments manually with the mouse in the cockpit, for the most part I would be wanting to control all four engines manually via a single axis of input, as that is all I have at my disposal in terms of actual controllers.

And finally, I have read reports that this aircraft is very sensitive in pitch. I'm not overly keen on this characteristic, however it depends on how sensitive are we talking about in relative terms. When people say it is sensitive, I have no idea of whether they are judging it by the standards of such a large and heavy aircraft, or by the standards of light GA aircraft. For example, is it as sensitive in pitch as the Piper Warrior (which is honestly as sensitive as I would ever want an aircraft to be in FSX), or is it even more sensitive than that (which is a bit hard for me to believe, but again I have no reference point other than the Warrior). If it is no more sensitive in pitch than the Warrior, then that is OK, but if it is more sensitive I think I would be wanting to find another aircraft to fly that was less sensitive.

It is unfortunate that there is no demo aircraft. It took me quite a while to pluck up the courage to buy the Warrior without any demo, but I felt quite a bit more certain about that aircraft because of the universal praise of both the system performance and the flight characteristics - two things with which I can now concur having bought it. With the Constellation, I don't realyl have that up-front confidence, especially when these aircraft all command such a premium price (I am not complaining about the price but it is a concern that with such an asking price, there is no way to try the aircraft before buying).

Thanks

flapman
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Re: Thinking of buying - some questions please

Post by flapman »

Hi Jon,

I'll try and answer some of your questions, although I don't own the A2A Warrior so I can't give you a comparison there...
Firstly, system performance.
In many respects these large passenger aircraft are different from A2A's GA offerings.. certain new features are offset by features which have been removed. As the Captain of a propliner you don't need detailed access to the maintenance status of the aircraft. It's the airline's job to maintain their equipment according to schedule. You have some interaction, but it's not in depth as GA or SEL Military aircraft from A2A. The developers have instead given you the interaction that you need as a propliner captain, namely a responsive flight crew, flight attendant, and passengers. Aircraft wear is not as thoroughly tracked by the addon (though the engines/airframe still wear and respond to abuse), you have a "career" which tracks your performance as Captain.
What this all means is that it's a fundamentally different addon, not just a larger more complicated Warrior. I don't own the Warrior but I own several A2A GA and Military aircraft, in addition to other high quality payware aircraft.. and notice no performance problems with the Constellation (or Stratocruiser). I can't guarantee it, but I highly suspect your system will be capable.
I am wondering what sort of control options are available to the pilot
You have an adequately qualified Copilot, Flight Engineer, and Navigator on every flight. Should you enable the "Career Mode" these will be joined by a Flight Attendant and your paying passengers. Your copilot will give you callouts to help your awareness of each flight phase, and you can give full control of systems to the FE, or you can take responsibility yourself. With the FE having full control you would only be responsible for throttle control and "calling" for gear/flap via joystick/keyboard press. FO responds to each configuration change. Your Navigator will give you a position update, and provide information on groundspeed, fuel burn, and performance. FA will notify you of problems in the cabin and provide snacks 8) Either you can control the engine RPM, or you can delegate it to the FE. Note in the real aircraft you as the captain would also delegate throttle operation to the FE, and you would merely call out the desired power setting, but the A2A WOS aircraft do not support this (I think.. I never have the FE in control). Also keep in mind that the FE cannot read your mind, there are some functions he cannot do, and some performance targets he does not know (landing field cabin altitude for pressurization) but I hear that he's good enough.
on the subject of controlling throttles,
Yes, it actually functions better than default aircraft in many regards. I personally use a single throttle to control the Constellation. In addition to single throttle control via mouse, you can also use the "engine selection panel" to give your commands to a single engine, then return to having single commands affecting all engines. It will also respond to the default MSFS engine selection mechanic ("e" + number of selected engine(s)... i.e. "E12" is engines 1&2 only.)
I have read reports that this aircraft is very sensitive in pitch.
Yes, this is true and is apparently accurate to the real aircraft. I wouldn't say it's "very sensitive" but stability on the pitch axis is "relaxed" and IMHO not overly difficult to manage. Again I don't own the Warrior so I can't give a comparison, but I do own other A2A GA+Military aircraft and find that flying the Constellation is not more difficult (in this regard :D ). This is going to be a hard one to answer as it's your personal preference. I'd like to think you will quickly adapt to it without much hassle but I can't say for sure. I would say that if you have experience hand flying large turbine transports then you will have no problems flying the L-49. Try maintaining altitude +/- 100ft with the default 737-800 or 747-400 and that will be more sensitive than the L-49. By far the Default CRJ-700 is the most pitch sensitive aircraft I have!

