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Flight control feels unstable and with few seconds delays


eric_jeppesen

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Hello, captains

 

This topic mainly discusses about weird flight control feeling - flight control feels so unstable (floating? fluttering?) and rolling with few seconds delays . At the beginning of this post I apologize my first language isn’t English, so please forgive me for any grammar errors, thank you!

 

First and foremost, I noticed a special note about the feel of flight control in the product manual, for whose fly the airbus at first time. I’m not newbie to Airbus, I flew many models of different add-on buses (Sorry for mentioning other companies, no offense), such as FSLabs, BlackBoxSim, FlightFactor, JARDesign, etc. However, the flight control experience of these aircraft is not as unstable (fluttering) as Aerosoft A330.

Specifically, whether the aircraft is rolling or pitching, when the joystick returns to neutral, the aircraft will continue to rolling/pitching for up to a second or so - just feeling so unstable, pretty difficult to control the attitude. Especially when the plane was landing, I couldn’t even make a stable approach.

How to say? 

· When performing a pitch up maneuver, I pull the joystick a little bit and the plane responds quite well, too sensitive. And when joystick returns to neutral, pitching continue for a time, so unstable.

· On the contrary, when performing a rolling maneuver, near the neutral position of the joystick, I feel there is a large area of “dead zone” - the aircraft has a considerable delay in maneuvering. At this time, I stepped up a little bit more, the roll of the plane suddenly became particularly sensitive. And of course, with unstable/fluttering.

 

In the flight sim, I have never experienced such a strange flying feel. FSL and FF, flight controls are comfortable and handy. Maybe you’ll say “it’s A320 families, not A330.” But when I was flying an BBS/JARDesign A330, the feeling did not make me feel so confused.

I even consulted my uncle last night, a reality A332 pilot in China Southern, he said that there is no such weird feeling in reality.

 

Alright… I know that the Aerosoft production team is unlikely to get detailed aerodynamic data from Airbus, there must be some errors in the simulation level. Please allow me to ask the production team for one thing: Could you please make flight control easier? Just a bit of stable to maneuver, not too fluttering. It would be a huge help if you improve flight control in further updates, I’ll be grateful for this.

If there is something wrong with the above language, please forgive me, an aviation enthusiast whose native language is not English.

 

Eric

a day after AS330 officially release

 

 

P.S. When the Airbus is only about 50 feet from the touch-down, FBW’s “Flare Law” will be engaged, force the plane to pitch down, to urge the pilot pull back the stick, performance a nice flare. Could you please add this function in further updates? Many thanks!

 

another P.S. I also meet a low brightness of FCU panel without installed any 3rd party shaders. May I open a new topic to claim this issue? Thx.

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  • Deputy Sheriffs

Hello eric,

Did you apply the settings we recommend for control on manual vol 1?

We are aware of the flare logic not being complete and hopefully will get a chance to have a closer look into it at some point.

About the FCU, there are two knobs under the glareshield that control the brighteness settings on the FCU. The right knob will control the brightness of the display. Have you tried that?

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26 minutes ago, Secondator said:

Hello eric,

Did you apply the settings we recommend for control on manual vol 1? We have consulted many real world pilot advisers to gain feedback on flight control behavior. Also, it's good to remember that the A330 is a big heavy aircraft that has lots of inertia so the movement would not stop suddenly when stick gets into neutral position. Think of stopping a light shopping cart and a heavy shopping cart.

We are aware of the flare logic not being complete and hopefully will get a chance to have a closer look into it at some point.

About the FCU, there are two knobs under the glareshield that control the brighteness settings on the FCU. The right knob will control the brightness of the display. Have you tried that?

 

Thanks for your reply!

 

Yep, of course. My default settings as same as Manual vol. 1 's recommend settings. Perhaps I have to get used to this wide-body bus. :D

As for the problem that the FCU is too dim, thank you for your answer and it has been solved perfectly!