Coming from an aircraft such as the Warrior (If you have no large aircraft/propliner/jet experience) your biggest concern will be transitioning to such high performance and large aircraft. Many A2A users have difficulty with planning and staying ahead of the aircraft, and that might be the biggest challenge and opportunity to learn and experience this aircraft will offer you.

I'm sure you'll be happy whatever your choice Jon!

JonP01
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Re: Thinking of buying - some questions please

Post by JonP01 »

Thanks so much for such a detailed reply. It makes me think a lot more of the world than I do right now when someone such as yourself takes the time to write such a detailed and exhaustive reply. If I was hesitating buying it before, I am not now! But I have to save up for it nonetheless. That said, where it not for the fact that the career mode can be disabled, I think I would give it a miss. I intend to train myself thoroughly on the aircraft first - without the pressure of performance - before I even remotely consider having my skills put to the test! 8)

So far as the pitch sensitivity is concerned, I took a test flight in the CRJ-700 and had no issues at all maintaining near perfect altitude (in normal weather). I did not find that plane as sensitive as something even like the stock Cessna Caravan. But anyway, yes - no problems.

But I do find the A2A Warrior quite the handful. Being so light it bobs around a lot and especially when changing flap settings, one has to be instantly ready on the yoke, as the pitch change is both dramatic and immediate. I actually find the Warrior to be the "busiest" simulated aircraft I have ever flown in terms of hand flying. It is almost like three hands are needed - one on the yoke, one on the throttle and another reaching up to the trim. Even after a week, I still struggle to maintain a consistent rate of descent on final as I slow the aircraft and deploy the flaps. And you need to put ever increasing trim on as well because as I say, deploying those flaps requires a pretty dramatic yoke input which you then need to trim out - if you don't then you literally risk running out of control surface deflection if your approach is a tiny bit too slow. This is why I was concerned that the Super Constellation might be a super-sized version of all of that. But if it is similar to any of the large turbofan stock aircraft in FSX, I've never had any problem with any of them. They all fly very easily.

I did get much more success with the Warrior when I changed that "elevator control force" parameter from the default of zero to around 45. At 45, I felt I had the sweet spot and the only time I was still having problems is when there are significant wind gusts immediately before or during the flare (the Warrior loves to balloon but if you reduce the speed to mitigate the possibility of it happening, you easily risk dropping onto the runway like a stone even before the stall light comes on).

But anyway, sounds like it should not be a problem. I am curious though as to whether the Connie has that elevator force parameter that can be adjusted like I understand most of the other A2A aircraft have?

JonP01
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Re: Thinking of buying - some questions please

Post by JonP01 »

Oh and sorry for continually referring to my A2A Cherokee as a Warrior. They are of course different aircraft and fly quite differently! I have Cherokees and Warriors on the brain at the moment!

flapman
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Re: Thinking of buying - some questions please

Post by flapman »

Thank you for the kind words Jon,

Of course I'm not sitting at your desk next to you, watching you fly your Cherokee, and I can only go of what you have written here. While the simulator is much more accommodating with regard to pilot error (i.e. you survive :mrgreen: ) you lack an experienced instructor sitting next to you and giving you real time advice and demonstrations. What follows is my attempt to do so through text.

My estimation is that you may be incorrectly judging pitch sensitivity, and attempting to either "fly the airplane with the trim" or else are "behind the airplane".. these issues are giving you a great deal of trouble controlling your Cherokee. They will give you just as much or more frustration trying to smoothly fly a Constellation.

We've left the discussion of A2A products IMVHO, and ventured into larger topics of aircraft theory and control. I would describe a "pitch sensitive" aircraft as one which has relaxed stability with very responsive controls. This is my experience of flying the CRJ-700. Your scenario of extending flaps in the Cherokee suggests that it is instead the opposite, that it has less responsive controls and is very stable in the pitch axis. If you had previously prematurely added nose up trim (flying with trim), then this would combine with the extra lift of the flaps to produce a strong nose up tendency, which you would have to fight with strong forward yoke pressure, with you again frantically adding nose down trim. This could get you into an induced oscillation which you would experience as a sensitive aircraft. In a Constellation your passengers would not be very amused.