 

Anyway thanks a lot for your help! I really enjoy your A330 product. :)

 

Eric

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"We have consulted many real world pilot advisers to gain feedback on flight control behavior. Also, it's good to remember that the A330 is a big heavy aircraft that has lots of inertia so the movement would not stop suddenly when stick gets into neutral position. Think of stopping a light shopping cart and a heavy shopping cart."
 

Would you please have one of your pilots comment on the following System description regarding the A330 FBW behavior

"The roll rate requested by the pilot during flight is proportional to the sidestick deflection, with a maximum rate of 15°/s when the sidestick is at the stop"

So I don't think your argument is correct. The A330 has larger flight control surfaces to counteract that "larger shopping cart" inertia to meet the FBW commanded roll rate.
But again, I would love to have a statement from one of your real world pilots on that. Thank you.
 

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For what it's worth, I'm experiencing this too. The flight control surfaces (in external view) seem to lag behind the control inputs significantly. It makes the aircraft very difficult to hand fly precisely. My controls are set up exactly as the manual suggests.

 

1 hour ago, Secondator said:

the A330 is a big heavy aircraft that has lots of inertia so the movement would not stop suddenly when stick gets into neutral position

 

This is a fair point of course, but none of the PMDG heavies have anything like this amount of latency between control input and the flight surfaces moving (the A330 isn't a 747 of course).

 

I agree with eric_jeppesen about the pitching motion continuing for much longer than expected. An extremely brief pitch up on the sidestick causes nothing to happen initially, then after a delay the aircraft starts to respond, but continues pitching for much longer than the sidestick deflection occurred.

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1 minute ago, pegasus said:

"We have consulted many real world pilot advisers to gain feedback on flight control behavior. Also, it's good to remember that the A330 is a big heavy aircraft that has lots of inertia so the movement would not stop suddenly when stick gets into neutral position. Think of stopping a light shopping cart and a heavy shopping cart."
 

Would you please have one of your pilots comment on the following System description regarding the A330 FBW behavior

"The roll rate requested by the pilot during flight is proportional to the sidestick deflection, with a maximum rate of 15°/s when the sidestick is at the stop"

So I don't think your argument is correct. The A330 has larger flight control surfaces to counteract that "larger shopping cart" inertia to meet the FBW commanded roll rate.
But again, I would love to have a statement from one of your real world pilots on that. Thank you.
 

 

I absolutely agree with you. Modern heavies control response are designed to be responsive - certainly no lag response. I have a few friends flying Quantas A330's in real life  and they assured me that the control response has no noticeable lag. I have watched the few videos of the Aerosoft A330 available on Youtube, and I have to say , in my opinion, that this aircraft is not hand flyable!

 

The initial Airbus 318, 219, 320, 321 (before the Professional release), had similar lag response issues on control inputs. They did manage to fix this issue when they released the Professional series.

 

Hopefully they can get this fixed asap - I will certainly not buy this plane until this flight control response issue is fixed, even after waiting so long for initial release.

 

All the best,

 

Don Dormehl

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6 minutes ago, Cheetah349 said:

 

I absolutely agree with you. Modern heavies control response are designed to be responsive - certainly no lag response. I have a few friends flying Quantas A330's in real life  and they assured me that the control response has no noticeable lag. I have watched the few videos of the Aerosoft A330 available on Youtube, and I have to say , in my opinion, that this aircraft is not hand flyable!

 

The initial Airbus 318, 219, 320, 321 (before the Professional release), had similar lag response issues on control inputs. They did manage to fix this issue when they released the Professional series.

 

Hopefully they can get this fixed asap - I will certainly not buy this plane until this flight control response issue is fixed, even after waiting so long for initial release.

 

All the best,

 

Don Dormehl

While I disagree with the fact that you are basing your assertions on watching a video instead of having purchased the product, I actually agree with your post.  Hand flying this aircraft, especially on approach, seems very difficult. It has caused me to be super unstable on several approaches which is what TheFlightsimmer was experiencing in his streams, I believe.

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I purchased download the AS A330 Pro last night. I have issues with pitch control during final approach while landing manually. Pitch is quite unstable, in fact unflyable. Would you please update the flight model?

 

Haseen Ahmad.

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6 minutes ago, Secondator said:

And you all can confirm that you are using the settings mentioned on the manual vol 1?

 

Yes indeed. I normally use full sensitivity and a very small deadzone, but changed them as the manual advises for the A330. The recommended settings reduce the sensitivity of the flight controls, but do nothing to affect the (apparent) latency between input and aircraft response.

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i have the same problem as haseen. Manual control on final approach is all over the place. Using logitech extreme 3d pro. I have to use they little input but seems to float up and down.

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  • Deputy Sheriffs

Alright, thanks for the feedback guys.

 

We will have another look into this just to make sure that nothing for example changed between the test that our real world pilots made and the release version coming out and get the very latest feedback from our A330-300 pilot advisers with the released version on this.

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43 minutes ago, Bigt said:

While I disagree with the fact that you are basing your assertions on watching a video instead of having purchased the product, I actually agree with your post.  Hand flying this aircraft, especially on approach, seems very difficult. It has caused me to be super unstable on several approaches which is what TheFlightsimmer was experiencing in his streams, I believe.

 

+1

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I will add myself to the list of those that notice slow response from the aircraft after input has been made. At first I thought it might be the larger aileron travel on the honeycomb yoke, but there certainly is a delay. The sidestick animation corresponds perfectly to my yoke inputs. While I think with a little getting used to hand flying is possible it sure feels a lot different than all the other planes I have (including the Aerosoft A320) and there isn't much difference among the others. I think the pitching thing is due to auto-trim? Perhaps switching FBW off might help for the time being? 

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Piling on, there's something odd about the continued motion after a return to neutral stick (not with a max deflection snap to center, but a calm measured return to center which even in a non-FBW would be expected to at least almost null rates). Besides that it did fly fine on departure, but on landing I had severe roll delay coupled with pitch over-sensitivity, and had there been any gusts or crosswinds I would have had to go around.

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Thanks all you captains replied above! :)  Made me convinced that I'm not alone in encountering this problem.
A330 is one of my favourite airplanes and I look forward to have a flyable A330 in FSX/P3D for many years. I hope and thank the Aerosoft team for improving this product in subsequent updates. :D

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It's surely not un-flyable, but I too look forward for changes to the better. I don't know if the current aileron input logic is realistic or not. Perhaps a lot of P3D limitations, but I'll take a better responsiveness nonetheless if it can be achieved without causing other FDE aspects to break. Perhaps MSFS will provide a much better environment for this A330 should Aerosoft decide to bring it over.

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Hi everybody nice plane thanks Aerosoft !! Same for me ailerons and elevator issue. The latency  is very significative. There is to much delay to ailerons and elevator return to neutral position. 

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I can only confirm what you all reported: I'm pretty experienced in flying different types in P3D, but I never had such difficulties to fly an approach in any other add-on. Out of a stable ILS approach, things got even so much out of control yesterday that I slammed on the runway with 3.5g. I achieved some softer landings in other flights, but I always had tremendous difficulties to cope with the sluggish roll control and the laggy, but then oversensitive pitch control. I didn't achieve a single landing without large deviations from the centreline or without touching down "somewhere in the landing zone". With crosswind or turbulence, it's almost impossible to control the aircraft on final.

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It is definetly much more difficult to fly the a330 in the sim than other airbus models but once you got the hang of it it is actually somewhat flyable. Nevertheless I have the same opinion as everyone else here that the controls are not very realistic and i hope this is going to be fixed soon.

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Hey all,

 

The issues mentioned in this post now seem to have been acceptedly resolved. Please check this topic:

And thank the Aerosoft team very quickly release this fix.

Eric


P.S. Administrator can feel free to close this topic.

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I definitely agree, the response of a real a330 have nothing to do with the one of aerosoft, the ailerons move half as fast as they do in reallife as a result, the effect is not as in reallife too. I added a video of a real a330 approach, compared to the aileron movement in the sim, the real ones move with the doubled speed and so allow the pilot to keep on the localiser perfectly, with aerosofts a330 it‘s nearly impossible.

Please login to view this video.

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