The Cessna Caravan is a rock solid stable airplane, it can basically be flown hands off the stick. You should not be having nearly the problems with it that you're reporting. Another clue lies here,
I actually find the Warrior to be the "busiest" simulated aircraft I have ever flown in terms of hand flying. It is almost like three hands are needed - one on the yoke, one on the throttle and another reaching up to the trim.
The Cherokee is of course designed to be flown by the average human, with only two hands. Load it (or the Caravan) and sit in the cockpit to see it's logic. The trim wheel is on the same side as the throttle. The right hand (left seat) can only either be touching the throttle or the trim wheel and not both at the same time. The left hand holds the yoke, or can manipulate switches for brief moments. You must have trimmed out the control pressures to release the yoke without a sudden loss of control. The throttle cannot move while you trim (neither can flaps or gear...same hand) and it SHOULD NOT. What you're describing is equivalent to driving down the road with both feet on the gas and brake, and greatly complicating the task of driving a car. If the power is changing then your flight condition is changing, and you cannot use trim to relieve a constant control pressure (because the control pressure is not constant). If you add extra drag and lift from flaps than you are in a changing condition with changing control pressures, and there is no STEADY control pressure for you to relieve with trim.
Likewise since your left hand is applying varying control pressure on the yoke, you will not be flicking switches or playing with the fuel selector while simultaneously making power/configuration changes. The airplane is designed for a human with two hands, and different controls are in different places for a reason. You greatly complicate your simulation experience by making inputs impossible in the real airplane. Even if the left hand can control trim via electric switches, it is a bad idea to do so while you make power/configuration changes. This is all very difficult to type out in text but is the best I can do without sitting next to you of course.

Here's a quick video to explain the proper process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPfR9tQ1ksI

Hope this helps. Continue building skills with the default Cessna and you Cherokee before adding the challenge of the Constellation which you will most certainly enjoy.

EDIT: The Connie also has some pretty gigantic flaps. That first notch adds a substantial amount of wing area (=lift) and uncorrected will result in about at 600+ ft/min climb if you don't catch it. Because of it's relaxed stability there won't be much pitch up, but you will need to add a fair amount of forward yoke to maintain altitude (and trim if you're experienced.. not flying the plane by trim).

JonP01
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Re: Thinking of buying - some questions please

Post by JonP01 »

Thanks for those explanations - they make a lot of logical sense - I had not thought of it in those terms.

I was reading a real world pilots forum about the Cherokee where pilots were talking about the effects of the flaps and trimming. So even real world pilots were finding it a challenge. That said, it was pretty obvious form their conversations that the A2A aircraft gets it spot on. One of the pilots there gave some advice and that was to be a bit less anxious to get the flaps down and instead to leave it a little later. They suggested around 80 knots IAS for the first stage and about 70 for the second stage. I tried it in the sim myself and it was much less of a handful partly because you have to put a large chunk of the available trim in before you even deploy any flap at all - so slowing down more gradually just on engine power and gradually trimming up in more nose up over a longer period. It then saves the "three handed panic" that I like to call it. But adding around 46% of the simulated elevator control force made a pretty big difference as well. In any case, I followed some real world advice and it paid off. Sadly we cannot all afford to have a CFI who is also experienced in simulations sitting next to us. But there is definitely enough information out there - both here and on other real world aviation forums.

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Alan_A
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Re: Thinking of buying - some questions please

Post by Alan_A »

Another set of things to think about - what controllers (yoke/joystick and/or pedals) are you using, and what are their settings? Choice of controllers and variations in settings can make a big difference. Here's a thread that might be worth a look.

Coming back to a couple of your original questions... in my experience, the Cherokee is the most stable and forgiving of any of the A2A GA aircraft, just like its real-world counterpart. So... to your point in the post just above, you can definitely afford to take your time with it and let it settle in on a pitch/power setting before messing with flaps. In general, nothing is going to happen all that quickly or severely in a Cherokee, which is why insurers like it. You can experiment with different settings and event timings (for things like flap deployment). It won't bite, unlike some of its stablemates (the Bonanza comes to mind).

About the Connie - for me it's quite sensitive in pitch, to the point where I don't enjoy flying it as much as I do some of its Douglas competitors from other flightsim developers, or the A2A Stratocruiser, even though that one is a bear to land. The Connie doesn't like to settle in the pitch axis. Pitch is also an issue if you're using the period-correct Sperry autopilot, which - my take - is an irritating piece of equipment. Now, of course, all of that is a matter of personal taste - I like a stable airplane that "sits" well, others like something livelier. Given the choice between the Bonanza and the Comanche, I'd choose the Comanche, but others feel differently, of course.

In terms of system performance - the Connie is one of the few A2A airplanes that challenges my system. I don't have frame-rate problems, but I do get microstutters, especially in dense scenery areas. I've seen similar reports, but they're by no means universal, which suggests something system-dependent. I'm sure it's curable, I just haven't had the chance to be methodical about it. The effect is very subtle and you may be busy enough with the airplane that even if you experience it, you don't notice it much. It's definitely not in the same disruptive category as a frame-rate issue, and again, you may not be affected by it at all.

Hope all of this is helpful.
"Ah, Paula, they are firing at me!" -- Saint-Exupery

JonP01
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Re: Thinking of buying - some questions please

Post by JonP01 »

Thanks for the reply. I decided to bite the bullet and buy it overnight as I really needed to see how it performed in a technical (fps) sense on my ancient machine so that I could correctly plan any computer upgrade. I know I said I would save up for it, however in hindsight there was no point planning around getting a particular CPU and mainboard and then find I wanted more power to run the Connie. And I am glad I did buy it now, because I think I would have been disappointed if I had planned to get anything other than the latest and greatest Intel CPU (I had been thinking of just getting upper midrange stuff in terms of the CPU).

So first up yes, I can see that this add-on is very power intensive. My ten year old Core i7 920 is borderline hopeless. It basically chugs down to around 15 fps at the stock International airports in the US like KLAX unless I put all the sliders almost hard left (and then the sim just becomes too basic to really enjoy). So I really need close to double the power I have now as I like to get 30 fps at half the monitor refresh rate of 60 hz. And the new RTX2060 graphics card I am getting won't really help much - it is just there so I can turn up the anti-aliasing and filtering a lot more than I currently have it set to with my (also ancient) GTX580. I tried turning off all the antialiasing and filtering on my GTX580 and it made no difference - so the CPU is the bottleneck here (not surprising of course).

As for the flight characteristics, a bit hard to tell with such low FPS but I wasn't really having issues with pitch - but I certainly agree that it does move around alot. I think what some people call pitch sensitivity others call a lack of pitch stability (and any variations or combinations of the two). But by my definition - which is what it actually does when you move the yoke in still air - it is fine - it is just obviously not as responsive as a smaller aircraft so you have to control "ahead" of it. I think that is the biggest challenge compared to what I have been used to - trying to predict more what it will do and not being afraid of much more significant transient controller deflections than for something like the Cherokee.

I'm sure I am going to have a lot of fun with this add-on but the for time being I will shelve it till I get a new computer sorted out. I'm not the slightest bit annoyed or angry that my old machine can't run it - I thought it was pretty unlikely to be honest. The best modern CPUs are getting to around 90% faster in single core operations than my current one and graphics cards are about three to five times as fast. As if I really had a chance of running an add-on as complex as this on a machine I built a decade ago!! :roll:

JonP01
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Re: Thinking of buying - some questions please

Post by JonP01 »

Just an update (and a very surprising one). The combination of the graphics card upgrade from a GTX580 (year 2010) to a RTX2060 and going from the tweaked boxed edition of FSX to FSX Steam has made the Connie run perfectly well - no appreciable difference now from the Cherokee! And I can attest it took both "upgrades" for this to happen because I'm running them side by side on the very same machine with sliders in precisely the same position.

I had only expected the new graphics card to provide better picture quality because I could turn the AA and filtering right up, but it took away a lot of the stuttering I had before too (I was hoping it might but I was doing just that - only hoping). But it still wasn't really running in such a way that I thought I could hold off a complete system upgrade.

Then I started to read up more on FSX boxed versus Steam and got the usual stuff I'd read before - mainly some say it was better, some said no difference. Well this time around, given the cost of the Connie was twice the cost of FSX Steam, I thought, why not. And the difference was pretty obvious - at least to me. It is much "snappier" loading up the interface, changing views is much faster and stutters are virtually now non-existent.

So it looks now like the only real reason to upgrade from this ancient Core i7 970 is for third party scenery purposes and other A2A add-ons that might be more recent and more system intensive (but based on past experience I would say mainly for scenery which really loves eating up performance).

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